My interview series continues with renewed fervor now that Zine Quest has begun. If you have an active or upcoming ZQ project and would like to schedule an interview, feel free to contact me through email or Discord, both linked on the sidebar.
A: So, to get started, would you like to introduce yourself and your project?
S: Sure. I'm Sam Sorensen, sometimes known as SquigBoss. My current project—or at least one of them—is an old-school-ish toolbox/supplement called Lowlife. It's about caves, mines, trenches, and other nasty places underground.
A: It looks very interesting, and seems like it would slot neatly into a lot of OSR games. It's also random-table focused with cave generators and that sort of thing, isn't it? How did you make sure those generators give cohesive results?
S: It is in part, yeah. The random cave/trenchwork generation tool is still somewhat in the works, but the basic gist is that it's always 2d6, and thus the results skew towards averages; so long as you can draw your data from those 2d6 (or other averaged rolls), you can predict what the "average dungeon" will look like with more accuracy.
The trickier thing, honestly, was—is—the process of retroactively adding in tunnels and passages to an already-existing dungeon. Maps-from-scratch tools are pretty straightforward, and there's a fair number of good ones that are easy to reference, but a process that needs to account for an extant dungeon is tougher.
A: That retroactive addition system one of the parts I find most interesting - it's always good to make supplements easier to add to a game. What are the basics of its process, at least in its current state?
S: It's a derivative, ish, of the ship-building process from Dead Planet, the Mothership adventure: you roll 1d6 for each room (or area, significant hallway, whatever), and any set of two dice that add to 7 have a tunnel connecting them. You use the angle of the lowest die to determine how big the tunnel is; optionally, you can use the dice as a d36 table to get some kind of variation or hazard in the room: collapsing ceilings, dangerous gases, skittering beasties, that sort of thing.
The main goal was that you roll 1d6 for every room on a floor, and can transform an otherwise-normal dungeon into a rat's nest of nastiness.
A: Does the zine include any advice on how to map these more spatially complex dungeons?
S: It does!
The basic method—which might get updated—is a lot shorthand annotation: a filled-in circle is a large passage, two concentric circles is a medium passage, a hatched circle is a narrow passage, that kind of thing. On top of that, my recommendation is that you draw a simple side-view sketch of the dungeon, maybe even two, so you can track which tunnel goes where vertically.
Mapping 3D is difficult on graph paper, and while stuff like isometric paper can make it easier, there's no substitute for good note-taking and careful diagrams.
Of course, even pretty simple dungeons can get players lost—especially in the dark—so adding even a modicum more complexity will leave them confused and afraid with just a few twists and turns.
A: 3D mapping is one of the most difficult problems to solve with more unusual movement - anything from tunnels to 0g seems to lead a lot of people to throw up their hands and give up. That system seems nice, though - certainly a lot easier to deal with than the mapping in Veins, for instance.
You referenced that the room modification tables could add monsters; are these going to be specifically monsters from Lowlife, or will it also have more standard cave-based creatures?
S: A mix, probably. I feel a little weird, as a designer not present at the table, just straight-up saying "this room now has a monster" so, it'll lean more towards "a monster has tunneled in here" or "there are gross-but-probably-not-dangerous insects crawling around in this room".
Things that influence the tone and mood and vibes of the dungeon, but are less directly influential on whatever difficulty curve it has.
A: That's helpful for the kind of GM who wants their dungeon to have a certain pacing, then.
But those generators aren't the only parts of the zine; there's also player content like items. Dungeoncrawlers tend to have a plethora of equipment already, so how did you find new things to add?
S: In terms of equipment, it's a mix of classic dungeoneering equipment in slightly higher detail and granularity (a shovel, a pickaxe, and a hammer and chisel all have very different uses, for example); riffs and variations on basic equipment, like a shovel-mechanism that can dig on its own but needs to be fed lamp oil, or dynamite that can be spread around like a sticky liquid; and straight-up oddball magic items, like a big worm kept in a bag of holding that will eat anything you hold the opening to, including earth, stone, and metal.
A: That's definitely a lot to fit into 30 pages.
Now, let's talk about some nuts and bolts: Lowlife isn't your first Kickstarter, or even your first Zine Quest project, but it is the first time you've worked on fulfillment without the help of DTRPG. Was this a choice on your part, or were you forced into it?
S: A smidgen of both?
DriveThru's great for some things, like if you're really new and don't quite know what to do and don't know how many copies you'll be selling. But this time, for Lowlife, I was both getting tired of dealing with DriveThru's nonsense (slow turnaround, odd menus, annoying formatting requirements) and am interested in selling wholesale to online retailers (your Exalted Funerals and such), which DriveThru makes significantly more difficult.
Also, LightningSource, DriveThru's printer thing, is killing zines in a month, so there's that.
A: You've decided to use Mixam instead, if I remember correctly. That's what I used for my ZQ project last year, and I found them really easy to work with.
Lowlife has hit almost all of its stretch goals at time of writing, and your earlier Kickstarters have also tended to be quite successful. Do you think you'll aim higher with your next project in terms of size and complexity?
S: Hahaha, that's nice of you to say.
My last project—a guide about running a West Marches game—was significantly larger and more complicated than Lowlife, so it's been nice to ease off a little bit and just chill with a simple zine. But yeah, the next project probably will be something more complicated. Or at least, you know, something with a bigger pagecount and a hardcover.
A: In terms of future projects, how do you decide what to Kickstart when? For example, what made you choose to expand your caving rules instead of Big Wet or Seas of Sand for ZQ?
S: Oof, that's a big question. A lot of comes down to momentum.
I get started on some project, I noodle some drafts, I run a couple of playtests, I see what sticks. If each of those is successful—i.e. the rules drafts aren't terrible and the playtest is useful and the players seem interested—then it might get to go further. But if I hit snags in any one of those, which happens all the time, it probably dies.
For the two you mentioned specifically, Seas of Sand is too big (it's probably the next big project) and the Big Wet has seen exactly zero playtesting. Not that those won't ever appear in the future, but they would've taken significantly more legwork to get ready for this year's ZQ.
A: What I find interesting is that you've moved backwards in the generic order of OSR progress (blog, zines, books) - you had already completed multiple Kickstarters before starting your blog. Do you think that's helped or hurt your ability to work on larger projects like zines?
S: Running Kickstarters and making zines definitely has made me better at running Kickstarter and making zines, if that's what you're asking.
A: I was asking if having the blog has made it easier or harder.
S: Oh, oh, oh, I'm a dingus.
But yeah, the blog. It means I can put stuff out into the open and gauge the waters a little bit ahead of time, which is very handy.
But it also adds another step to the make-game process: you come up with an idea, you draft it up, you put in your blog, then you start thinking about making it into something more real. A lot of the stuff on my blog ends up being things that I was working on anyway; making stuff "for the blog" hasn't really worked for me—other than just kicking around GLOG classes, which is basically a micro-hobby unto itself.
I also kind of doubt that the blog is helpful for marketing other than in the sense of having an extant portfolio of drafts; like, my posts average something like 50-100 viewers, which isn't going to pull any kind of engagement for a Kickstarter. Hanging out on a popular server for months and engaging with the community and running playtests, though, that does drive engagement. Chilling on the ex-McDowall OSR discord is, I think, in no small part responsible for the success of Lowlife.
A: That kind of community entanglement is really the most important thing in something as niche as the OSR.
I'm out of questions - is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we wrap up?
S: Uhhh, I didn't bring any talking points, really. Buy my games? Make cool shit? Don't be afraid to publish? I dunno.
A: All great points.
Thanks for your time, I hope you have a good night.
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