Luke Gearing hosted an AMA on the NSR Discord on April 4th between 7:54am and 5:52pm GMT.
The AMA is compiled here with permission from Luke Gearing. The questions and replies are mostly attributed anonymously. The AMA is presented in semi-chronological order, grouping answers/replies to the same question together.
The only alterations to the messages were to replace the Discord ID number for Zedeck Siew with Zedeck’s name.
The original AMA can be found here: Discord
Luke Gearing:
i’m luke gearing and i’m here to say
i’ll be doing in ama in here on the 4th of april all day GMT time
if you would like to leave some questions in advance that would be great, otherwise just fire them off as they occur to you
some shit i wrote: fever swamp, gradient descent, the isle, wolves upon the coast, the big squirm, swyvers, violence
NSR Discord user:
What system should I use to best incentivize correct play of your adventures
Luke:
there’s a cool larp you could try called “playing in traffic”!!! (for those not aware me and gromb are were friends elsewhere. i’m not telling randos to play in traffic lmao)
NSR:
what do you think of icky slime?
Luke:
broadly pro
NSR:
How does one design a sci-fi dungeon adventure, and how is the process different from designing fantasy dungeon adventures, if at all?
Luke:
sci-fi dungeons are usually more likely to be in-use ime. the function is more important - this means reading up on what the irl equivalent might have. a fantasy dungeon doesn’t have toilets - a sci-fi one does.
i mean some fantasy dungeons have toilets or dungheaps. i’m a fan of that, but it’s less regular you know
NSR:
Also, what makes a gameable sci-fi setting?
(ironically, i’m making a sci-fi game myself, which proves the AmAs with you and McCoy to be incredibly fortuitous)
Luke:
so i think a lot about this and i think for a big sandboxy setting (sci-fi or not) you need Distant Authority. you want at least one huge, centralised power and then you set your game on the fringes of its power. this does a lot of cool stuff for you. it means the players can do cool adventure stuff BUT they have to keep in mind that they shouldn’t break too many laws or else risk the wrath of the Empire (or Company or whatever). this slight downwards pressure keeps choices interesting - one of the bigger risks with scifi is the players just running away from consequences, so having the big central authority means consequences might be slow but they never ever disappear.
i also think you shouldn’t sweat the technology too much, more worry about its impact on society rather than how it works. if you and your players are all hard-scifi people i’m sure it could work but it sounds like a lot of work to me!
unironically, read the mothership Wardens Operation Manual. obviously i’m affiliated but i really do think Sean did a killer job with it
NSR:
What’s it like working for/with the Melsonian Arts Council?
Does working with different publishers have an impact on your creative process or style?
Luke:
MAC are great! very lovely crew who took the first big chance on me publishing fever swamp when i wrote it way back when because i needed money for cigarettes.
different publishers all work very differently. MAC i’ll usually write a manuscript of my own accord and send it to them asking if they’re interested. if they are, i play comment tag with an editor for a bit and then they take over. i’ll be asked my opinions on the rest of the process but it’s their show at that point. spear-witch worked the same ime.
mothership/tkg stuff is much more collaborative - from the beginning there’s feedback and back-and-forth on content and writing, art and layout. this process carries on throughout.
space penguin ink is a mix between the two - i’ll write the thing, hand it over and then also be along for the ride with art and layout.
if i’m writing by a clients request i’ll adapt my tone but at this point i can assume they asked me specifically because they like the way i write. equally, i know if i’m writing troika i can do an elephant with a little hat on his head or a long-legged dog, but i probably wouldn’t do the infinite pit of screaming androids. (i mean actually troika can be very dark and nasty but you take my drift)
so uh, yes - it does.
NSR:
There’s been mention in the past of the possibility of a print version of Wolves Upon the Coast. Is that still in the cards?
Luke:
yes! i’m buying up cover art slowly because i spent all my money getting married last year. hopefully i can start doing it late this year, otherwise it’ll be 2025. it’ll get edited, each book will have a piece of cover art and it’ll be in a box-set, unless something changes. i’m not doing a KS if i can possibly avoid it - just a pre-order.
NSR:
What’s your favourite aspect of your mentorship program?
Luke:
seeing someone write with more confidence and belief in themselves at the end is massively rewarding.
the opportunity to think & talk about stuff also helps clarify my own position on things - i need to know what i think to teach it to someone else.
the opportunity to be told i’m wrong! i’ve had mentees be like “i don’t agree” and they’ve talked me round - that shit is great.
NSR:
luke can you send me your hex fill prompt tables again i lost the txt file
also: how poetic is too poetic? are strong vibes gameable? how much thought goes into the meta-narrative of a product like monsters&?
