I’ve long been a fan of building things within games when I roleplay. I was that guy who wanted to renovate the keep after we cleared it out, and I wanted to keep any art treasures we found so we could decorate. So I was excited when Fari RPG reached out to talk to me about their upcoming game, Stoneburner, where you play dwarves not only clearing the demons from your home but building a community to better resist them.
I was privileged to ask Fari RPG’s René-Pier Deshaies-Gélinas some questions about design, gaming, and yes, the upcoming Stoneburner RPG, now (very successfully) funding on Kickstarter.
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Brent: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. For our readers not yet familiar with your work, please tell me a bit about yourself.
René-Pier: Of course! So my name is René-Pier Deshaies-Gélinas and I’m a French Canadian tabletop game designer focused on action packed, fiction-driven, and accessible games. I’m the designer behind the free and open generic system Charge, the survival horror condensed RPG Breathless, and the solo guided game across a plagued land Firelights. Thanks for having me Brent!
B: What drew you into tabletop roleplaying games? What was your “hero origin story” in the hobby?
RP: I actually started in high school with DnD 3.5 and had quite a bad experience with it. During my first session, a player tied my character up and threw an oil lamp at me to kill my character and get their gold. This experience made me avoid the hobby for around 15 years. Around 5 years ago, a friend who talked to me about TTRPGs again and I started thinking “DnD is probably not the only game out there, maybe there’s something more to my liking?”. I started doing some research and found a game system that I ended up really enjoying, called Fate, by Evil Hat Productions. I started GMing some games with my friends, but as we lived all far away, we played mostly remotely. When we played Fate, there was no virtual tabletop application that I liked using when playing online, and as I’m a software engineer by trade, I decided to build my own VTT. I built this application called fari.app, made it free and open source, and launched it in the wild. From there, I started getting known and started forming a community. Afterward, I designed a website called fari.community to host free and open licensed RPG content (like SRDs) and got into game design a bit after that with my first game Charge.
B: How and when did you shift from player/GM to designing your first game? Was that gradual or did you jump in right away?
RP: It was very much gradual. We played a lot of Fate with my friends, and one day I bought a copy of Fate of Cthulhu and was very intrigued by how similar it was to the original system, but still had very interesting mechanics that existed to reinforce the themes of lovecraftian horror. I started reading a bit more about the Fate Toolkits and extra mechanics and started incorporating them into my games for fun. As I got to understand those extra mechanics and how the cogs of the system worked, I decided I wanted to try to design my own thing. Fate is a great game, but my group was starting to be bothered by the “aspect management” side of the game. At that time, I was reading Blades in the Dark by John Harper, and started hacking the system to make it into a generic system for us to use. Every week, I’d tweak things, shared drafts with my online community on discord, iterated, played with my friends. And eventually, this project became the Charge RPG system.
B: You describe Stoneburner as a “TTRPG of demon hunting and community building in a dwarven asteroid mine”. Can you expand on that? What can players expect?
RP: Sure! Players play as a group of dwarves who were relatives to the late Brokur Longneck of house Grandrock. In his will, Brokur bequeathed the players the cursed asteroid mines of the Long Belt, and its mining settlement. The goal of the players is to arrive at the mines, and see only one thing: potential. They are meant to explore the mines, cleanse the fire spitting demons that haunt them, search and loot for its lost treasures, sell and salvage those treasures for credits, and finally use those credits to rebuild the settlement’s community. The game includes 5 kits (classes) for the players to choose from, and is based off the Breathless system. Mechanically, players can expect rules for handling risk, looting, combat, crafting, salvaging, and even for adding new buildings to the community where each new facility gives new abilities to the group.
B: Why is community building an important element of Stoneburner? Did it come later in the design process or was it baked in from the start?
RP: This was one of the core idea from the start! I love when games have goals that are more than just “we want money/power”. Having this goal of rebuilding a community was an idea that I wanted to introduce in a game for a while now, but didn’t know how to implement both story wise, but also mechanically. The first thing that I came up with was the story aspect and how we force all players to work together from the get go. They are between a rock and a hard place, but they have to make do with what they have. Then, I started designing a gameplay loop that revolved entirely on exploration and looting and lead the players to pool the resources together to rebuild a safe and thriving community.
B: Are there design elements of Stoneburner you are particularly proud of? Is there anything you hope other designers can learn or take away from your design?
