120 Mappa Mundi | An Exploration & Ecology RPG

Music. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to this week's episode of Not D&D, brought to you by E.N. World.

As always, I am your host, Jessica. And joining us this week, we have George Francis Bickers from 3Sail Studios. Thanks so much for coming on. Hey, Jeff. Thanks for having me, mate. My voice has totally gone already. Thank you for having me, mate. It's really good to be here. No problem. So we're here this week to talk about Mapa Mundi, which is the tabletop RPG, which is about exploration and ecology.

It's something really different, and I hope you all enjoy hearing about it this week for those of you that are joining us live hello welcome if you have any questions get involved ask them in the chat and we can answer them live and if you're listening to the podcast hello thanks for joining us any links to things we're talking about will be in the show notes of the podcast so you can just click through there so now we've got the admin out the way

George I'm going to be nosy and ask about you dive into your background and history with games so the first question I'll start with is do you remember the first tabletop role-playing game that you played yeah absolutely well yeah absolutely and then now I'm questioning it as well though because I saw Elaine Lithgow who works for Roman Rook and Deckard now.

They count Inquisitor as they like you know Games Workshop's old they were like 75 scale minis Inquisitor is their first tabletop RPG and that was the first one I ever played and like I loved that game but the first one the first like book tabletop RPG I ever played was also a GW product it was one of fantasy roleplay was the very first one I ever played and that was I was hooked right from the start absolutely loved it fab so that's interesting

because it's a not a D&D sort of introduction which a lot of people yeah I didn't play D&D for a long old time like I played a lot of other games before I played D&D and so I feel like I'm not quite I've like managed to escape the tractor beam that is D&D's hold on people's brain do you think that's influenced your game design and the kind of games that you make oh yeah no I yeah I think so I mean I mean we're all I mean I've played I've played D&D I've played my

fair share I probably yeah I've played my fair share of D&D I've run my I've run more of it than I've played and it definitely told me what I didn't want to be doing like it kind of taught me that I didn't like I it's you know again no shade on D&D people play what they want to play people get enjoyment out what they get enjoyment out of it's just really not my jam and playing a lot of other games really helped me.

I think so many people come into they come into the hobby through it and they spend so much time in it and they don't know that other things exist outside of it that when people can get quite defensive and territorial about it when they're when they're kind of asked or suggested to play other games and so that didn't happen with me I played so many other games for so long that I've always been very open to dive in and out of other stuff when it comes up.

And so, yeah, that definitely helped. I don't like D20s, for example. There are no D20s in any games I designed, so I feel like I've managed to avoid the D&D pitfall trap straight off the bat. Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess if you tried so many different things, you can see. And in all games, I think you do get an element of what you do like and what you don't like. And you can take that from B&D, but also any other system as well.

But yeah, so great. So you started playing, had a really varied tabletop RPG diet.

How did 3Sail Studios come about? How did you start being somebody that played a lot of games to be somebody that made games? So I always, always, always wanted to make games. I mean, I remember when I was about 10 or 11 years old, We had this terrible, terrible, terrible laptop. It was like the family computer. It was so bad, and it could just about run 26K in and out, whatever it was, back in 1999, 2000. And it had a word processor. I love that. Yeah.

In fact, I don't even think it had word. I think it had notepad. And I remember sitting at my mom's kitchen table writing a terrible Rickoff script for a Final Fantasy JRPG thing. It was just Final Fantasy with different character names.

And like so i've always always wanted to design them and when during during covid so just after covid started i was i just finished my phd like i had my phd thesis in in april 2020 so like a few weeks into lockdown and i was like right well there's no you know universities are closed i can't find you i can't find any work what am i going to do and i was a quite i was a big miniature wargamer for a long time and i started i got into a song of ice and fire tabletop miniature war game.

And i started making youtube content for that and very quickly i became like the biggest dedicated youtube content creator for that game which sounds very impressive but it was like 6 000 subscribers it was big fish small old kind of thing and yeah from that i realized that i was quite good at talking about games and breaking games down so i started like the content i started was aimed at beginners to help them learn the game because that was the process i was going through but it

became quite clear it became clear quite quickly that i was quite good at talking about these games and breaking them down and i was i just one day i was like that's it i'm gonna design my own tabletop miniatures game which i which i did i crowdfunded by we funded it in 2023 but i pulled the campaign two days before we finished the campaign because the margins were so razor thin that if anything went wrong it would have so i was like it's actually the the

safest bet is to is to pull the plug on it but about six months before that campaign had happened i'd come up with the idea for map of monday and i was like oh i'm going to design miniature war games and i'm going to design ttrpgs because adhd is a hell of a drug. And so I, you know, I pulled the plug on the miniature war game and kind of turned myself entirely to TTRPGs. And I was, the YouTube channel that I started was called Three Sales Gaming.

