Interview with Luke Gearing (compiled from the NSR Discord)

Inspiration
21

NSR:

Love Swyvers; currently have 3 groups in the same city which is a total blast. Do you have any media to watch/read/play where I can get more of those delicious grimy Smoke vibes? Do you personally imagine The Smoke as Victorian, Tudor, or a mix of both? Do you have any tips for writing adventures for it? Thanks!

Luke:

i think of the smoke are more medieval - but it’s extremely anachronistic so you can have more or less of any of those elements as per your own taste.

terry pratchett had a huge influence on me growing up, especially the Vimes series. the smoke is a ankh-morporks nastier cousin with bad tattoos.

the early Thief games also fucked my brain up as a kid, so those are really worth playing. you could probably steal a few of those missions and run them as a bigger heists.

i think a lot of swyvers is rooted in the experience of growing up outside of london. there’s all these towns and smaller cities falling into the gravity well of London, which sucks up all the money, all the wealth, all the people. it’s actually a huge problem - the north of england is drained dry of investment by this process. i live down south, but still outside of london. visiting it as this huge place full of extreme wealth and poverty made a big impression, as well as the amount of history openly on display. london is always being rebuilt, but the bones of the many londons before are always on display. it’s a weird one, but the book Liquid City by Iain Sinclair & Marc Atkins gets at some of this.

swyvers is written to be pretty sandboxy - just lean on the stuff you generated in the districts to guide you (and your players) in finding targets. as normal, think about things as places, this isn’t an adventure locale, it’s somones house, it’s a jewellers shop, it’s a prison. for security measures, give the guys a “competence rating” out of 10. whenever you spot a security hole in the design, roll the d10 - if its on or under, they spotted the flaw and have some kind of mitigation in place - otherwise, it’s still there.

22

NSR:

Is Behind Closed Doors getting a re-release? (I vaguely recall you mentioning working on it again, a while back, unless I am misremembering)

Luke:

yes! it’ll be released with space penguin ink later this year or next!

23

NSR:

  1. How sick are you of being asked when Wolves Upon the Paper is coming out?
  2. When is Wolves Upon the Paper coming out?
  3. When are you and [Zedeck Siew] going to do a colab Crocodiles Upon the Bank so I can pay you to have it exist in my hands/hard drive instead of it living rent-free in my head.

Luke:

  1. it’s free advertising buddy i’m not complaining
  2. probably early next year at this rate but maybe later this year if things go well!
  3. [Zedeck Siew] :eyes:

NSR:

Cheers for the answers! When you and Zedeck make it happen (cause why wouldn’t you it’s obviously a fucking incredible idea) and you need playtester I’ll be fucking raging if you don’t ask me!

Follow up, you any closer to figuring out how you’ll deal with the various people who’ve bought in at various prices in terms of if they want to pick up the print version? Could be a quick sale from me if it seems worth while :wink:

Another question, when can we expect a return of the lunchtime space Hulk game?

Luke:

if i can’t work out something better it’ll be “anyone who bought the pdf gets an alternate cover”. ideally i’ll work out some sort of discount that doesn’t mean i’m losing money hand over fist too.

space hulk is a maybe - i’d like to but time is even more precious now!

24

NSR:

I love sci fi and would love to play more, but I feel like it requires a different kind of buy in from players, and more work to know and explain the setting. Has this been true in your experience? Can you tell us about how you run sci fi? And maybe about how you pitch sci-fi games to your players/friends?

Luke:

point out to your players they (probably) use a phone every day and they don’t know how it works.
a big thing with spacefaring sci-fi is that cultures are all gonna diverge as local conditions impact culture. just cos you know how it works back home doesn’t mean they know how it works at the planet two systems over. think about how different nearby cultures can be - certain things which are fine in one culture are deadly rude in others, and that’s one just one planet.
all this to say - relax. it’s a game, and we can work it out as we go. i posted some shit much earlier about Distant Authority that might be useful for you too

25

NSR:

What’s your favourite kind of adventure/game to run at the table?

Luke:

SANDBOX. give me a bunch of disparate things in a place for my players to fuck around with. my players are a little more trad-leaning than me so one thing i’ve found useful as a compromise is a “sandbox with a mission”. so like, there’s sandbox but you’re there to achieve some external objective and deal with the consequences if you bumping into shit in the sandbox

1 Like
26

NSR:

I think we’re roughly around the same age (late 20s-ish?), which seems to be pretty young for OSR spaces in my experience. I personally got into the OSR after starting RPGs with Pathfinder and 5e, and I have zero nostalgia for earlier editions of D&D. I’ve often felt out of step with a lot the OSR as a result, even if I love a lot of its principles, but this is a perspective I’ve rarely seen shared. Do you think your age has affected your relationship with the OSR at all, and have you ever felt out of place in OSR spaces as a result? Or have you found age not to really matter at all for your career in RPGs?

Luke:

yeah i’m 29, got into osr stuff at college (i did a btec and got into uni for any brits in the audience lol) so around 17-18?

i think a lot of my disinterest in the stuff i don’t care about is entirely driven by that lack of nostalgia. i don’t care how it used to be done, i don’t care about fidelity to gygaxian play, i’m just looting the body for the shit i find useful. which happens to be most of it! but there’s no sacred cows for me. i think this is a good perspective to have! let the old folks jerk off about ad&d by the book. that’s a boring conversation to have anyway. lets take od&d apart and glue it back together again instead.

my age has mostly only surprised people ime - i don’t think its ever been a hindrance!

