Meanwhile… a poll!

Hey everyone!

We’re putting out the last two scenarios in the Lockdown arc, as well as the last two Playable Characters in the “core” box: Father Cosmos and High-Rise. Father Cosmos manifests energy into shapes with physical form, enhancing his allies and hindering his foes. High-Rise can change sizes to maximize her damage to enemies while minimizing adverse effects to herself. These characters are fairly high-complexity, but if you have a player on your team that enjoys experimenting with inter-dependent effects (or you are that player on your team), they can really rocket your team to victory!

With the Lockdown arc out in the wild, we wanted to give you all the opportunity to request what arc we put out next! We have 6 total co-op arcs, although two of those did not see any playtesting, as there were other focuses during active development. Whatever Co-op arc is chosen will also dictate which Threats are shown next, as well as the Environment deck that is associated with the arc. The core premise of each of the remaining arcs’ settings were born from the question “What if X villain had actually succeeded in their goals, to one degree or another?”, so each setting definitely leans way in to a specific theme. We hoped that this would allow players to jump right in without requiring too many panels of introduction in the scenario books, and that future expansions would give us more leeway on longer-form theme-building and setting descriptions.

All that being said: Here are your choices for the next co-op arc to release!
1) Despair: A setting where a nefarious cult has succeeded in summoning their dread god from an otherworldly realm, bringing despondency to the world and forcing world leaders to acquiesce to the demands of this cult and its terrible deity. Threats include: Ennui, Dreadlord, Chosen of Despair, The Ancient Despair.
2) Outbreak: A setting wherein a Virulent plague has run its course unabated, morphing all humans into a beast-like form and forcing most to lose their higher-level cognition. Threats include: Plague Beast, Plague King, and Vector.
3) Antibodies: A setting where everything is normal. Nothing at all is out of the ordinary. Why ever would you ask what’s wrong with this world? You must not be from around here, let me help you get settled in. Threats include: Muscle, Marionette, Fleshpit, Bodybuilder.

We’ll close out voting on Sunday August 23, to give us time to write up an introductory post about the winning setting.

We are continuing our studies into Black Lives Matter with Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist:

Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the type of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals. Some of my most consequential steps towards being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions. To be an antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/antiracist ideas, racist/antiracist people. To be a racist is to constantly redefine racist in a way that exonerates one’s changing policies, ideas, and personhood.

So let’s set some definitions. What is racism? Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities. Okay, so what are racist policies and ideas? We have to define them separately to understand why they are married and why they interact so well together. In fact, let’s take one step back and consider the definition of another important phrase: racial inequity.

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of White families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to 45 percent of Latinx families and 41 percent of Black families. Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or racial equity between racial groups.

Ibram X. Kendi “How to be an Antiracist”

As before, the most up to date Print and Play materials are in the Dropbox, and the Tabletop Simulator mod should be up to date as well. Thanks to darleth on Steam for helping us troubleshoot the mod and letting us know when we’ve misconfigured things! =]

–Smith at the Forge

Meanwhile… A Scenario emerges!

Welcome back! The last time we spoke, we had forgotten to put the Cooperative threats in the folder, but the first two are in there now! We’ve also uploaded the first scenario that we’re showing off, where the Guardians are sent into an interdimensional “Hyperspace Alternative Violence Eradication Nexus” to try and prevent the facility from jumping through realities without any control.

We’ve also added three more playable characters, as well as the full rulebook. As with all of the Meanwhile content, the rules are fairly complete; however, there are still edge cases and situations that are not covered, so please feel free to ask about anything that seems to be missing or unclear. The three new characters are a small increase in complexity from the Quickstart characters, with Squall and the Accompanist heavily using their Meanwhile slots to maintain and amplify ongoing abilities.

The Scenario calls for a number of new tokens that have been added to the token sheet in the dropbox, as well as a Secrets Bag filled with some Secret tokens. If you would prefer not to utilize tokens this way for any reason, you can also shuffle an Ace-6 set of cards or roll a six-sided die to achieve the same result. This Scenario also introduces an Environment Deck that is used to bring the setting of the scenario to life a little more and give players an additional measure of challenge.

Continuing our study of Abolition, we have included a passage from the first chapter of Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis.

