077: Challenging Stereotypes in Fantasy Game Design with Ella Watts

Courtney: 30:16

Hey, entrepreneurs, I love introducing you to new creators every episode, but I could really use your support. I would love to invite you to join our Patreon page, where you’ll gain access to behind the scenes content, add your questions to upcoming interviews and you can even receive a shout-out on our site in an upcoming episode. To learn more, go to Lightheartadventurescom. And now back to the show. Okay, well, talk to me about what happened after the campaign was over.

Ella: 30:46

Yes, so mostly very excited celebration. It was wild. We did not actually expect to make that much money, so that was pretty exciting. Asked David Amber Devereux, who works at Tin Can Audio, to compose our soundtrack, and Amber enthusiastically said yes, because they are a darling and a dear creative collaborator of mine. And then it was time to do the real work. So I had already written the full manual of Up or Down River before the Kickstarter, but the game system had not been streamlined or workshopped by Sasha and so a lot of work kind of immediately went across to Sasha, who sent out both kind of open and blind play tests where they contacted people who follow McGuffin and Company subscribed to their news lesson. Members of the Patreon sort of said hey, we want to play this game, is anyone up for signing up to it? Sasha also contacted a lot of his contacts in the tabletop space and asked other game designers if they’d have games with him and have a conversation during the game about how it was going, what was happening, started rolling out the play tests at different conventions and events and just sort of picking up on things that were sticking and things that weren’t quite going smoothly. And then occasionally, if Sasha wanted to change something, sasha would get in touch with me and we’d have a conversation. We’d talk about what we wanted to do, because I am not an experienced game designer this is my first game but something that was really important to me was that the mechanics of Up River, down River be very, very flavorful. So, for example, in general the game works on 7s and 4s, because there are 7 Cs and all rivers are categorized into one of 4 Stralar numbers and I really wanted that theme to kind of come up as much as possible. So you’ll notice those numbers and divisions of multiplications of those numbers appearing throughout the game, and so sometimes it would be like, okay, I understand that 2D6 is a really satisfying probability curve. However, I am going to be neurodivergent about this and insist that we use what I think is unfairly our everyone’s least favorite die, which is the D4. So there was a lot of that. Really. The game development came next and took up the largest amount of time, as we all dealt with different levels of illness, and then the illustrations kind of continued. Max finished doing all of the masks of the river, as well as a few more character illustrations. I wrote a little bit more flavor. There were places where either our sensitivity readers had given feedback and we wanted to rewrite things, or there’s a really big thing about that that I want to talk about. Actually, there were a couple of silly things. So, for example, I’m a sailing instructor, I like boats, but a thing that we noticed was that when people were playing the game they didn’t know how to talk about boats and would get a little bit stressed and confused of the what and the who do what and the bleh, and so I insisted on writing a boat terms glossary in the book that people could use, just so that if people want to use, like you can just say grab the Hoogamah flip and fly the silver thing and that’s fine, like it’s your game. But just in case people wanted to use some actual sailing terms, included some sailing terms and picked sort of streamlined the boat, the ship, battle mechanics and, yeah, just like tight, mostly like little tweaks to the flavor of the game. Sasha did some additional writing on some of the locations, especially the locations that function as challenges themselves. Those locations you go to and you can kind of have a story in them, but some locations are themselves the story of the game, so it’s just like navigating them. Like there’s a whitewater rapids place called the stone cities and really like that location is just you survive the whitewater rapids. That’s the session that week, so Sasha did some writing on that. I really love her writing on the crystal nets, which she did a lot of writing on. One of the biggest changes to the game was one of our sensitivity readers was Dr Erin Pritchard, who is an academic who studies the representation of people with dwarfism in media. Erin is herself a woman with dwarfism and in the original draft of River Down River we had the dwarves as one of our kind of magical origins. So you can play as like a human and elf, a river folk or a dwarf, and this was kind of quite big for the game because the game is all about this kind of magical fantasy war. That’s happened in the past Because, as you can see, the law of the rings influences in here, and the result of that war was that the dwarves disappeared and it’s not clear whether there’s been a genocide or whether they’ve just left and no one on the river has followed them or found them, or whether