And I changed that to Three Sales Studios. And Joel, who is one of our co-owners in the studio, he's also our artist. He had come on board for the miniature war game. And then Jeremy, who's our other co-owner and our developer and editor and my co-writer.

He had done some writing for this miniature war game and i knew he had just moved from the us to the uk and i knew that i wanted him on board as well because we worked really well together and that's when three cell studios really became a thing and map of monday was our first project and now it's funded and it feels really weird saying that because we've spent so long building up to the campaign that now it's funded and it's done and it's with the printers it feels really strange.

Yeah i'll bet i mean that leads us really nicely into into talking about it so i'll jump straight in there it's so funny that you say it's you started in a war game place because map of monday feels like the opposite of a war game like there's it's the complete opposite of that but for people that haven't heard about it could you do a little intro and welcome us yeah absolutely so map of monday is an exploration and ecology rpg so it's a zero combat system it's you know a fresh new system,

it's not obviously it has inspirations, but it's not powered by the Apocalypse, game or a Blades in the Door it's not based on any other game, So it's set in a parallel version of our own world in a kind of pan-medieval period. And the core rule book takes place in the continent of Ivasu, which is our version of Eurasia and a bit of North Africa as well.

And this world has gone through 100 years of a climate catastrophe and people have become isolated in their regions and the world has been kind of cut off from itself and after these storms that are called the flux is finally beginning to lift and players play as players play as chroniclers and they're essentially adventuring academics and they've been trained by the mapamundi institute over this hundred years to be ready as soon as as soon as

the flux has begun to recede to go out into the world and study it again and reconnect it and learn about all of its monsters, creatures, cultures, and peoples, and landscapes and geographies. And so the players are positioned as the first people to kind of travel back out into this world that's been isolated for so long. And like I said, it's a parallel version of our own world. It's kind of geographically almost identical, but the big difference is that monsters are real.

These amazing fantastic monsters are real and your job is to go out and study them learn about their behaviors document them you know remap the world so yeah that's that's kind of map of monday in a nutshell there love that i mean someone's asked a question in the chat which was the question i wanted to ask so thanks so much for being involved it's curious about what inspired you to do a zero combat game especially assuming as you have such a war game-headed background why did

you make that choice for mahamundi um so it was i i kind of so i'm i'm a vegan have been for a long long time and i was i i the the idea for mahamundi came to me which is i wanted to do a kind of pokemon style like monster collection game but with the veganism and stuff like i'm not a big fan of zoos so i don't want to kind of capture and imprison monsters and.

Yeah like i don't want to capture them and imprison them and i don't want to fight them i don't want to you i don't want people to go out and like if you give someone a sword and put a monster in front of them the person's first instinct is well i need to use this on that but if you take the sword away and put a monster in front of them then the instinct is different the instinct is what what do i do with like what am i supposed to do here and so that core gameplay loop and i was like i was

saying to my partner when i was first concepting it i was like well how do you do like a collection game without actually kind of capturing and physically collecting these beings? And I was like, okay, well, Pokemon does that as well. Like it's the Pokedex is you are, you are, you know, encountering them and documenting their behaviors and learning about them. And to my mind, that is the point of Pokemon. That's the thing that the game judges you on.

And so I was like, okay, so what you do then is you just, you set this in like a medieval period and you do a bestiary like you know in most games you are given a bestiary of all the things that exist in the world and they just have stat blocks and this is how you fight them but like an actual bestiary is an account of animals and an account of monsters and unfortunately in some cases an account of people as well so i was like okay so the point of this game is to

go out and to write the chronicle it's to write this new history of this world and that's the kind of that's the kind of seed from which mapamundi grew and obviously games like you know in terms of the zero combat stuff games like wander home and a quiet year and to an extent rayutama as well were really big influences from out monster care squad is another really big one by sadly games like monster care squad was is one of the games whose shoulders we are standing on for sure.