The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs-it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism. What, for example, do we miss if we try to think about prison expansion without addressing larger economic developments? We live in an era of migrating corporations. In order to escape organized labor in this country-and thus higher wages, benefits, and so on-corporations roam the world in search of nations providing cheap labor pools. This corporate migration thus leaves entire communities in shambles. Huge numbers of people lose jobs and prospects for future jobs. Because the economic base of these communities is destroyed, education and other surviving social services are profoundly affected. This process turns the men, women, and children who live in these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison. In the meantime, corporations associated with the punishment industry reap profits from the system that manages prisoners and acquire a clear stake in the continued growth of prison populations. Put simply, this is the era of the prison industrial complex. The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the de-industrialization of the economy-a process that reached its peak during the 1980s-and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling. Moreover, draconian drug laws were being enacted, and “three-strikes” provisions were on the agendas of many states.

In order to understand the proliferation of prisons and the rise of the prison industrial complex, it might be helpful to think further about the reasons we so easily take prisons for granted. In California, as we have seen, almost two-thirds of existing prisons were opened during the eighties and nineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was there such an obvious level of comfort with the prospect of many new prisons? A partial answer to this question has to do with the way we consume media images of the prison, even as the realities of imprisonment are hidden from almost all who have not had the misfortune of doing time. Cultural critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiarity with the prison comes in part from representations of prisons in film and other visual media. The history of visuality linked to the prison is also a main reinforcement of the institution of the prison as a naturalized part of our social landscape.

Angela Davis “Are Prisons Obsolete?”
Chapter 1. Introduction: Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?

As before, all of the material for the Meanwhile system Print and Play will be in this folder, and we will do our best to keep the scenario content organized in this sub-folder.

Also, the United States is continuing to have multiple cities with protests against police violence, and federal agents are beginning to deploy to cities in record numbers to assist local police in delivering state violence on protesters. Please find a local bail fund to contribute to, as detention for protesters often happens with no way to mitigate the possible transmission of COVID-19.

–Smith at the Forge

Meanwhile… in your printer!

Hello everyone!
We finally have a Print and Play and Tabletop Simulator mod for the Quickstart mode of the Meanwhile System! This is only the six most basic characters that we felt eased new players into how the rest of the system played. If you were ever fortunate enough to find us running a demo of the game, you’ll probably be very familiar with these squads and how they operate.

For those of you who are eager to see the breadth of what we put together (characters, maps, scenarios, etc.), we will be posting smaller chunks of that content over the next couple months as they are transitioned thematically, likely in two-week bits. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have opened up a call for new playtesters, as we have a few games in active development that we can always use new eyes on. If this Quickstart content has you excited for more, please join our community and help us make this the best it can be!

Before we link to the Print and Play content, as part of our ongoing education, we’re continuing to read material from Angela Davis, this time from an interview conducted by Frank Barat, and collected in Freedom is a Constant Struggle:

What does it say about the Black civil rights movement that more than fifty years after MLK and Malcolm X, the targeting of Black people, Latinos/Latinas, is still happening? Does that mean that the Black civil rights movement has failed or that it’s a continuous struggle?

The use of state violence against Black people, people of color, has its origins in an era long before the civil rights movement—in colonization and slavery. During the campaign around Trayvon Martin, it was pointed out that George Zimmerman, a would-be police officer, a vigilante, if you want to use that term, replicated the role of slave patrols. Then as now the use of armed representatives of the state was complemented by the use of civilians to perform the violence of the state.

So we don’t have to stop at the era of the civil rights movement, we can recognize that practices that originated with slavery were not resolved by the civil rights movement. We may not experience lynchings and Ku Klux Klan violence in the same way we did earlier, but there still is state violence, police violence, military violence. And to a certain extent the Ku Klux Klan still exists.

I don’t think this means that the civil rights movement was unsuccessful. The civil rights movement was very successful in what it achieved: the legal eradication of racism and the dismantling of the apparatus of segregation. This happened and we should not underestimate its importance. The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework.

Economic racism continues to exist. Racism can be discovered at every level in every major institution—including the military, the health care system, and the police.

It’s not easy to eradicate racism that is so deeply entrenched in the structures of our society, and this is why it’s important to develop an analysis that goes beyond an understanding of individual acts of racism and this is why we need demands that go beyond the prosecution of the individual perpetrators.