they’re in hiding, but for whatever reason, all other people to the river don’t know where the dwarves are, and so originally there was a lot about the dwarves in the game. However, we got Dr Pritchard on board, partly because I know people with dwarfism in real life and over the years I have felt increasingly uncomfortable with the way that in TTRPG spaces we talk about dwarves, because the thing is that dwarves are not a magical fantasy thing. Real people with dwarfism exist and they’re not all alcoholic and you can’t tell what gender they are. They are actually real human people. And people with dwarfism especially suffer from discrimination because people without dwarfism treat them like they’re not human, like they are some magical fantasy race, like they are alcoholic and circus freaks and whatever else. And it’s incredibly, it’s a history of horrible violence. It includes medical discrimination, social discrimination, legal discrimination, no culture. It is impossible to prove where any folklore, legend or mythology came from, but it is sensible to observe that in the world for the history of the human race there have been people with dwarfism and in the world in the history of the human race we have written stories about humans who are short. And I don’t feel for me personally that using the fact that dwarves exist in mythology is an excuse to continue dehumanizing disabled people in my fiction, on purpose or in my games. I don’t actually think it’s funny anymore around my table for someone to be like, well, I’m a dwarf, so I sort of you know you can’t tell whether I’m a man or a woman and I drink all the time and I’m alcoholic and violent and stupid, because all of those are horrible stereotypes about real disabled people. And it’s difficult, it’s complicated because, for example, I’m also queer and the fact that dwarves often have beards is something that a lot of trans and queer people have a lot of joy in and really enjoy, and I don’t want to be unfair to that. But I think that we all have to take responsibility for ourselves and responsibility for the way we exist in a community and recognize that if something we’re doing is causing actual real life harm to real life human beings, then maybe we should think about what’s more important and find other ways to express our gender expression. But you can play a character who has dwarfism, who is gender queer. That is so cool and good actually. But the problem that Dr Pritchard observed specifically is that in fantasy media and role-playing games especially, there is this pervasive and insidious idea that people with dwarfism are not human, that they are not human beings, that they are a separate race which has separate abilities, characteristics, that it really starts going into eugenics, that they have a different personality just because they are short, and all of that stuff is really, really bad. And so Dr Pritchard came back to us and one of the things that I found sort of honestly both moving and distressing as a queer disabled person was that Dr Pritchard did not come back to us and asked us to remove the dwarfs from the game. She said this is a problem in fantasy media Like this happens a lot. People with dwarfism are portrayed as not human, as a separate race to human beings, and that allows people to bestialise and caricature them. But she didn’t ask us to take them out, she just said well, so if you could please make these changes to the language. And Johnny and Sasha and I sort of read that feedback and I talked to them about it and I was like, well, I feel like on the basis of this, I don’t want to have a fantasy race of dwarfs in my game. Like I don’t like, given this information, that feels bad. So we went back to Dr Pritchard and we said, okay, well, so what if we just got rid of them? And then we said we had like a race of like the sort of origin of stone shapeshifters who are made of crystals and are more like, kind of like nature spirits and are visibly not human, visibly not short people. And we do that instead. And Dr Pritchard was like, well, that would be a lot better. And we were like, great cool, we’ll do that instead. And so we did that and I wrote a letter explaining why we’d done this on the Kickstarter and I invited Dr Pritchard to add her own note. And in her own note she talked about how, when she was a child, her mother had taken her to the doctor and the doctor had immediately suggested that she get a job in the circus because that would be the only place that people like her could go. And she talked about how, you know, you never see portrayals of people with dwarfism as immediate, as interesting or attractive or heroic or romantic interests, so you almost never. Obviously, there have been some great stuff, like the Serano de Bergerac film was really cool, for example but and Pieces English generally in his career has fought really hard to fight this, but it’s just such a big thing and I’m sorry for taking so much time on it, but I do think I do want more people in TTRPGs to think about it, like just at least a little bit, because I do think we should think about it more than the community currently does, because I never see any conversation about it and I think that that conversation is actually important. So, yes, that was a big part of the game. I’ve talked for a really long time.