RP: The whole system expands on Breathless, a survival horror game/SRD that I designed early last year. One of the things I’m the proudest off is how it builds on top of this SRD, while also keeping things simple and accessible. The rules are predictable and easy to understand. There’s no cleverness for the sake of cleverness. One of the sub system I’m the happy with of is how you generate your expeditions themselves! The Long Belt is separated into multiple sectors, and when you decide to explore a sector, you create your expedition map. When you do so, you roll your set of polyhedral dice on a table, and use their actual physical location on the flat surface on which you rolled them to determine what the sector actually looks like! Then, you use the values of the dice and map them to the sector’s rolling table to determine random point of interests and events that will happen as you delve deeper into those cold tunnels. I’m particularly happy about this system because the “physical aspect” of it really makes things interesting, but because it’s all linked to rolling tables, it keeps every single expedition new and exciting.
B: Your co-creator, Galen Pejeau, is also your illustrator. How do the visual elements contribute to the player experience?
RP: I love to think that every single thing in a RPG book should reinforce the themes. The writing, the layout, the mechanics, and the art. The art that Galen does exactly that, and more. When I started talking about Stoneburner on Twitter, Galen actually reached out and sent me art telling me “even if we don’t work together on this, I’m going to make fan art for this game because it looks great”. This is when we decided to partner on this project! The way that Galen brings the world of Stoneburner to life is invigorating. Ideas bounce between each other, and become real through his illustrations. Every single piece of art he builds adds so many layers of lore to the game. Just by looking at his illustration, you quickly grasp what the vibe of the game looks like. You see what the dwarves’ main food looks like, what the effect of the demons is on the mines, or even what reshaping the community feels like to the people who live there. Those illustrations communicate the whole melancholic, yet hopeful vibe that the game is all about.
B: Stoneburner launched on Kickstarter last week and you are already over 300% funded, congratulations! Can you talk about the process of setting up a campaign? What aspects of it did you find challenging and what came easy?
RP: Thank you so much!! We’re super thrilled by the response the project has gotten. This is extremely exciting. And yeah, setting up a Kickstarter campaign is a whole other beast that game design! While this isn’t my first crowdfunding campaign, it is my first Kickstarter and my first project where I need to potentially print and ship hundreds of books! The most challenging part was to get this entire unknown part of the project as solid as possible. Unknowns in a project are what often cause delays. This is why we tested the printing and distribution flow in advance, and also why we decided to partner with Indie Press Revolution to handle everything that’s related to the distribution process of the campaign. We feel confident that with our current infrastructure, and the partners we have, we have a strong foundation on which we can make this project successful. As for the easy part, I think the easiest part came to down the marketing bit. It’s not always easy to talk and promote your game, but for Stoneburner it felt really natural. I think that’s because I’m very proud of the game itself, but also all the art that Galen has illustrated made it very easy to share very nice bits of both art and mechanics to folks for the past three months.
B: As a designer, what other games out there right now excite you? What are you drawn to as a designer and as a player/GM?
RP: Oh I love that question. As both a player and GM, I love everything that’s action packed, and have a focus on dire situations where hope is everything. You see this often in my games because it’s a theme and gameplay that I love! That being said, I’m trying to diverge from those themes to expand my horizons, both as a designer and a player. Currently, I’ve been reading a lot of OSR and NSR games, and I’d love to bring one of those to my table to fully grasp how they play. Things like Cairn, Mausritter, Liminal Horror, Primal Quest, etc. Other things that I’m not very familiar with, but I’m deeply curious about, are token-based games like Wanderhome or Apocalypse Keys. I’ve been reading both recently, and I need to find a group to play those, as I feel like they must really bring an entirely different experience to a game.
B: It may be too soon to ask, with your Kickstarter launching tomorrow, but any future projects coming up? Anything you can tease or talk about?
RP: Actually, there is something! Stoneburner wasn’t supposed to be Galen and I’s big project. We are actually working on a game called Our Last Stand, a tragic tactical mech combat RPG. It’s about a group of terraforming mech pilots turned combatants in a hope to delay a monster apocalypse for as long as possible while humanity is trying to flee to the stars. This is how we properly met, and while our focus has shifted to Stoneburner for now, Our Last Stand will be one of our other big projects. One of the exciting aspect of Our Last Stand is how the entire “party” has skills that degrade over an entire campaign, like in Breathless. But after a certain point, it triggers the “end game” and the final battle. We’ll share more info on Our Last Stand later in the year, or early next year!
B: Thank you again for talking with me! Where can folks find you if they want to see what you’re up to?
RP: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, it’s been a pleasure! People can find me @RPDeshaies on Twitter, and my website is farirpgs.com. As for Galen, you can find him @GPejeau on Twitter and look at this fantastic catalogue of games and art at https://assemblyrequisite.itch.io/.
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Thanks again to René-Pier for talking with me! If you want to check out Stoneburner of any of the games mentioned, please follow the links in the interview above. And if you have an idea for someone I should talk to, drop it in the comments or send me a message on Twitter.