It reminds us obviously of South Africa, where legally apartheid was ended, but an economic apartheid, even sociological apartheid, is still in place. When we were in Cape Town for the Russell Tribunal, I was shocked to see people of color waiting every morning at the corner of the street to be picked up by employers who deemed to pay them three dollars an hour, I was horrified by the ghettos and shantytowns. You drive around the nicest beaches of Cape Town and a few minutes later it’s like being in Mumbai or something.

Well, what’s also interesting in South Africa is the fact that many of the positions of leadership from which Black people were of course totally excluded during apartheid are now occupied by Black people, including within the police hierarchy. I recently saw a film on the Marikana miners, who were attacked, injured, and many killed by the police. The miners were Black, the police force was Black, the provincial head of the police force was a Black woman. The national head of the police force is a Black woman. Nevertheless, what happened in Marikana was, in many important respects, a reenactment of Sharpeville. Racism is so dangerous because it does not necessarily depend on individual actors, but rather is deeply embedded in the apparatus…

And once you’re in the apparatus…

Yes. And it doesn’t matter that a Black woman heads the national police. The technology, the regimes, the targets are still the same. I fear that if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist…

The “bad apples” type of…

…who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Chapter 2: Ferguson Reminds Us of the Importance of a Global Context
Interview by Frank Barat in Brussels (September 21, 2014)
Interviewer’s words in Bold, Angela Davis in Italics

We have our Quickstart content located here, which includes everything except the 6d4, 6d8, and 6d12 physical dice. It includes a printable sticker sheet if you want to be very fancy with your dice, or a simple conversion chart if you prefer to leave your dice uncovered. If you have additional questions, would like to utilize the TTS mod, or are eager to see more content, please fill out the playtesting form and we’ll get you in the conversation!

Thank you all for your interest and support!
–Smith at the Forge

Exciting new game!

We are privileged to be working with Elizabeth Hargrave and Pandasaurus Games on a project they have in the works about breeding and domesticating foxes! We are currently looking for interested playtesters who may be interested in any of the nouns in that previous sentence!

This is a 45-60 min euro-ish drafting game for 2-4 players with a pretty quick core round structure. Playtest groups will need 12 six-sided dice of two colors(or close-enough color families), and access to a printer and a way to cut out a fair amount of cards.
Playtesters who are still observing social distancing and isolation, don’t have a group of their own, or simply prefer digital will be able to test using a Tabletop Simulator mod we are almost done with.

As part of our ongoing education, we’re exploring prominent voices in the abolition movement. From the opening paragraphs of Angela Davis’ essay: Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation:

Despite a long history of exalted appeals to man’s inherent right of resistance, there has seldom been agreement on how to relate in practice to unjust, immoral laws and the oppressive social order from which they emanate. The conservative, who does not dispute the validity of revolutions deeply buried in history, invokes visions of impending anarchy in order to legitimize his demand for absolute obedience. Law and order, with the major emphasis on order, is his watchword. The liberal articulates his sensitiveness to certain of society’s intolerable details, but will almost never prescribe methods of resistance which exceed the limits of legality—redress through electoral channels is the liberal’s panacea.

In the heat of our pursuit for fundamental human rights, Black people have been continually cautioned to be patient. We are advised that as long as we remain faithful to the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will eventually arrive when we will come into our own as full-fledged human beings.

But having been taught by bitter experience, we know that there is a glaring incongruity between democracy and the capitalist economy which is the source of our ills. Regardless of all rhetoric to the contrary, the people are not the ultimate matrix of the laws and the system which govern them—certainly not Black people and other nationally oppressed people, but not even the mass of whites. The people do not exercise decisive control over the determining factors of their lives.

Angela Y. Davis, Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation
Collected in “If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance”

If you want to playtest for us on this game and future projects, please visit https://loreforgegames.wordpress.com/playtester-interest-form/ and provide us with some information about your interest and capabilities, and we’ll be sure to get you in on our playtesting!

Prime War Postmortem

We were very excited to get an email from Greater than Games in July of 2017 asking if we wanted to do some development work on the (then) core box expansion to our favorite game, Sentinel Tactics. We had been all but managing playtesting for the expansion’s content, and had actually designed some of the first rough drafts of the characters for both Prime War, and Rise of the Ennead, which was to have been a smaller expansion that was published alongside the core box.