Courtney: 40:49

Okay, so first off, don’t apologize for spending time on this topic, don’t apologize for talking to her like time to get to know you, but I really do like I remember when that update came out on Kickstarter and just reading what you said and then reading what she like, her letter, and just talking about her experiences and everything. Thank you, I hate to say it like mind-opening, but it really was, because it is so common Dwarves are in every fantasy series, trope, everything out there. Taking the time to actually do the research and do the conversations, have her look at the game and make the decision to not further that stereotype along, I think it was a huge choice and just a really honorable choice. It definitely made me think a lot and pretty much ever since reading that email I’ve just been analyzing every book, series that I’m reading, every movie or TV show that has a race of dwarves and just seeing how incredibly harmful that is. I feel like that had there been a hard choice to have to change a big portion of your game that much, and yet I am personally so glad that you guys did and I’m really glad that you shared the journey to that decision.

Ella: 42:29

Thank you because in the last 15 years or so I’d gotten to know some more people with dwarfism in my real life. When I started writing the game, I included dwarves because I really wanted to create this archetypal fantasy inspired by all of the fantasy worlds that we know, whether it’s D&D or Lord of the Rings or whatever. But even as I was writing it I felt a bit weird about it and I was trying to compensate for that by having characters who were human people with dwarfism. And so Belle Crane, who is still in the book and I love her as a character and I’m really proud of her but she is this human woman with dwarfism. She’s married to Julie Diamantes, the Minnow, the pirate queen, and she kind of in the original draft, took advantage of people’s superstition and prejudice around the dwarves and would kind of be like oh sure, I’ll sell you a magical map with my dwarf magic. But it’s interesting because then, when Dr Pritchard came back to us, it was actually kind of a relief because I’d already been feeling this pressure and discomfort and everything else in the game gives me a lot of joy. And so Dr Pritchard just straight up being like this is harmful, and this is why it was like, oh okay, yeah, no, you’re right, we can. Just, it almost felt like having permission to just fix it, yeah, and also like in the way that we had been writing what were the dwarves and became the kiwi, they’d always had this magic that affected the world around them. One of our playtesters, rachel Ayres, played a dwarf character and had a really big influence on how I imagined their whole magic, because I didn’t want them to have kind of you know, kiwi, remote control magic, like in the book series by the woman who must not be named because she’s a horrible transphobe and racist, and I didn’t want kind of zappy, flashy, clicky fingers and you fixed everything magic in this world. I wanted it to be more atavistic than that, and so Rach had this idea of you know, the dwarves. The kiwi have this innate magic that means the world just moves around them. Like if they need a door to be taller or shorter, it becomes taller or shorter, like hills mold themselves around them, like clay, everything kind of moves around them, and I love that idea. But with that idea of shape shifting, it was then like, well, why do they need to be dwarves? They don’t need to be dwarves if they’re shape shifters, and so we went with the kiwi instead, which I really, really like because it brings in some Scandinavian influence that I also have. I studied early medieval Scandinavian history at university and asked a Swedish friend for thoughts on what to name them and still keeps the kind of Welsh influence of lots of kind of nature, spirits and mountains and rocks and generally kind of the magic of the hills.

Courtney: 45:24

Yeah, the one thing that I also really like about this game and I think is unique is the fact that, even if your character dies, you can still play them as a ghost, and I really want to know, like, where did this idea come from?