1 Like
27

NSR:

Something that often strikes me about your work is how “convincing” for lack of a better word the magic and rituals feel. Have you done a lot of reading on real world occult beliefs and practises or is it just a quirk of your own imagination

Luke:

i’ve done some which i then speculate on but apparently i was just built to be a druid. the resonances/sympathetic stuff makes a lot of intuitive sense to me? i’ve got a big penguin Dictionary of Symbols which was very useful, although the fun of the semi-historical stuff i like is you can invent your own symbol-sets.

NSR:

Interestingly I have the same Dictionary of Symbols and use it for similar purposes. The poetic/symbolic magic in Wolves really works for me.

28

NSR:

Wolves Upon the Coast I feel does an extremely good job of marrying historical elements and fantasy. Especially adding the late antique / early medieval touchstones.

Is there any period or element of real life history that draws you? Also, I would love your thoughts on including historical elements versus going for a fully fantasy world with no connection to ours.

Luke:

literally all of them, it’s a problem. i’ve spent all my money on history books and my family are starving.
more seriously, some historical periods i’ve been toying with writing “with” : bronze age collapse, interwar/white terror siberia, celtic britain during the roman conquest.

adding historical elements is great fun because honestly, most fantasy stuff is just referencing it anyway - coming right out and saying “these are romans” is refreshingly honest. the trouble with history is its very political and extremely horrible. a big thing with wolves, for example, is that vikings made most of their money on slaves. in school it was always “oh the vikings took the gold and silver from the villages” lol. anyway - you then get the fun (horrible) choice about either leaving that horrible element in and writing about it extensively OR you can leave it out and feel like you are whitewashing history. of course, when we make fantasy/sci-fi stuff referencing history you could argue that is one big whitewash too - there’s no easy way out. i think you can just be honest and talk about why you made those decisions.

29

NSR:

  • Would you ever release a “director’s cut” of Gradient Descent? I’d love to read the pre-bullet point version.
  • Was there a particular overarching idea that sparked GD?

Luke:

i’d love to but i’ll need to see how much of the prose version survived sean mccoy’s evil clutches!

GD started as just “AI goes bad™️” and everything else kind of evolved from there - letting the themes and such naturally emerge as it was written rather than deciding them ahead of time. the zhuangzi quote was all sean!

NSR:

Thanks so much for taking the time on this, Luke. Really great stuff.

30

NSR:

Ooh, any good ideas for connecting Another Bug Hunt to run Gradient Descent afterwards?

Luke:

either send them to cloudbank to find artefacts to pay off their debt to company for extraction, or…

(spoilers for ABH) || hinton was made in cloudbank. go there, find the personality he is based on - we need to know if hinton is unique or, more worrying, if there’s problems with all androids…||

NSR:

thanks for the answers, that was efficient!

31

NSR:

Do you write any poetry or prose outside of your rpg stuff, and if so what kind

Luke:

i’ve not written fiction-prose in a long time. i find writing rpg stuff a lot more engaging and interesting.
i used to do a lot of poetry stuff but that’s all fits and starts - its something i’d like to do more of

32

NSR:

I prefer the fact that ADF has no concrete adventure content! The ideas in there are so evocative that adventures can kind of form themselves with little effort. (I made a rogue AI Tank a hotly anticipated dinner guest at a Sultan’s palace. The PCs had to find the tank, not get killed by it, and invite it to dinner)

When creating random tables, do you decide how big the table is going to be first (i.e. d66) and then try to fill it? How do you shake ideas for table entries loose when you can’t think of any more?

Luke:

that is an excellent adventure!

mostly based on what the table is for and how often i’ll be rolling on it! the d66 is a super useful middle-ground between the d20 and the d100 for “rolling on this often but not most-sessions”.

tables i usually write out in a notebook so i can use another page for vague idea-types and then expand on those when i get stuck. sometimes it’s just about letting it stew for a while - other times it’s a lot of fun to bash out a table in a VC with some friends.

33

NSR:

Do you have a note taking system of any kind? How do you keep track of your ideas?

Luke:

i have a “general use” notebook where most of everything goes. stuff in there gets a title or a book dart if i need to find it again, but most of the value is in writing it down rather than re-referencing it for me.

if i’m going to be working on something specific for a while (like a say a forthcoming mothership book…) i’ll give it its own notebook - much like how each campaign gets its own notebook

34

NSR:

How important do you think reading genre fiction like fantasy/sci-fi/weird fiction is to RPGs as a hobby and do you think players and referees are missing out on important touchstones, tonally or inspiration-wise in their games if they don’t do so?

(Yes this is a leading question, soz x)

Luke:

i think having a grounding in it definitely helps! there’s a lot of good stuff in those books. equally i think we can (and should) be looking beyond genre fiction. i mean genre fiction is a super weird term i have a lot of beef with anyway but what you gonna do

that said i don’t know if we’re retreading the same path too much by working and re-working genre fiction. i think the cutting edge of them offers a lot but if we’re just re-reading the appendix N you’re only ever going to be exposed the same ideas as gygax etc. i mentioned earlier today about if you only read RPGs you only get the same ideas as other people in the field - the same is probably true of the “staples” of genre fiction

tl;dr read weirder books

35

Luke:
thinking-adventures-woz-ere

THINKING ADVENTURES WOZ ERE

36

That concludes the AMA.