And like from outside of games as well like i'm like princess mononoke is my favorite studio ghibli film like my absolute favorite one and i'm like while makamundi is resolutely stylistically not a kind of anime ghibli style thing that kind of ethos there's that i i absolutely love that the line that i love the most in princess mononoke someone asks someone asks actually achataka why he's coming he said i came to see with eyes unclouded by hate i love that line

so much and that's kind of the spirit that runs through makamundi is you've come to you come to learn and you've come to understand and so that's that kind of ethos really really runs through what makamundi's trying to do gorgeous that sounds fantastic so tell us a little bit more about the characters we'll be playing so we're going to be playing chroniclers like you mentioned what what goes into creating a character and yeah who are these people that are going out into the

world to do this so character creation in map of money is real simple so like for the people who are watching this stream live they can see them up on screen now so we only have four what you're supposed to call them character classes we don't really consider them classes in like the gnd sense we call them licenses because these are the characters that you play as are people who have been trained to do a job right and so we've got four different character licenses You can be an archivist.

A diviner, a fixer, and a guardian. So your archivists are your kind of researchers and scholars and librarians and people like that. They're carrying the diaries and carrying the chronicles and the maps and making sure that the information is being recorded.

Diviners, so there's no, we don't really do religion in the world of Map of Mundi quite in a kind of organized fashion, but fate is the kind of prime mover who has created this world unknowingly in her case and diviners are able to kind of tap into that kind of, beyond the beyond the physical kind of thing that they're they're able to kind of they're you know they're they'll read tea leaves and they'll you know they'll use tarot cards and they'll roll in the game we use tarot cards

as the journey deck which we'll get no doubt we'll get on to later on but also our die the dice that the characters were the players role are also actually carried by every person in this world we call them the bones they're based on kind of chinese these horrible bones your fixers are kind of either they're your kind of diplomats and suave connectors and they'll talk their way into or out of anything else or they're your kind of engineers and.

You know the person is going to get you out of trouble when you need something there's your fixer and then finally guardians yeah they're kind of big heavily armored people normally but they don't carry any any offensive weapons they tend to they the the symbol of the guardian is the shield and then they're people who've taken odes to protect their companions in the wilds but also protect the wilds from those who would do harm to it so you know you've

got you've got this whole you know and it's we we keep we kept trying to come up with other with other character types and we're like yeah but that's just a guardian or that's just an archivist and so what you do is is rather than have it rather than us having 10 15 20 different classes we have our core four but each of those four has three specializations so things you can work towards along our skill paths and then you can combine the skill paths

of different licenses to gain what we call endorsements so there are you know there's nine endorse there's three endorsements for each character class so that gives a total of 12 there's three specializations for each character class which is a total of 12 and we've not we've left plenty of room in the game for people to combine specializations as they want like we've only provided 12 out of a total of.

Three times three times three times three that we haven't done and i can't do i can't do math that quickly or that or that to that extent but but yeah someone in the chat yeah but yeah so there's there's there's what map of monday is is it's a rules-like narrative first system the rules are really robust and they really help you play the game but they don't get in your way there's there's a map of monday is built on this ethos of collaborative storytelling

and collaborative world building and players have given a huge amount of agency like mechanically as well as narratively to to influence the world around them and we one of the key ways we do this is with our shaping mechanic so one of our play testers described shaping as adding flavor text to the world but like it's it's the narrator our version of the gm we call them narrators it kind of establishes a structure of the world

but it's the players who give life to it so when they enter a So when they enter a forest, it's the players who were telling the narrator what the forest looks like rather than the other way around. And so players are given this huge sense of agency and ownership over the world. And you never see the same thing twice. Between Jeremy and myself, Jeremy is, as I said, one of our co-owners and the developer, editor, and co-writer on Mapamundi.

We've run our introductory adventure 100 plus times at this point. And despite the structure of the adventure being the same, it's different every single time. And not just they went left and they went right. It's like the world is different every single time, which is really, really beautiful. Yeah. Thinking about that, as you're saying, the shaping mechanics, so it puts a lot on the players to kind of create the world.

Does that mean inversely that it takes a lot off the GM or the narrator's shoulders? So does that mean it's easier to prep for a session and it's less?

