If you’re a British game designer, you work beneath a cloud – both literally and figuratively. For the former, it’s really cloudy here, For the latter, it’s a small country that homes a big company. Unless you come entirely outside the standard gaming ecosystem, Games Workshop likely have touched your life. It’s there. How can you deny it? How can you escape it?
As such, when I heard about Ex Tenebris, I was intrigued.
Josh Fox and Becky Annison’s Black Armada Games have a golden run of interesting games which take and then show real mechanical understanding of what’s at their core. To choose a few examples, Lovecraft-esque Lovecraftesque was ahead of the curve on the post-modern adventure format that’s the current big thing in mystery games. Bite Marks is the pack-centric werewolf game that really understands what it means to be Alpha and to be family. And now , with Ex Tenebris, they’re doing a grim far-future RPG about investigators digging into occult incursions and xeno-conspiracies which can destroy civilization…
I would be less interested if it wasn’t them. As it is, I’m very interested.
Yes, It’s very clearly influenced by the Inquisition in Warhammer 40k, as turned into an RPG in Dark Heresy… but look again. You can forget the modern, bespoke mechanics (but why would you?) but the specifics of the setting seems to make the point all too clear – specifically, it a game set after a grimdark empire has fallen, about a civilization trying to form itself in the aftermath of this star-addled fascistic fuck-up. That’s intriguing for me – it admits the interest and the formative influence, but also – in mechanics, text and subtext – speaks of the need to move past it.
I’m also in the mood for games which assume fascism can fall, and we will then work out what to build in the ruins. That sounds like a useful theme to me.
So I was interested. Interested enough to say “yes” when they asked me to write a scenario for it. And now, with the Ex Tenebris Kickstarter their most successful ever and into its final week, I thought it a good time to chat about everything that makes up Ex Tenebris, where they are and where they’re heading next.
I’m going to be perhaps undiplomatically candid here. My first response to looking through Ex-Tenebris was “A Dark Heresy I would actually want to run.” I mean, that would be enough. But you look again, and that’s both true and not true. Yes, it’s a science-fiction investigative game in a bleak universe… but you’ve specifically changed the fictional wrapper to something else, one which both registers the obvious influence while also firmly establishing its own place. As in, this is a story set after the Awful Space Empire has fell, in the fledging more civil society trying to hold itself together. You still have all the same psychic-predator hell problems – plus the left over reactionary space fascists wanting to stage a come back – but you’re not (one again, perhaps undiplomatically) necessarily playing fucking aresholes. What was the journey to here for Ex-Tenebris?
You’ve actually called out the starting point, which was the fun we had playing Dark Heresy, longer ago than we care to mention. I (Josh) ran a 6-year campaign, with a set of ground-level detective type characters investigating mysteries in a hive city, and a set of overpowered Adepta Sororitas (played by the same people) who swooped in whenever a really nasty monster cropped up. But – and this is a clue to the direction I was heading – I tweaked the setting to make it less anti-xeno/mutant racist, and less totalitarian. I just didn’t want my friends to have to play fascist enforcers. We had a lot of fun hunting demons, genestealers and demon-possessed eldar tech. That was essentially the bare bones of a blueprint for Ex Tenebris.
There was a big gap before I started creating the Ex Ten-iverse, but with a lot of culture absorption going on. Years (possibly decades, let’s not think too hard about that) later I started toying with the concept of a scary grimdark universe full of horrors, but with a utopian culture that would be truly worth defending. That idea got dropped – in the end I wanted to tell stories that included human greed and hatred and ambition, alongside supernatural horror. But again, there was the seed of an idea there.
That seed germinated when I started thinking about a setting for the project previously called Untitled Space Investigation Game. I realized that I wanted the core of society to be democratic, tolerant, fair and free, but – to avoid a simplistic whitewash – I needed to muddy that up and complicate it with all the mundane evils you see in real life. That thought led to the creation of the Terran Empire, the fascist culture from which the Republic of Stars (the setting for the game) emerged. It also led to the idea that every Ex Ten scenario should contain a mundane evil that interacts with the supernatural evil the players are investigating. And that in turn led to me developing a rich and complex setting filled with plenty of venal politicians, grasping corporations, controlling bureaucracies and so on. In fact a major source of inspiration for this was the Alien movies, where the terror of the xenomorphs is heightened and complimented by the callous greed of Weyland-Yutani.