Ella: 45:41

I love death. That is maybe a strange thing to say, but I love death. I love death, and I especially love death in TT RPGs. I think that one of the most powerful magical things you can do in a role playing game is have a character die. And by that I don’t mean that I am a kind of cruel and horrible GM who’s going to randomly kill people’s characters. I will ask them whether or not they want the character to die and we will work on it together if that happens, and I use safety tools. But I do think death is really important. I think that death is something that we don’t talk about enough in the UK, america or Canada, certainly in my experience, and I think that’s incredibly unhealthy. Everyone has relatives and friends who die all the time. Everyone grieves, everyone experiences bereavement and everyone dies, and I think it is so toxic that we don’t let characters or ideas or stories end or die. We have to confront and approach and have a dialogue with death. It’s so important and so I love that CCWG’s create a safe space to rehearse bereavement, to rehearse the idea of death, to give you a gentle kind of training wheels on way of confronting mortality. I think it’s beautiful, I think it’s powerful, I think it’s very healthy, I think it’s very important. So I really really wanted to play a game that encouraged you to let your character die. But also, in my experience of playing games with people, they don’t want to let their character die because we have an incredibly unhealthy culture about death, because our culture is so wildly averse to death, to confronting death, to talking about death, to letting other people talk about death, and so I was like okay. So I think one of the reasons that RPG players are reluctant to allow their characters to die is because they don’t want to stop playing this dude. They don’t want to lose their play experience. They don’t want to lose the idea that they’ve created. If you’ve made a sorcerer and then if you die, you’re going to play a fighter, you’re going to be a little bit bummed about losing all the spells. There are actual game mechanics and factors in letting your character die. Beyond the thing that I’m interested in, which is the kind of the idea and the storytelling and the emotion of it, and so I don’t even remember consciously making the decision, but it just seemed like the natural solution to that would be to let people play as their ghost, so, like you can die and dying is okay, because you still have your character, you still have the idea, you can still do the stuff that you wanted to do, but now you have to have a conversation about death, about it, and that’s what I wanted you to do. Like ha, you fell for my trick. I wanted you to talk about death. Then, at the end of the journey, you can choose to let your character pass on. And what I like about that is that, even though most of the games I’ve run and seen played, people haven’t let their characters pass on. What it does at least mean is that all of the players and player characters at the table have a conversation about death and have a conversation about whether that person wants to move on. And often the player who is playing as a ghost really has a lot of thinking and talking and role playing about. Like, how do I feel about my character’s death? How does my character feel about their death? Is this the end of their story? And just encouraging those conversations to happen, I think, is so important and is so interesting to me, creatively, emotionally, as a storyteller. I think we tell stories for a reason, and one of the reasons I told this story was to encourage people to talk about death and think about death as a kindness and a beautiful thing and a natural thing and an important thing that must happen, and yet so you can play as your ghost, because I want you to think about death, because death is great and more people should think about it.

Courtney: 49:13

I think that’s a really special outlook. Yeah, it is such a taboo topic, even things like, oh, my pet died and I’m devastated but I can’t even tell you because you’re like, well, it was just a pet. Sorry, that sucks, but by the next day you’re just expected to be fine, let alone. I mean, I have no idea what it’s like in the UK, but here it’s very normal for a company to give you three days of bereavement when a family member dies, because obviously you’re going to be fine by day four.

Ella: 49:50

American labor laws scare me, by which I mean they don’t exist and they should. I’m really glad you’re all are striking. There’s a lot of striking happening over there. I hope more striking happens. You need better labor laws, what the hell? Oh, I agree.

Courtney: 50:08

Our system is fucked up in so many ways. But yeah, it’s just this expectation that. Oh well, obviously that’s very sad and I’m sorry and I’m totally here to support you, but it’s been a week already. Why aren’t you back to work? Why aren’t you doing? Why are you still sad? It’s just so annoying and it’s so just rude, I feel.

Ella: 50:35

Yeah, and it’s incredibly harmful Social violence done on a national and international scale, and I hate it. Grief stays with people for years, for decades, for your whole life. You never stop loving someone, if they are especially if they are a family member or a loved one or a friend. There is always going to be a part of your brain and your heart that is going to remember that person, and some days that’s going to feel good and some days that’s going to feel painful, and every day you should feel free to be able to talk about people you love because, sweet Jesus, isn’t that why we have a society Like I think it is? Yeah, I think it is unhelpful, I think it is unkind, I think it is unhealthy to have this horrible social policy of get over your grief, don’t talk about death, don’t talk about dying, don’t talk about what happens when you die. It will happen, we will not escape it, we will all grieve, we will all lose people and we will all die. Those things are all true, and pretending that it won’t happen does us nothing except cause us pain now, which to me seems a little self-defeating. So, yeah, play a magical fantasy game and then talk about death there instead. Oh God, oh God.

Courtney: 51:51

I can’t believe how long we’ve been talking already. It does not feel like it. So, before we wrap up, you’ve listened to the show, you know what questions are coming, so a lot has happened. I feel like we’ve talked about a couple of different things already that have been challenging over the process of this, but if you were to look back and just pick one or two things that were just really hard over the last couple of years, what would they be?