Luke:
Wolves Upon the Coast Hexfill Procedure - Luke Gearing don’t lose it this time!!!
so there is no “ultimate correct” way to approach things here. i will say if you’re writing game material poetically you have to do it well for it to be useful, whereas clunky mechanical prose is probably going to be more useful. that said, you should aim high and accept failure as part of the process of writing. lose 100 games of go as quickly as possible etc etc
strong vibes can be gameable but there should probably be a reason you’ve given me only vibes. one of my big pet peeves is a book tracing the outline of a great idea and then backing off when it comes time to actually execute the cool idea. i think this actually relates to the above - just giving me the vibes of a cool thing means you can’t fail to deliver the cool thing because you never actually tried. this is taking “vibe” as a derogatory term - i think you can do a lot of work implying and hiding information elsewhere. like in Acid Death Fantasy, if you read all the backgrounds & monsters you know whats going on the setting to a large degree. i don’t think of that as “strong vibes” but your definition might vary? (i think now i should have added more adventure content in the book to make it concrete but what can you do) ultimately if an idea is cool enough to get you excited it’s sort of gameable but if you as the gm are doing all the work the idea wasn’t actually gameable it was just cool - you, the gm, did the work of making it game - the author was just like “hey wouldn’t something like this be cool?”
i try not to think too much about theme or meta-narrative. i usually end up finding all of that stuff afterwards. fr. ex - it was like a year or two later i realised the goblins and hobgoblins entries were “talking” to one another, and fit as two sides of the same coin. the idea of these connections arising subconsciously in much more interesting to me than me deliberately putting them in - if i’m not surprised by the work, that is a failure i think!
NSR:
You’ve said that Swyvers was actually the first system you ever worked on and that it was just worked on and delayed until now.
Why do you think you were interested in heists in RPGs so early on? And what do you find makes heists interesting in RPGs over regular dungeon crawling, etc.?
Luke:
it’s more than heists - i’ve always been extremely interested in crime as a human activity, and swyvers is built around crime in general rather than specifically heists. if you scroll up a bit about distant authority, swyvers is that but the authority is right here and you’re still trying to live on the fringe despite geographic proximity.
crime is inherently interesting as a deliberate break from the status quo, and a decision (or often, not a decision but a necessity) to live outside of the law. you kind of expose the idea of the state as the monopoly of violence by playing around with this, as well as putting a lens of shit like corruption, primitive accumulation, generation wealth/privilege etc. there’s a fun book written by a greek bankrobber who escaped from the same prison twice that i read recently that talks about some of this (a normal life - Vassilis Palaiokostas) or you could pick up Primitive Rebels - Eric Hobsbawm for a more academic look at some of this. the Swyvers can be very self-interested or they can fit the mold of the “social bandit”. it’s flexible!
NSR:
Hi Luke! Do you have any secret tips for writing evocatively?
Luke:
write as short as possible and as long as it needs to be. big words get in the way of the image of the thing. don’t try and “write like a writer” - your readers can spot the affectation of “writer voice” and will respond negatively, even if they don’t know why. read strunk & white - the elements of style. you don’t need to agree with it all (or any of it!) but it will make you THINK about writing in a serious, critical way. oh, and read more!!!
NSR:
Woe, Two long questions be upon ye.
I have heard it said you “work at it” with RPGs (I heard this on Yochai’s podcast, quoting someone who I now forget). What’s that work look like? What’s the process for your stuff? Do you read a lot of other work (RPG or other?)? Do you spend a lot of time doing the actual writing, or incubating the idea? Do you draft, throw away, and draft again? Do you play many many games to have a fine tuned sense of what’s gameable? Or does it burst from your head, fully formed, in a splatter?
You seem to write mostly to the OSR sphere, or at least you write adventure-y stuff (or maybe these so-called “Thinking Adventures”). What aspects of OSR do you write to? When you think OSR, what makes it work for you? I’m guessing the tactical infinity is up there, but you also have some apparent fondness for modernizing “classic fantasy vibes” like monsters& and the treasure one. And what specifies a Thinking Adventure beyond broad, general OSR, in your opinion?
Luke:
working at it USED to mean waking up an hour earlier than i needed to so i could write for an hour before work every week day. it meant turning the internet off for that hour and actually just doing it solidly - research doesn’t count. mapping doesn’t count. just pen on paper (or fingers on keyboard, depending).
when writing, i write an intro first. the intro will have the seeds of almost everything else first - the ADF intro sparked the entire book. when writing an intro is can be useful to do the “coating the pearl” thing i talk about here Techniques to Write Adventures - Luke Gearing
after that i outline a skeleton of the work using the headings i think the work will have. then i start writing “around” the skeletons, filling in the headings as i go, adding notes to other sections or more headings as they seem to arrive. once you’ve written through the whole thing, take a day off. then start again at the top and improve, cut, chop and change. as you do more writing this second step gets shorter - the first few times it’ll take a lot longer than the writing probably.