Mechanically, Ex-Tenebris is doing some interesting things in its choices. It’s clearly influenced by some of what Harper did with Forged in the Dark, but moves back a 2 dice plus modifier system – but bases it on a D10, ala Ironforge. Rather than FITD’s generalised set of action roll responses that let you essentially build a move on the fly, it instead gives broad “Sitches” (as in, Situations) with firm guidance of what to do when the dice hit the table in each. Okay – I’m going into too much detail there, but this fascinates me. You’re doing this trying to create specific effects, clearly. What’s on your mind? Why was no previously existing set up right? Is some even just aesthetics – internally, this organ has a belief the D10 is the archetypal dice of science fiction, so you clearly have to use it…
I wanted to find a bridge between the highly-tailored, relatively rigid moves in Powered By The Apocalypse games (of which I’m a huge fan) and the single very broad, very flexible mechanic in FITD (again, games I love). PBTA gives you these incredible laser focussed moves which are great at replicating genres and give lots of support and guide rails to GMs on how to narrate the outcomes of a roll. But they can lack flexibility and a satisfying sense of tactics. FITD is far more flexible so you can do more with the moves, but there is a bigger burden on GMs, as it often feels like you’re having to build moves on the fly without any support on how to do that.
I wanted to balance flexibility with GM support and guidance, hence the Sitches. Each Sitch provides a menu of options and suggestions appropriate to a particular type of situation that comes up a lot in Ex Ten. Similarly, the Sitches provide the sort of genre scaffolding provided by PBTA moves, without losing the ability to colour outside the lines a bit.
There’s another fun thing about Sitches, which is that you can mix and match them. If you’ve got a character trying to do an occult ritual while someone shoots at them, you combine the Fight and Meddle Sitches. So even when you’re colouring outside the lines, you’re getting a bit of help to do that.
And why the d10s? It’s partly because of the way I wanted the Shadow mechanic to work. You spend Shadow to boost your rolls, but unlike Stress in FITD, you aren’t rolling extra dice which might still come up as misses, you’re modifying your roll directly, so you know what you’re gonna get. That reflects the fact the characters aren’t daredevil gamblers-with-fate, they’re professional investigators. But also: it’s a pun. Ex Tenebris is shortened to Ex Ten, or X-10. Two tens. (The pun wasn’t a major factor but it did kind of seal the deal.) By the way, they’ve got a very similar probability curve to PBTA and FITD, which is nice.
I was also struck by how Ex Tenebris dances with the post-modern approach to mysteries that was popularised with Brindlewood Bay, and continued in all that school of Carved by Brindlewood games. As in, games where mysteries don’t have a set solution, and play is as much about assembling a reasonable solution as finding one. However, Ex-Tenebris is quite different, in specific ways. I’m struck at a comparison between those first-wave PBTA games which basically just riffed on it in the happy glee of this new thing, and the second wave which had time to chew over it all a bit more, and be more deliberate. There’s choices here which feel born of an interest in the idea, but an express dissatisfaction with its execution. Would you agree? I’m thinking things like clues vs leads, GM vs Player theory, the scenarios having a default solution to guide initial clue placement, etc?
It’s funny, you’re absolutely right, but there’s also a way in which this draws on a previous generation of emergent mystery games, of which our game Lovecraftesque was the first. Lovecraftesque creates GMless mysteries on the fly, rotating the role of clue-creator around the table, and then stitching the clues into a coherent whole using its Leap To Conclusions mechanic, a forerunner of Brindlewood’s Theorise move. The same mechanic is used in other games such as Bleak Spirit, but as we never did the whole verbed-by-noun design badge for Lovecraftesque, there isn’t a name for that class of games. (We have joked about calling them “appended by the esque” games.)
Lovecraftesque was one of the inspirations behind Brindlewood Bay, but BB took it in a very different direction. And I think BB does something quite different from Ex Tenebris. BB and its hacks are simulating a TV mystery drama, and putting the players in the role of writer’s room, building the mystery one clue at a time and even rewriting it when there are gaps in the mystery. Ex Tenebris is doing something else: it’s simulating a traditional investigation TTRPG, and putting the players in the position of detectives trying to solve a mystery, while still building the mystery one clue at a time.