Ella: 52:18

One or two would be. One for me was letting go of being precious about the system mechanics, because this is my first game and I think, like a first novel, I’m just like I want to keep everything in, no matter how janky it is, and I still. I look at the game that exists now and I know it is an objectively better game, but part of me is still like okay, but what if we stuck with the janky game, though? And then, apart from that, it’s been learning patience. You know, I am disabled and chronically ill, but handling the kind of balance of ADHD, anxiety, external pressure and expectation of 800 people who very kindly supported our game and were waiting for it, and then also having to face the fact that the team isn’t always going to be able to make the stuff or hit that deadline or we’re just going to have to keep pushing it back, that was really hard, it was really stressful. I felt miserable for a really long time because I just couldn’t do every job, and sharing that responsibility and letting it go. The theme here is I struggle with letting go of things and not micromanaging, but, yeah, I would say that those are probably the most challenging parts just the waiting and changing the mechanics.

Courtney: 53:34

What were some things that helped you get through those?

Ella: 53:37

I think for the waiting. It was talking to Johnny and Sasha, who had experience of doing this before, who every time I was having a bit of a meltdown, could talk to me and be like no one’s going to care. Most of them have forgotten. They’ve even backed the book. When it does come out, they’ll be happy to have it. We’ve done this before. We’ve seen it happen before. It’s going to be fine. That was a lot of it. With the game mechanics, I had a really helpful conversation with Sasha where we were talking about the game mechanics and I was saying but no, because if I was running the game, when I run the game, I would do it like X, y and Z. Sasha just looked at me and was like you’re not going to be at every table where someone plays this game. You personally are not going to be there to be able to tell them. Oh well, what you do in this situation is this you need to make a game that people can play even if you’re not there. It sounds so ridiculous but, honestly, having that reality check was really helpful. Yeah, the game is. Maybe there are things that I would change about it when I run it at home, but the game is one that anyone can pick up and play, and I have confidence that they can enjoy playing it and will understand what it does. That is way more important, because otherwise I should have just kept it in a notebook. If I’m going to make a game and share it with people, it has to be something they can play. So, reminding myself of that, reminding myself that when I look at a mechanic that maybe I wanted to do differently as someone with not a lot of experience in game design but the reason it’s different is because of it’s so that other people can play it I find very comforting and joyful. So it works out.

Courtney: 55:08

Okay, to flip it around what has been some of the most rewarding parts of this journey. Oh, my God seeing people get the game.

Ella: 55:17

There have been so many people who have shared pictures of them getting the game. They actually have the game. There was a real game now that I can hold in my hands. That’s wild. I think that one time that I nearly fully burst into tears was that I was at an RPG convention and I was with Sasha and someone came up to Sasha and was like, oh, by the way, that game you were playtesting up River Downriver, is that going to be available at some point? And they had playtested it. Then they backed the Kickstarter and now they were waiting for the book to be printed and Sasha was just like, oh, we’re working on it at the moment. This is Ella, the person who made the game. And this person was like oh, oh, my God, hi, it’s really nice to meet you. And then they went into their bag. I’m literally well. I got just thinking about it and they got out their character sheet from a year ago for a River Downriver and they were like this game meant so much to me that I just keep my character sheets. And here’s my character sheet. I think they were like a first mate of the star and it was wild. That was, for me the moment where it became so real, because it was like whoa, this is a person who I’ve never met before in my life, who not only has played my game and it’s meant something to them, but also they’ve remembered it enough to care enough to tell me about it, and that was incredible. And then we went to UK Games Expo McGuffin and Company did and meeting people there as well, I had someone come up to me and asked me to sign the book. That was wild. I didn’t even find anything before, or I had someone else who I talked to, sold the book to this person, and then the next day the person came back to the stall and was like hi, I bought this book from you yesterday and I just wanted to say that last night I sat in my hotel reading it and I loved it so much. I wanted to come back and tell you how much I enjoyed this book. So can I just tell you how cool this book is. I was like what? That is wild. You’re at an actual convention. You can spend your evening reading my book. So yeah, honestly, that. And then, outside of that, just the support of the RPG community has been incredible the number of people who played the game, who streamed the game, who did podcasts of the games like frugalberry games gave us stream layouts after we did one stream over there because they were like oh well, just in case you want to use them, just for free, just mocked us up a bunch of stream frames. Hatchling games like helped us endlessly. Navar at the secret nerd podcast has helped us so much. Reckless Attack ran a game of over and over because I emailed them a PDF of the quick start guide and they had a really good game and since then they have just been almost vocal supporters and it’s wild. I don’t know these people and they are so kind and so just that has been just amazing, like, and it has been really rewarding just meeting people who, I think, understand what I was trying to say and care about it and think it’s important. Whether those are people who are playing the game or whether those are my colleagues in the space yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t. I didn’t honestly expect it to be like this and it has been wonderful.

