Interview with Jason Morningstar, Designer of Fiasco

Jason Morningstar is best known for his games The Shab-al-Hiri Roach and Grey Ranks, a role-playing game about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, which shared the 2008 Diana Jones Award with Wolfgang Bauer.

He is almost finished with a new game, Fiasco, which aims to recreate the kind of fiction we are accustomed to seeing in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. This fiction can be described, to quote Jason out of context, as gut-punching-emo-indie-narrativist-misery tourism.

Fiasco is for mature gamers who enjoy playing through bleak and sometimes bloody scenarios. It is also no-prep and GM-less, which is great for a harried GM who has a screaming infant to help care for (cough, cough).

Brennen Reece: What's Fiasco's elevator pitch?

Jason Morningstar: Fiasco is a game about powerful ambition and poor impulse control.

You engineer and play out stupid, disastrous situations, usually at the intersection of greed, fear, and lust. It's like making your own Coen brothers movie, in about the same amount of time it'd take to watch one.

BR: I'm guessing the fiction is more in line with Barton Fink or Blood Simple than The Hudsucker Proxy or Raising Arizona.

JM: Blood Simple is the ultimate model, perfect in every aspect. But a Raising Arizona feel isn't uncommon--the tone depends a lot on how you set up your game and how you like to play.

BR: Will you be including a filmography in the text?

JM: Yes! I list 54 inspirational films, arranged in categories.  So, you've got your note perfect fiascoes like Burn After Reading.  Historical goatscrews like Bad Day at Black Rock. Less-lethal clusterf***'s like Bad Santa.  Ugly bloodbaths like The Way of the Gun.  International s***storms like City of God. And crimes that do not pay, like Jackie Brown. Basically movies that span many genres but cling to the core element of human ambition and failure.

BR: Wow. I love so many of those movies. I'm very happy to see Bad Day at Black Rock on the list.

What inspired you to write Fiasco?

JM: Originally it was a game called Hat Creek in which you built a western town from scratch and then played in it. I'd forgotten that! Pretty soon the relationships you made as part of building the town became way more interesting to me, and I realized that focusing on relationships rather than characters was the game's killer app. Then I realized the fixed setting wasn't necessary, and that the initial "engineering" could set up a really fun situation, with enough freedom for it to be fresh every time. Finally, the "criminal failure" sub-genre really clicked, and I began devouring films and seeing the same relationship framework again and again. So, a series of happy accidents as the project evolved, coupled with my current interest in providing useful constraints to the fiction--in this case sort of guided oracles implying powerful situations in a cool way and die-handling that paces play, as well as randomizes and guides authorship.

BR: What's your creative process like?

JM: I'm usually inspired by some media, history, or something, and simultaneously there are interesting constraints I've seen in other games, or bits that work especially well, and I want to find ways to incorporate those, or sometimes there are specific problems or lessons learned that I want to address. Usually, I work on a bunch of things at once, and the individual projects thrive or die on their own merit, in their own time. Some percolate back up later, some get scavenged. Like I wrote this very weird game called Elmer Sapp that never quite worked and never saw the light of day, but I love it, and now the Elmer Sapp DNA is in two other projects I am also loving. And to refer back to the previous question, one of these project just jumped out at me after reading about a very unusual historical incident, and the other came from an arbitrary constraint in a game design contest.

BR: Where are you now with the design process? When will you be releasing Fiasco?

JM: Fiasco has had some problems in the layout stage because I want it to be really perfect, and it hasn't been. The rules are locked. Layout is ongoing. It won't be long.

BR: Now that the rules are finalized, are you working on any other game designs?

JM:  Yes! I tend to have three or four games in process at any one time. I'm participating in Nathan Paoletta's "Two games, One Title" challenge, and Ashok Desai and I are writing different versions of The Plant, which is fun. I'm working on a pair of card-based games: Cowboys with Big Hearts and Carolina Death Crawl. The former is a sort of mythic, death-of-the-west fantasy about dying cowboys going on one last ride, and getting juiced up with patent medicine to keep it together. The latter is a southern gothic sort of thing based on actual historical events--Potter's Raid, in July of 1863, where a bunch of dudes, including locals sympathetic to the Union, rode into the Tar river valley and burned down four towns. Being familiar with North Carolina cultural values, I was struck by the notion of local boys riding as scouts for the Union army. These games are super focused and small. Further out is Medical Hospital, the Medical Game of Medical Melodrama, which I adore but isn't firing on all cylinders yet.

BR: How do you go about marketing your games?

JM: Up until now I've been very haphazard about it. I sent out a few review copies, I encouraged play reports, I flacked them at conventions. Now I'm re-assessing, trying to set clear goals, and being more deliberate with my efforts to market my games.

BR: What advice do you have for would-be game designers such as myself?

JM: All the tools are very accessible if you want to jump into small press publishing. There's a big community of people willing to help you. As far as the actual design goes, I'd advise you to not pay too much attention to what other people are saying and doing. I, for example, am very much rooted in a world view and play style that is going to color my advice, and I can't really help that. I think the most practical advice I can give is to get involved, which you are, Brennen, practice reciprocity, help others, support your friends, and be a positive and helpful person. This is how you get commenters, play testers, collaborators, and friends. By commenting, playtesting, collaborating, and being a friend. Also, don't spend money you can't afford to lose.

BR: Tell me about your family and professional life. How does that relate to gaming? Where are the overlaps? What about conflicts?