It's so easy to prep it's so easy to prep if you're if you are a gm narrator who who can think on their feet which most of us most of us who run games are pretty good at this now we're pretty good at adapting and thinking on our feet all you need to do is choose your region that you want the adventure to take part in choose one of our 30 monsters now each region it has three monsters and five creatures associated with so choose a region choose a monster or a creature from that region and

then choose a number of journey deck cards that would match the the kind of biome or environment where that monster would live and that is all you need you you start the players off you walk through three gameplay phases but you start the players off all you need to do is be that prime mover you set them off and then you that they are giving definition to the world then you run with it you run with what they do so it's not you know we've all been there when we've been running other

games where you put hours and hours and hours sometimes days and weeks of prep in.

Only for the players to take a different decision within the first five minutes and all your prep goes to waste so map of monday it doesn't put a lot on the players it's really asking actually very little of them it's on it's you know asking them to add a sentence of description or a small paragraph of description or even just a word or a feeling to us to us to a given situation when it's presented to them but it does take a huge amount of work off of um off of the off of the

narrator perfect i love that i'm always looking for systems because i want to run more games but sometimes like you say all the work doing the prep sometimes puts you off because it's time and we're all busy people so the less prep i have to do to get a game to the table so i can sit down and actually enjoy a game with the people i want to is the best thing we've also we've also written we've got four free written adventures that are coming out alongside the core

book as well so during the kickstarter anyone who backed on kickstarter got the core book and the journey deck and that all comes in a nice box they also got a free pdf of the solo gameplay rules and they're also getting four free adventures as a pdfs and that we're doing we should be calling that chronicles of the wild it's a volume one of chronicles of the wild so that will be available as a purchasable PDF.

For anyone who's buying after the campaign stuff and we'll bundle it in with the digital auditions and stuff like that. So yeah, it's really simple to pick up and we obviously, we have these examples of gameplay in terms of, in terms of the pre-written adventures as well. Yeah, perfect. I mean, speaking of the Kickstarter, which the links are in the comments or in the show notes, you have successfully funded the crowdfunding campaign happened.

I think you sent out digital copies very quickly to a lot of people.

Or what is we have so with the digital copies are ready but we haven't sent them out yet because we're just finished we're finishing the layout and the writing on the pre-written adventures so we want to send all the pdfs that we like technically we could send the pdfs out tomorrow but we want to send all of the pdfs all three pdfs out at the same time yeah so we're getting we're planning a very early may for the pdfs to go out perfect so

that's i mean that's really i'm to say this because it's really great so you did an interesting thing with this crowd funder because i just want to let people know that they are going to very quickly gonna gonna have this you know available and there is late pledge options so if you're listening to this now and you weren't an original kickstarter back you can get involved on late pledges with your pledge manager via the link but yeah

i was really impressed to see the timeline you had on the game like you say the pdfs you've kind of done all the work and a lot of the writing you were just waiting for your art and things like that to come in so it's coming together really quickly so I believe as you're saying it's like summertime this is going to be out and yeah so the idea is we've we've we've said to people on kickstarter that we wanted to have games in people's hands.

By june or in june I would like it to be by june but we've said in june because you know we have to have some yeah there has to be some contingency planning because of you know global shipping and stuff like that but the book was the book was fully written by the time we started the campaign which was february the 4th and the last piece of artwork arrived two minutes before the campaign finished on march the 4th and we literally we we

said the print file was out the very next day they were approved they've all been approved now so printing is beginning slash begun so yeah it's been would like someone's asked me before would i recommend doing it this way like like having the game finished before you go to fund it because obviously that's it's just not the done thing normally you know people are getting their games yeah 25 to 50 percent done before they're going to to crowdfunding

which i can understand because it costs a lot of money to get this stuff done but the only reason we've been able to do it this way is because we've done it in-house, the three of us own the company and the three of us have been the ones working on it. And I've worked three jobs to make sure that Joel, our artist, gets paid because Jeremy and I are able to do outside work. Like, it's been a really, really tough, it's been a kind of difficult way of

doing things. But for us, for the three of us, it's the way we prefer to work.

But yeah, so we had, it was really valuable for us having the game finished by the time we launched. Because it just means that we can get that quick turnaround. We could show the game off in its entirety to people.