Courtney: 58:23

I love so much, like just the way that certain parts of this community really work well together and just like it’s so exciting to always have people cross promoting and being like, oh, did you hear about this game? It’s like, oh, yeah, I got this game too. It’s so cool. Yeah, it’s a really special place. Agreed, this has been absolutely amazing. I wish that we could just keep chatting for a few more hours, but if people want to find you and keep up with you know like upcoming projects and like find Upper River, downriver and all of that fun stuff, where should they go?

Ella: 59:03

Okay. Well, if you want to get a copy of Upper River Downriver, you can now buy a copy from McGuffin and Company. You can get a PDF or the hard copy of the book. It does ship internationally and they have American suppliers, so you can also buy it from American distributors. If you want to save on those scary, scary shipping costs and the best way to do that is to go to the McGuffin and Company website, which I will be providing a link for, so hopefully you’ll find it in the show notes and then outside of that, if you want to find me, I am at GEJWATS everywhere, which is a G for Gabrielle, e for Ever and J for Jane. They are my initials, because Ella Watts has generally taken, but GEJWATS isn’t. I am on all of the. Every social media is kind of in a weird place right now. I’m on Instagram, I’m on Blue Sky, I am on Twitter for as long as Twitter exists. I’m on threads. I don’t have a Macedon account, but I’ll probably get one. Just search GEJWATS on your social media platform of choice and if I’m there you’ll find me. And yeah, like in terms of upcoming projects, I mean, please support Upper River Downriver. We’re going to be doing an actual playstream of it on Girls Run these Worlds at the end of August, which I’m really excited about. I’m going to be GMing it. We’re going to be having music that was composed for the game. I think it’s going to be a really lovely journey and it’s going to be the first time that we’ve streamed a campaign of the game so you can actually see the whole story as it’s meant to be seen. And then, outside of that, I have also written an audio drama which I am directing and which is going to be coming out in 2024. And if you want to check that out, then it’s Camlan. It’s a post-apocalyptic urban fantasy inspired by British folklore and Arthuriana. Or, alternatively, it’s about three idiots and a dog in Wales trying to survive the apocalypse. I’m very proud of it. It’s very, very, very precious to me. I have been working on this on and off for eight years. And if you want to check that out, it’s Camlan pod on all social media, including Tumblr. I’m not going to tell you my Tumblr because that’s private, but Camlan is C-A-M for Merlin, l-a-n for November, twice so C-A-M-L-A-N-N. Although I expected it will also probably appear in the show notes, if you’re not sure on those spellings. And yeah, that’s what I’m doing. That’s where you can find me. That’s where you can find my stuff.

Courtney: 1:01:19

So many cool things. Yeah, I’m excited about Camlan, thank you, especially like with the alternatively, also about like three idiots and a dog.

Ella: 1:01:27

I’m like oh really.

Courtney: 1:01:28

Amazing. Yes, I will have all of that in the show notes. At this point we are going to end the official interview but, like I mentioned earlier, I’m going to turn the recording right back on and do a little fun quick question blitz for our patrons. Thank you all so much for listening today and, ellen, thank you for coming on the show.

Ella: 1:01:49

Thank you for having me.

Courtney: 1:01:55

You just finished another episode of Roll Play Grow, so check out the show notes and transcript from today’s episode. You can go to lightheartadventurescom To keep up with every episode. Please subscribe on your podcast player of choice and, if you’re enjoying the show, I would absolutely love if you would leave me a review and share this episode with your friends. Your review might even get featured on an upcoming episode. To follow m e on Twitter, you can either find me at lightheartadventures. com for our business account or at Ketra RPG for tweets on gaming, my dog Bowser and other random shenanigans. You can also find me on Patreon at Roll Play Grow. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you next time on Roll Play Grow.