at this point i write mostly to “first draft” quality. not everyone does - a lot of people find a zero-draft “get the words on the page” approach really useful, refining it after that. this can be good as way to deactive the editor/critic in your head. i’ve killed mine so i just write what i want first time and it doesn’t slow you down too much.
i read a lot of books but less rpg stuff. if you’re only inspired by the works in your field, you’re only ever going to be using the ideas other people have had. find unrelated things to pull inspiration from. list of everything i’ve read since halfway through 2021 : Books I’ve Read - Luke Gearing
i play 3 games weekly, so it’s a lot of experience i think.
i don’t really think about OSR as OSR. my own aesthetic and play preferences align to OSR, but i’m not squeezing myself into that box. restrictions can breed creativity but they can just be restrictions too. for example, i don’t care about hewing close to TSR standards etc. i’ve heard about this “gary gygax” guy but i don’t know who that is? a lot of my interest in older game stuff is seeing what was left behind as games became increasing a product, and imagining what things might have looked like now if other things had become bigger or been explored more.
the stuff i do like: tactical infinity, treating the world as a place the characters exist in, treating rules as abstractions of the reality not as generating it, getting killed by a big scary monster.
i think Thinking Adventures is something like the osr but trimmed of a lot of the stuff i don’t care for? but i don’t think it really belongs to me as an idea anymore
NSR:
What are some words of advice to up-and-coming designers when it comes to functional and effective dungeon/adventure design??
Luke:
think about the place as a place that exists. places have geography, history, ecology.
think about the people as people. people have relationships, history, bad ideas, hopes.
if you can do these and develop an interesting situation you are set tbh. sometimes an adventure is just two or more people wanting the same thing at the same time.
Red Rock Funeral - Luke Gearing this is literally me rolling up a few monsters from ADF as i needed them and stringing it all together
NSR:
Hey Luke, big fan. What do you think makes a good rule in a tabletop rpg?
Second NSR user:
Bullets
Luke:
one that gets out my way quickly put gives me a plausible result!
NSR:
What new (or new for you) games would you like to write for if an opportunity should arise?
Luke:
this is an odd one for me because i tend to write system-neutral and then just add the mechanical shit in afterwards. i was on a modern day paranormal horror investigation kick last year (think delta green) - doing a big book of that would be super fun.
trashed_tabletop [me]:
Once this AMA is concluded, will it be okay if I compile your answers here into a public forum post on the Cauldron? That way this AMA is more accessible and better-preserved?
Luke:
yes!
@hugehorse:
Luke who’s the coolest guy you write with?
Luke:
all you bby
NSR:
You’ve done quite a lot of mentorships. What’s a rule or advice you’ve often given to your mentees? And is there a common mistake everyone does when starting out?
Luke:
i mentioned it up thread but writer voice is a big one. people love putting qualifiers (most, generally, almost) in their prose and it almost always makes it weaker. the other big one is fear - what if the prose is bad? what if these ideas suck? the big thing i always say - words are free. you can delete them if they suck. better to write 20 paragraphs and delete them because they are bad than to write one good sentence.
the big thing a lot of people express in the application phase is they want accountability. i can’t be that in perpetuity - a lot of this is about habit rather than accountability. i spoke before about creating protected time in your schedule to write - this is one of the best things you can do for your practice. the time doesn’t count if your internet connection is live.
NSR:
Luke, what are a few of your favorite books?
Luke:
oh god that’s a huge one.
the art of not being governed - james c scott (this changed my life)
hothouse - brian aldiss (the weirdest sci-fi you will ever read)
blood meridian - cormac mccarthy (the best book by one of my favourite authors)
moby dick - herman melville (much funnier than you’d expect. banger)
heart of darkness - joeseph conrad (the sheer horror expressed - incredible)
NSR:
Also— has your relationship to writing changed at all since you went full-time with TKG?
Luke:
yeah! it’s something i do most of the day now so i’ve found myself looking for new stuff/increasing the time i spend doing other things in the evenings - which is really nice! i still love writing and it still brings me a lot of joy
NSR:
- What are some niches you would like to see explored more in RPGs?
- You’ve built up a strong community with Thinking Adventures. Do you have any general advice for someone trying to foster a creative community, locally, online or otherwise?
- Do you have any favourites in the things you’ve written? What do you think makes them stand out?
Luke:
- i want to see more people trying to tackle big huge fucking campaigns. i want someone to write masks of nylarthotep but good. i want to believe there’s a way to do these things and have them not be railroady etc.
- thinking adventures is weird because i didn’t want to make a community at all. i think this attitude might have something to do with the growth of it, but i’m not sure. mostly be genuine, connect with people you think are interesting rather than just growing your numbers, have opinions and don’t try to please everyone.
- i think monsters & still stands out for me at the moment. it’s so sparse, there’s really nowhere to hide. some people hate it and that’s great! art shouldn’t be for everyone. for the people who enjoy it, they all seem to really like it.