As and especially as first-time creators as well like that you know there's so much of a kind of like trust deficit on kickstarter or crowdfunding full stop for first-time creators um and to sit there and say no look the game's done you can look at all of it it's right here i think really really helped us and obviously us being able to deliver it on time and quickly will obviously help that going forward as well absolutely yeah

it's an incredible thing to be able to do i know it's not something that everybody can do like you said for all the reasons like money and time and things like that it's something we do in publishing as well and i think it does just make it so much quicker to get the things in people's hands so that's very exciting to you doing that but anyway diving back into the actual game i'd love to talk about the system a little bit so we talked about the shaping mechanic a bit but if

maybe if we go through that the system i know we don't have d20s as you said at the beginning you've avoided that but let's talk about the dice and also we mentioned the journey deck so if we talk a bit about that and maybe go through the three main phases of gameplay and and so so what it's actually going to look like yeah absolutely so mapamundi has three gameplay phases you've got the research phase the journey phase and the encounter phase now like the traditional way of playing through

the game is to do it in that order but actually we have loads of fun like mixing things up like starting with a journey phase or you know mixing mixing phases together but so the research phase is your kind of like very recognisable.

Kind of role-playing anyone who's played a role game will recognize the journey phase you are going to a place and you are talking to npcs and gathering information about the target that you are looking for which is almost almost always a monster that can be other things so you know you were going through you're talking to people and you're gathering information the the thing that makes it different to to that kind of standard role-playing that standard

role-playing kind of gameplay loop is that as you are doing that the group's narrator is building a depth of it's building a journey deck based on what the players do but also crucially don't discover so the journey deck it's it's 71 cards 37 of which different landscapes so they range from forests to swamp to salt marshes from deserts to glaciers from mountains to rainforests that almost any kind of environment you can think of is represented within this journey deck

there's also then one card for each of the game's 30 monsters and then there's two kind of generic creature cards and generic opportunity cards as well so as the players are discovering or not discovering information about their target the narrator is putting together a deck of these cards now the order that they go in is important because you're going to play through them in that order during the journey phase because it represents the movement from,

like, that's the exploration part of the game. But also the orientation of the card. So they're tarot size, so they're 70 mil by 120 mil. And obviously with tarot cards, the direction, the orientation they come out in when you're doing a tarot reading is important. Like a card means something one way and means something different the other. So Mapa Mundi's journey cards are drawn radially symmetrically. So when it comes out what we call right-wise with the name at the top.

It's the kind of the best version of that environment it's a fertile meadow or it's a lush valley or something like that but when it comes out inverted it's the opposite it's going to be you know the meadow has been diseased or the valley has been burned or flooded or something like that so as you then play through the as the journey phase starts and the narrator starts to play these cards out and you play through them and if they are right wise you get you know you something good is going

to happen you get opportunities to shape the landscape and define it using the shaping mechanic if it comes out inverted something difficult is going to happen you're going to have some kind of challenge that you have to overcome if you overcome it the card gets flipped right wise and then you can then you can shape it if you don't overcome the challenge it stays inverted and then once you've played through the the deck that the narrator has made it might be three cards

to five cards sometimes even 10 if they want this really long epic journey, you then encounter your monster target and the what we call the posture of that monster is going to be one way or the other depending on how your journey is gone so all three phases are linked together what you find out in the research phase like defines the journey deck and the way you deal with the journey deck defines how easy or difficult the monster is going to be so if

it's half or more the more of the cards are right wise the monster is going to be what we call passive, which means it's going to be.

It's not necessarily happy to see you but maybe it just doesn't even notice that you're there it's it's it's just doing its own thing if more half or more of the cards are inverted the monster is going to be aggressive now that doesn't necessarily mean physically aggressive but it's going to be agitated or scared or or otherwise not happy for you to be around in the encounter things you then have to you basically your job every monster has eight unique behaviors some

of them about seven but as a rule they have eight unique behaviors and you have to use your role playing skills and your characters abilities and interact these things we call interactions which are kind of special abilities that each chronicler has okay to uncover these behaviors so you're trying to prompt the monster to do something specific so if you you might not know that the monster could fly but if you do something that causes it

to take off into the air you've revealed its flying behavior and then a raider will tell you that you've uncovered it but then again like with with it's a continuation of the shaping mechanic in most other games when a monster flies or if a monster i don't know has fiery breath or something the the gm is going to tell you as the character who's witnessing it exactly what that looks like in map of monday the narrator will say well done you've unlocked

the flying behavior tell me what it looks like and so the player gets to shape how that monster is in the world what it's doing because they're the ones that know they're the ones that are present in. The situation they're the ones that should know so again. It's that collaborative storytelling and yeah you're. Trying to you know we we treat the encounter phase like a boss battle like there's a kind of arena in which.