So it’s absolutely born of dissatisfaction with the existing BB model, not because it’s a bad model, but because we wanted a game that did something else. We had talked for sometime prior to Ex Ten about how important regular theorising was to this style of game. In the first ever playtest of Lovecraftesque, we hadn’t yet developed the leap to conclusions mechanic, and the result was a hot mess of unrelated clues. So when creating Ex Ten I immediately reincorporated that regular theorising to give the mystery a more coherent feel and an investigative logic. I built the distinction between clues and leads to give it more structure and more of a feeling that you’re following a trail. I also added the Menace track, which generates regular threatening Events, to make the mystery feel more dynamic and alive. The default theory part of the scenarios actually emerged from playtesting, but it contributes to the same design goals by helping the GM hit the ground running at the start, generating Clues and Events with confidence.
(Fans of Carved From Brindlewood games may be wondering where the emergent part of the mystery comes from, if the GM already has a theory as to what’s going on. The answer is that the game mechanises the trade-off between the GM’s theory and the players’ theory. When the players roll well, they find clues that tend to mesh with and corroborate their theory. When they roll badly, they find clues that tend to complicate it, based on the GM’s theory. So as the game plays out you wind up cross-pollinating between those different ideas, which is similar to what happens in Lovecraftesque.)
Ex-Tenebris isn’t just you – your list of contributors is pretty notable. Jim told me to say “Yoon Ha Lee is extremely exciting to see on that page” but I will reveal that’s him rewriting ” “holy shit, Yoon! Ninefox Gambit is so fucking cool.” You have the misfortune of having asked me, of course, but it’s a striking list of people. How do you think about who to invite, especially for a kickstarter? What’s going through your head? And what do they bring to the game?
It would be wrong if we didn’t start by saying “I know right! Yoon Ha Lee! So fucking cool!”
With that out of the way – we love hiring other writers, it’s a core part of how we operate, because it brings a host of cool ideas and perspectives to what we’re writing. There’s a nearly endless list of game designers we admire who we’re always just looking for an excuse to work with. Yoon is someone whose work was a direct influence on the setting and we are both massive fans of his novels. He is just so cool and out of our normal sphere but was such a perfect fit for a project that we feel compelled to reach out to them, even if the odds of a “yes” are lower. Similarly, during Bite Marks, Becky managed to get Kelley Armstrong, a New York Times best seller and author of the Otherworld series to write a scenario for the game. We also like to make space for promising designers with less of a big profile (like yourself, Kieron 😉 ). We try to have a mix of all of these on any given project.
Broadly, can you talk about Black Armada generally, and how you operate? Becky and Josh are both designers – but this is a Josh game, right? How does that work? What’s it like to be where you are in the British indie scene?And what are your goals?
As to how we operate, that’s changed recently, because I (Josh) am now working for Black Armada as my (gulp) full time job. But we’ve been designing games together and separately for about a decade, commercially, and more like 25 years as hobbyists.
We have what we jokingly refer to as a “live dev environment” in our home – we’re constantly talking about game design, sharing our ideas, bouncing things off each other. (And of course we play games together a lot, so we reflect on play all the time as well.) So even when one of us is officially designing a game on their own, there’s always a significant contribution from the other. Becky is writing a big chunk of content for Ex Tenebris and brought a lot of ideas to the setting.
We’re not short of ideas for future games – Becky is working on a game about a circus whose travelling route and acts are part of an occult ritual to hold a powerful demon at bay. Josh is toying with ideas for his next project, which include a world-building game that develops an in-setting ecology alongside the culture, history and geography of the setting, and an epic scale fantasy where you juggle playing the political movers and shakers and the ground-level characters at the sharp end of their schemes. So we are constantly thinking, designing, writing and playing.
Business-wise, we’re in constant conversation about what we want to make, what we’re excited about but also what might do well in the market, and therefore what we might release when. Becky has less time but she gets the benefit of Josh handling a lot of the admin and project management. Josh gets the benefit of Becky spending a bit more time on community building and social media, which he finds more draining.
We’re in an interesting place overall. We think we’re doing pretty well but – I guess this is probably true of any field – we want to have a bigger profile and do more. It’s kind of challenging because, to a certain extent, you have to be willing to take risks. When Josh went full time, we weren’t yet earning enough money for this to be a sustainable plan – but we had plans for projects that we hoped would make it possible and, as it happens, they worked out. If he’d just stayed in his day job that probably wouldn’t have happened. So while we’d never tell anyone to just quit their job – we did a lot of preparatory work and audience building before we got to that stage – it’s definitely a thing you can do, and at some point you do have to take a leap.
Ex-Tenebris is currently crowdfunding.
Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.
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