JM: I've been married for seven years to my wife, Autumn, and she's extremely rad. By her choice there is a firewall where gaming is concerned--she wants no part of it herself--but she recognizes what a positive thing it is for me and encourages me at every turn. I arranged our gaming schedule to overlap with the night she works late, so it doesn't cut into family time too much. I'm in two weekly groups, and the other includes my brother, so I see him a lot and that's always fun. Last week his character got thrown in a well and drowned, good times. Honestly, Autumn is so supportive there are no conflicts--I'm sensitive to her needs and encourage her lunatic hobbies just like she encourages mine. As far as Bully Pulpit Games goes, her mandate was "you cannot lose money," and that hasn't been an issue, happily.

BR: What you just said about your brother, about his character drowning, really emphasizes a play style difference from how most people (that I know, anyway) approach role-playing games. I'm a pretty masochistic player, and I'm okay with bad rolls since they make interesting fiction. For a lot of the people I play with, a night of bad rolls can ruin the game.

JM: That's cool, good luck to them. Most of the people I play with regularly are fine with their character getting hosed, if it makes for a more interesting, fun, or challenging session. I'm pretty aggressive about putting my guy in bad situations because it acts as a catalyst for action and conflict, which I enjoy. There's so little time, let's go! It's just a play style that privileges the fiction over the character a bit and I recognize that it isn't everyone's cup of tea. It isn't even my cup of tea always--I was recently in a game where I grew to really care about my guy, and then it was "hell no!" when people started pushing on him.

In the example above, my brother Scott was in a big conflict during his spotlight episode (we're playing Primetime Adventures), and another player's intention was "throw Rodrigo in the sacrificial well." That guy won, Scott lost, we all cheered. We made it clear that Rodrigo can--and probably should--come back next week for the final episode, either in person or as a ghost or whatever. But we were all happy he lost, because in the context of the season's narrative arc, it made sense and was very satisfying.

BR: What's your favorite game that has come out in the past year?

JM: Montsegur 1244, hands down.

Beautiful and tight. Very influential to me and eye-opening. Frederik says he was inspired by some of my stuff to a degree, so we're on the same wavelength regarding game play and thematic content, but he took it much, much farther and coupled it with a Danish sensibility that I really like. A great game.

BR: I've been meaning to pick that up, but I keep getting distracted by the huge number of games that are coming out.

The whole "indie/storygames" movement is starting to pick up steam and a lot of folks who usually play games like Savage Worlds or D&D are starting to get interested in them.

Do you have any advice where they should start to make the transition easier? Any must-play games?

JM: First of all, I know a ton of people who love D&D and Savage Worlds and also play Hero's Banner and [Primetime Adventures].  It isn't either/or.  That said, one game that I feel retains a nice balance between new ideas and a more traditional feel is The Shadow of Yesterday, which sort of puts the lie to the notion that player characters need to be balanced for everybody to have a good time. It's also strongly player-focused and a GM can't plan too much, which is fun. Ultimately you should try games that look cool to you, and don't over-think it.  Conventions are a great place to get a feel for many different games and styles of play with little investment or risk.

BR: What's this Trail of Cthulhu scenario you're writing?

JM: It's called The Black Drop.

BR: Is it a purist Lovecraftian adventure, pulp, or something else?

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JM: More pulpy but a mix, actually. It could be played either way. The setup is that you are going to the Kerguelen archipelago (49°15′S 69°35′E) for various reasons, and there's some seriously bad things happening there that you inevitably get involved in. There are Nazis and monsters. It's stuffed with real history. There's a passage in Foucault 's Pendulum where Eco talks about how if you look closely at something, it gets weirder and weirder--he explains the occult significance of an ice cream cart--and that was my case with the Kerguelen islands. A lot of deeply strange stuff has gone down there.  On top of that, the whole adventure is designed to force difficult ethical choices on you, and at a certain point you must decide whether aligning yourself with evil is ever justified, and what you are willing to sacrifice to stop an even greater evil.

BR: Your games tend to make players make difficult ethical choices. Is this an intentional aesthetic, or just something that happens?

JM: I really like that in my gaming, so it ends up in my games some. It's almost a cliche, really. "Tough choices," shorthand for gut-punching-emo-indie-narrativist-misery tourism.

BR: I personally dig that in the fiction I consume, so I'm attracted to it in my gaming as well. For me, that even trickles into more traditional gaming. Why did you decide to write a scenario for Trail of Cthulhu instead of a new game?

JM: It seemed like the perfect vehicle for my idea, which was predicated on this weird, fascinating history of the Kerguelens. The adventure just touches on it, and you get a little sense of it through historical document handouts and so forth, but it is an awesomely strange place. I'd been researching it aimlessly, and Graham Walmsley encouraged me.

BR:  To write it up for Trail of Cthulhu.

JM: Right.  It turns out Trail of Cthulhu is a pretty hard game to write for! The format is very specific and takes a lot of thought to get right.

BR: What stage of development is it in now?

JM: Almost done. I'm running it at MACE, a regional con, next weekend. I need to tighten it up, write up the example PCs, incorporate play-test feedback, then it is out the door for some external play testing.

BR: Are you a Lovecraft fan?

JM: Not really. I like weird horror and pulp, though.

BR: Thanks for talking with me, Jason. I'm really looking forward to seeing some new games from you.