This is taking place you're having to use positioning and skill and role playing and abilities and stuff to to get what you want but the difference is instead of trying to instead of trying to remove hit points you're trying to uncover behavior so you're building something.

Up rather than taking something down fantastic and do you have any examples of some of the creatures that or any favorites that people will encounter when they're wondering yeah i've got that i mean i've there's so many of them i i genuinely i love every single one that we've come up with that we've included we've not come up with all of them So one of the things we've tried to do is like, because these are real world regions and real world cultures that are inspiring

Mapa Mundi, we've tried, we've made sure, we've made sure to try and include.

Creatures you know real real mythological creatures from a lot of cultures around the world in some cases we are like mapamundi is the first the first example of of real mythological creatures in the western canon so we have one called the mo sinar which is a kind of taiwanese indigenous taiwanese monster that's never ever been featured in in the english language before we've also got another one they're called the sumperny they're from i think they're like estonia and

latvia and parts of finland and i couldn't find a single english language example of them so we fought them into into mapamundi as well in some cases we we've tried to in inverted commas rehabilitate some of the monsters from real world cultures that games like dnd have taken.

And for want of a better word kind of bastardized and just done whatever they wanted with so we have you know one of our monsters is tiamat and now tiamat is well known in fantasy circles as the mother of monsters in in our getting in nakamundi she's the mother of soul she's one of the three primordial beings who is who allegedly bought the world into existence and she's literally this huge leviathan that's made out of living sea soul that is

much closer to her kind of like sea monster leviathan kind of or like real world cultural origins but yeah there's i mean every single one of them i absolutely love but there's a one is the one that's got a real real special place at my heart is called the mandaba room. Yeah, it's from, so it's based on, it's, it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's a difficult one to describe really because it's, it's, it's kind of based on a real world monster, but also definitely not.

So the kind of in a nutshell the mandable rule he's the last left of his kind he's known as the living seed and he's kind of like kind of looks like a gorilla but he's made out of trees but has a bird beak and he is he is the repository of 10 000 years of local cultural history and knowledge and he's dying and he's the last of his kind and i there's there's something really beautiful going on there like.

There's huge story potential there for what can what could be going on with that kind of monster absolutely and says the importance of the chroniclers to if if it's the last of that kind to capture and get information about it so that they can be remembered through story someone asked in the chat as well is there mechanics to create your own monsters because you said you've provided loads as well but the beauty of this game is narration and creation so i imagine there's something to

support yeah so i mean so this is where the thing is is it's the monsters aren't in a way they're not really mechanical because they don't fight or they don't fight with numbers like they do in a lot of other games it's not really we haven't provided mechanics for it but we have provided guidance there's a whole page in the book which is if that's more than a page it's a whole spread if you want to create your own monsters or creatures this is how this is how

we suggest you do it this is how we do it and we've provided an example of a monster that we created but that we didn't end up including in the book so we are really really excited to see people creating their own monsters and creatures like we're thinking about game jams for people to design their own monsters and creatures and write their own adventures and stuff like these are all plans that we've got for later on this year and into next.

Fantastic. That sounds really, really great. We've had a question as well from earlier.

We were talking about the approach you took for publishing, which was to kind of create, write the game in advance and then have it kind of ready and written when you went to the crowdfunding already. Somebody in the chat asked, did this approach prevent you from including certain features or things you wanted to have in the game? No, no, no, no. We put absolutely everything we wanted to and more in there. So we took the time.

When I was concepted in the game and then when Jeremy and I kind of put our heads together to really start on the design, we were very, very clear that we wanted to make sure that we were putting out the very best version of the game, especially if we were going to be finishing it all. So obviously a lot of the ways other Kickstarters will work is they will use content, new content to stretch goals. Now, we didn't do stretch goals. We did, well, to an extent, we did social impact stretch goals.

So we donated, from the start of the campaign, we declared we were going to donate a pound for every backer. We were going to donate a pound to an elephant rehabilitation center in Sanctuary in Thailand. And then when we hit £25,000, we were going to make that a fixed £1,000 donation. Then when we hit £50,000, we were going to make it £2,500 and so on and so on.