We had been passionate fans of Sentinel Tactics, and were very bummed to hear about the postponement of the Broken City/For Profit expansions. As we assisted in playtesting for both that wave of content, and the Prime War/Rise of the Ennead wave, we started to explore what some of the systemic things were that had turned people off to the game. We began drawing up a draft of what it would look like to make a game like this from the ground up. One that had all of the excitement that had drawn us to it in the first place, but that wasn’t carrying the baggage of what was driving people away.

When we got that email, we sat down and got our ideas organized, designing a system that used nothing from the original except the general team-focused structure. We also tried to come up with a set of modifications to the Sentinel Tactics system, in case >G wanted to keep as much of the same framework as possible. We tried to keep ourselves as detached as possible, as we didn’t know what to expect from a meeting like this, and didn’t want to set our expectations too high.

As we sat down with >G at Gen Con 2017, we started explaining what we had identified as some core issues with the existing system and what we wanted to do to help improve on them. They listened to everything we had to say, but pulled on a couple of threads we had unintentionally dropped and got us to discuss the new design we had been workshopping for the last few months. They encouraged and built upon the pieces we described, including a neat iteration of our tournament ideas for how teams could be formed to have lasting narrative impacts on the lore as the game went on. Eventually, the weekend ended, and they left us with the guideline to “Make the game that [we] want to play”.

We knew we were fighting an uphill battle with a new design on two fronts: Sentinels players didn’t seem to want Competitive play as much as we did, and Competitive players wouldn’t look to a “Co-op brand” for a deep tactical experience. We decided to build the core system to support character-level combat and, after several iterations, developed a system that allowed competitive and co-operative play to coexist and thrive alongside each other, depending on what individual game groups wanted to do.

Fast forward to the first PAX Unplugged, where we had brought a printer, paper cutter, and scissors, as we had planned to show >G our playable prototype, but had been making edits up through the drive from VA Beach to Philadelphia. We had built out a set of 6 playable characters and a rudimentary group of co-op threats, and were nervous to demonstrate how this new system played. We needn’t have worried, as everyone loved it, and immediately jumped in to show us how this or that could be improved by the removal or addition of some other minor mechanic to help things run smoother or more in line with the theme.

We would end up going to St. Louis a handful of times over the next two years, and showing off in-progress content at the next PAX Unplugged and the next two Gen Cons. The Co-op system underwent five major overhauls by our count, two major revisions of the core system, and the characters required constant balancing to keep everyone in line with whoever felt best after a given change. We ended up creating content for 16 characters in the debut roster, as well as 15 for the remaster of the characters from the original Sentinel Tactics Flame of Freedom and Uprising rosters. We made six different cooperative arcs of 3-5 scenarios each, to be split between the two boxes, made up of something like 15 different “minion” classes, 7 “Lieutenant” targets, 10 “Boss” characters, and 12 “Threats”. (Threats would be the only concept that would survive to the last iteration, and incorporated many of the best bits of all of the concepts from previous iterations.) We eventually built out each different universe into their own “environment” deck, introducing some additional randomness and excitement into both the competitive and the cooperative modes. We would end up fleshing out four major competitive match types, a set of 7 different “Boons” for each faction, multiple tools for custom scenario building, and a set of scenarios to cover each of the old Sentinel Tactics playmats.

If you’ve not picked up on it yet, we Loved this game. We’re very sad to see it close down, and (like all of you, and everyone involved in the project) we’ll probably always have a little bit of curiosity for what it could have been. We are planning to take the Meanwhile system “on the road” to see if anyone has a home for it in their line, and are utilizing it to help practice our video game development skills; so who knows? You may see this project in some form or another in a little while. And remind me to tell you sometime about the alternate squad-based 1v1 game we made on my birthday after finally seeing some bigwig comic IP’s squad-combat game in person at PAXU.

For those interested: we will probably push out a Print and Play of 6-8 characters, a couple of maps, a rulesheet, and most likely a cooperative scenario. We’re still hashing out some practical and legal issues, but we want to show you all where the game is now, and let you all feel some of the joy we had (and still have) with this game!

–Smith at the Forge