Exclusive interview: Claymore, designer of FIST + loads of news!
TLDR
Get Sorry to Bother you freebie https://the-lost-bay.itch.io/operations-hq
Join the Urban Legend Jam https://itch.io/jam/urban-legend-jam
Follow Outer Rim Uprising https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thelostbay/outer-rim-uprising
Back FIST https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/frogappreciator/fist-paranormal-mercenary-rpg-box-set
Today we have concocted an exciting issue of The Dispatch for you with a special guest: Claymore, designer of the paranormal mercenary RPG FIST. But first here is some quick news from The Lost Bay Studio.
Welcoming the community
The Lost Bay RPG keeps growing. Last week I updated the First Look edition with better layout and exploration procedures, as well as some nice area creation tables. The zine features a beautiful map of the Lost Bay designed by Strega Wolf van den Berg. It's easier to read and funnier to play: if you haven’t downloaded the latest update, be sure to grab it. More updates are planned until the end of the year, with additional solo play support, and extensive adventure generation resources focused on the Sleep Country district.
Drum roll: next year we’ll be crowdfunding a paper edition of the game.
I’ll tell you more about this in future issues of The Dispatch, but I’m happy to announce that Lone Archivist will be doing the layout of the printed edition.
I’ve been looking forward to collaborating with Lone Archivist for quite some time, and I think that TLB is just the perfect project for us to do something together. Lone is an amazing layout designer, they’ll be squeezing out the spirit of the 90s and pouring it into the layout of the game.
Look at the VHS mockups Lone has done below, they’ll give you an idea of what you can expect: slick hyper readable layout reminiscent of early 90s tech manuals and publications. Cool, right?
As you probably know, the development of The Lost Bay has been heavily influenced by the feedback of the community. That’s why, as you suggested, the next update will be focused on the Creator Toolkit: a series of guidelines that will make it easier to design modules compatible with The Lost Bay. There are already a few folks working on third party The Lost Bay adventures, and I can tell you there’s very good and spooky stuff in preparation including a ghostly TV station, a mysterious handwritten manual, and weird rituals. If you want to join the gang, now you can, because I’ve just released version 1 of the Third Party license.
Speaking of community, the Urban Legend jam starts today! Come and say hi in the jam server channel and meet other creators. The jam is scheduled to last roughly three and a half months: a super extended spooky season for horror and weird story lovers.
SORRY TO BOTHER YOU
We’re getting closer to the start of the Outer Rim Uprising campaign, bundle and boxed set for the RPG Mothership. The take off is planned for October 3. We’ll be revealing very soon the campaign trailer and the rewards. But today we’ve added to our secret itchio page OPERATIONS HQ a freebie preview of Sorry to bother you, the NPC card deck designed by Victor J. Merino. The art is mind-blowing, and the stats block and descriptions are hilarious. The freebie features five NPCs. Go grab them, they’re free!
FIST
Without further ado, let’s welcome Claymore, the designer of the FIST Ultra edition boxed set. The game is kickstarting right now. If you’re a reader of The Dispatch, I’m sure this is the kind of game that you’d dig. Let’s hear Claymore about it.
Hey Claymore, thanks for joining us on The Dispatch. The campaign for FIST Ultra edition boxed set is running right now. What does FIST stand for and what is the game about?
Thanks for having us! FIST stands for “Freelance Infantry Strike Team,” and it’s a game about paranormal mercenaries doing dangerous, often-lethal missions to solve the problems no one else can. No government, corporation, or institution is your friend, you have no funding and perhaps no home, and you must lie, cheat, and steal to survive. It’s an OSR- and PbtA-inspired game, equally about clever, unorthodox tactical solutions as it is about personal development and tropes-as-mechanics.
The book looks fantastic. Reading it feels like having access to a highly classified intelligence doc, or to a paranormal-spy movie script. Where does the FIST setting come from? What are its sources of inspiration?
The basic “tactical espionage action” DNA of the setting comes from the Metal Gear Solid games which are set during the cold war, primarily Peace Walker and V. Back in 2019, this project began as a collection of MGS-themed playbooks for Dungeon World, then mutated into a by-the-numbers PbtA game with playbooks and moves designed to emulate the MGS “Mother Base” experience. By the time it was released in its new, quirky form, it was a weird soup of 1000s of pop cultural inspirations - from Saturday morning cartoons to classic horror movies to Star Wars to Yu-Gi-Oh to urban legends to ancient mythology - it got a bit out of hand.
The graphic design style (thanks, by the way!) closely follows the grid-based, sans-serif focused International Typographic Style, which was popular in the mid-20th century. There’s also a lot of aesthetic DNA traceable to the TTRPGs of the Cold War era (in particular, Star Wars D6 1E, from the mid-eighties), plus some weird sources of inspiration like automobile manuals and real CIA documents. The art is shooting for a look somewhere between Shinkawa and Mignola, and hopes to land at least nearby.
Fist Ultra edition has a modular structure offering a series of optionals tools and frameworks. It doesn't expand the ruleset, making it heavier or crunchier, but rather expands the fun. What’s the design motivation behind this choice?
Don’t you hate it when you become attached to the original edition of a game and when a new one comes out, it works totally differently? You have to buy everything anew, just like a video game console without backwards compatibility. We didn’t want to put people through that, because it sucks. It seemed like folks would appreciate it if they could port their old campaign to the new game with almost zero effort/relearning/repurchasing, which is the same reason every new edition (and now this final, Ultra edition) has been free. It’s sort of like the business model Hatsune Miku employed while she was developing Minecraft!
The boxed set looks packed with good stuff, what can we find in it?
It's got a core rulebook, a supplementary book called SUPPLY DROP which is a sort of bric-a-brac collage of random FIST stuff from different authors, a collection of trifold pamphlets (with themes like "human experimentation dungeon" and "evil plant faction"), and then - hopefully - three full-color campaigns, if we hit the right stretch goals! There's also gonna be stuff like dice and character sheet pads, just to make the whole process smoother and more self-contained.
It sounds like the game is supported by a strong community. What are the spaces where the FIST operatives dwell and how did the community impact the development of the game?
FIST is far and away more popular on itchio than it is on DriveThruRPG, and most of the community stuff (that I know of) happens in the Discord server. We've got something like 1.1K members and about 150 FIST-related projects uploaded to itch, which is pretty wild given that the game has only been around for a few years.
FIST wouldn't exist without its community. Ultra Edition was basically an exercise in, "How do we add more of whatever people want to this kind of game without compromising the simple core loop we've set up?" The Discord server helped answer that. In my opinion, you can't make a great game if you're not in constant dialogue with the people who have to actually read what you wrote and have to play the thing. People tell you not to do your art for others, but this game would've been shit without that dev-player rapport. Listen to your fans.
Thanks a lot Claymore for joining us on The Dispatch. There’s only twelve days left to back FIST, and as an early backer myself I’d like very much if we broke the next stretch goal: CRY HAVOC!, a brand new campaign for FIST.
That’s all I got for you today. If you hang out in The Lost Bay server, I’ll probably meet you there in a couple of hours to celebrate the start of the Urban Legend jam
Until next time, stay well!
Iko