So we did social impact stretch goals rather than content-based stretch goals now obviously that's because we we knew we had to get the book printed straight away we couldn't add any new content to it but we also made sure that all of the content we wanted was already there so we'd like again people do you know people run their campaigns in their own way and more power to them and absolutely you know everyone needs to do what they need to do but for us and for the way.

Kind of for me as a designer and for us as a business and and the way that i kind of the way that i like to do things is i want you to have the best version of the game already i don't i don't like fomo marketing you know we we are working and designing and selling in a community that has a higher proportion of neurodivergence than than the general population does like that's not i don't think that's controversial to say whatsoever especially as someone with neurodiversity.

And fomo marketing plays on neurodivergent minds like games workshop are really really really really bad for this they know exactly what they're doing and they and they just they're milking people and so i don't i you know i wanted to see transparency and honesty are right at the core of our business as print as kind of personal and business principles and so i was like look this is the best version of the game this is everything we have written

for it everything we want you to have is here it's right here already the book is already the best quality we think it can reasonably be the cards are the best quality prices as low as we can get it all of these different things you are getting every single thing that you need for this game plus more, and we're not going to hold that to ransom based on how much money you give us you get the best version right from the start so i it's a really really good question as

to did it prevent us from including certain features because i think the way people have come to view kickstarters is that if you don't hit stretch goals you don't get content but what i don't want to put out a game that doesn't i don't want to put out a game that doesn't live up to my creative vision this is the vision this is how the game works so you're going to get that and then we're going to do other things to encourage people to back more,

which is you actually give money away to animal rehabilitation charities. Which strikes me as a much better way of for us at least, it strikes me as a much better way of running things than do you want a foiled cover? Everyone likes a foiled cover, but do you actually need it? Probably not.

You know so that's that's the way we ran about doing stuff love that sounds great well as we mentioned the crowd funder you can if you go to the kickstarter page get details on how to late pledge so if you weren't aware of this till now the details are on the screen or in the podcast show notes because the best way to support indie tabletop creators is to buy their stuff if you can but yeah george thank you so much for talking

about map of monday it's been so interesting hearing about it and great to to hear more about it directly from you so thanks so much for coming on really appreciate it i do have one final question for you though i asked everyone before you leave and it's do you have any recommendations for any other tabletop rpgs and the rules are it can't be a game that you've made and it can't be dnd of course yeah yeah so there's there's two there's one that i've got i've actually

so we're moving house in like three days time so all of my all of my stuff is in boxes but i recently okay i got my copy like when was it.

Must have been like November time because I arrived just before driving me happened I got my copy of of Doom Song which is by Caesar Inc Doom Song Lord have mercy on us I I was like number two on that when that was on Kickstarter kind of last year or 2020 so I've got my copies I'm very very excited to to run it so there's that and then the one I'm looking forward to most at the moment is it's designed by a friend of mine actually he's a friend of mine a friend of jeremy's he's a big supporter of

us at three social studios daniel kwan who runs the asians represent podcast yeah he is he has designed a wuja game called wandering blades that's being published by plus one exp and i so pumped for it i cannot wait like wuja fiction of wuja movies is one of some of my absolute favorites and i got to see an early draft of wandering blades i know it's coming out on kickstarter soon the kickstarter page is like you can go and follow it i know it's

going to be great so anyone who's if that's anyone's kind of bag you should definitely definitely go and check that one out that's a great recommendation wandering blades actually i also saw a sneaky early version of it because daniel was on the show not dnd last year um so if anyone's wanting to know more about wandering blades there is an interview just like this about that game so you can go and listen to that that was about a year ago though so obviously the game was still in development.

But yeah, I think the crowdfunding is coming out in a few years. Yeah, I think it's pretty soon. It's definitely coming up soon. Yeah. Yes, I think so. I think I got a press release about it the other day. So maybe if you check out Ian Wells, we'll post about that there. But yes, I think that's all. Thank you so much for your time, George, and coming on, especially when you've just had a Kickstarter campaign and you're moving house. You're doing all the big live events at one time.

So thank you for taking the time to come on and chat to me about the games. And thank you to everyone who came along to watch and listen thank you so much for coming on we'll be back next week another indie tabletop RPG to share. Music.