We are just a stone's throw from our stretch goal for the Digital Map Pack, and should be unlocking it very shortly! Can we make it to the Encounters PDF?

This morning we have another creator interview as well!

I am a speculative writer in works of fantasy and science fiction. I am also the editor of GigaNotoSaurus, an online speculative magazine that publishes one story per month between 5000 and 25,000 words.

I wrote the content for Use-castes in Chapter 2 and the general information about Seasons in Chapter 3.

I've always enjoyed reading since from a very young age, and I loved making up my own stories. When I was 12, I received a typewriter for Christmas and started writing stories (mostly about British women standing on moors; never finished them).

I love writing about interesting characters. Throw two people with competing ideologies into a room and you got a story. I love figuring out their relationship and seeing what it would take for them to become amazing forces of nature...or destruction... But I also love unique and weird situations and how normal people react to them. And sometimes, I just like to write about something in detail, sort of like a meditation on who a person is, or a thing, what makes it tick. Exploration, be it geographic or relational.

Most of my stories tend to be thoughtful and/or bittersweet. I like to think of some as uplifting and fun, though there was a period where I wrote a lot of stories about grief, mirroring my circumstances at the time I wrote them. Nowadays, I'm aiming for a bit more humor. Also, my writing loves to play with craft styles (parentheses and italics *galore*)

I tend to be an observer, so I like soak in as much detail as I can, whether it is meeting new people or out on a drive or even if it's something mundane like making tea. All that observation comes out in my writing whether it's intentional or not.

Most of my past work has been writing supplemental fiction for games, usually short stories.

I was asked to write a short story for the Monarchies of Mau RPG game anthology.

I've also written for the Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology that accompanies the card game from Outland Entertainment.

I absolutely loooooved the Fifth Season trilogy, so when the opportunity came to work on the core book I was absolutely thrilled.

I had so much fun writing the little fictional snippets at the beginning of each use-caste's section. I'm also particularly proud of the section on the Breeder use-caste, focusing on their importance and care. I also had fun coming up with examples on how Seasons affected the environment. I'll go into more detail about that in the next question.

At first, a little intimidating, but as I started to brainstorm possibilities on how players could use the lore to build their own stories, I started having fun with it. This was especially true in the Seasons section as I wondered how would the Seasons affect people and the environment. 

My favorite example is the sunflowers developing a toxic ring during a season to ward off predators. Sunflowers aren't mentioned in the books, but I do know sunflowers can be raised as a crop, and since the lore mentions plants turning toxic during a Season, I can see sunflowers developing a way to protect their seeds. Sort of a hybrid sunflower / sundew plant. A very nice and creepy detail that I hope will enhance gameplay.

Obviously, I hope people have fun playing this game. I also want the gamers to come away with a sense of community. With all its messiness and flaws, it helps to have someone to rely on for survival.

I'm not a huge TTRPG player, but this is one of the few games I would actually love to try out. I'd definitely play as a Lorist...although with all the work I put into the Breeder caste, I might consider that as well. :-D

The biggest project I'm working on currently isn't a game, but a project with Meow Wolf, an arts immersive collective. I wrote the story for their project opening in Grapevine, Texas this summer, so for those in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, I hope you visit it when it opens this summer!

Newsletter: http://wanak.substack.com 

Website: http://tbonecafe.wordpress.com 

Facebook: lashawn.m.wanak 

Twitter: @TboneJenkins 

Mastodon: [email protected]

It's been an exciting day, and we're now officially in the final 24 hours of the campaign!

We have one more interview for you today, and the final interview and Fifth Season preview article planned for tomorrow. Let's see if we can unlock that Digital Map Pack by morning!

I’m a bit of everything in just about every possible sense. 

In the analog gaming world: I’m a writer, developer, and cultural consultant. I’m also a queer fiction writer, developmental editor, GM, streamer, video game programmer, actor, actor-combatant, video & audio editor — whatever the story I’m telling (or helping tell) needs.

On a more personal side: I’m Indigenous Okinawan & Yaeyaman (two of the native peoples of the Ryukyu Islands), Mexican, and Swedish American. I’m an ADHDer and disabled combat veteran. I’m queer, trans, non-binary, autistic, and probably a few other things my brain’s decided to leave out. 

I wrote a little over half of the Quickstart — mostly setting material, the handouts, and the adventure itself. I also developed the Quickstart, interweaving my text with Steve Kenson’s fantastic mechanical and setting work. For the core book, I was one of the developers alongside Tanya DePass and Joe Carriker, coordinating the writers, smoothing the seams between writers’ drafts, and filling in details as needed.

I got started pretty early — no later than 9. I remember reading tons and tons of sci-fi, fantasy, game manuals, comics, etc. and deciding that I wanted to make my own. A lot of my early stuff was essentially fan-fiction. At some point, I won a *very* minor award and decided that I should keep writing. Getting to where I am now has been super weird, but it all connects together in hindsight.

Queer genre fiction that screws with social, physical, and/or generic conventions. As a fun example: my novella “@ and &” is about a pair of genderfluid sorcerers (@/N@alie/M@ and &/Cass&ra/Alex&er) trying to solve/prevent a murder that hasn’t happened yet. It also has possibly the worst title for Search Engine Optimization; I’m terrible at self-promotion.

In fiction, my work is going to deconstruct something most people take for granted. That could be having a pair of queer brains going on a date with their rented robot bodies (Bi Robot), a whimsical fairy bemusedly wrecking havoc after hearing the phrase “be gay! Do crimes!” (Be Fae! Do Crimes!), or a group of mercenaries analyzing the morality of hunting zombies (Cold Case). I want my readers to say, “What‽” at least once. I’m also merciless with puns, as those titles demonstrate.

In games, my aim is to give players options for approaching situations. I don’t want anyone at a table to think that fighting is the only approach that’ll work. Different people like different things, and even someone who loves having their character kick butt might want to take a break from violence to talk someone down or crack a mystery.

As an undergrad, I got big into the post modernist movement (particularly its deconstruction of existing stories), cyberpunk (esp. how it explores the nature of personhood, bodies, and consciously (re)constructing one’s self), and folklore. Unsurprisingly, my work often touches on at least one of those topics.

I was like 5 years old, playing 1st edition D&D from the Magenta Box (the version right before the Red Box). I played a cleric, my cousin Scott played a fighter, and my uncle Mark was the DM. We ran into a room full of stirges (giant mosquitos), and my character died because I was captivated by the game’s fantastical elements to the point that I just didn’t realize that there was any danger.  I mentioned that I was 5 and have autism, right?

Scion Second Edition. It’s a game where players roleplay as the children of one of Gods from world mythology and do heroic things (for whatever definition of heroic the players subscribe to). I love folklore, and the game does a great job of steering people to learn more about the world’s cultures and peoples. Also, I’m the line developer for it, so I’m kind of obligated to say it’s my favorite.

My favorite TTRPG that I don’t have a clear conflict of interest with is Shadowrun because I love the setting. It’s also basically 5 games in one, which is super fun... so long as the GM knows how to run physical, magical, matrix, astral, and vehicular combat simultaneously. That’s a pretty big ask for any Game Moderator, but it does work beautifully at times.

I like playing games where everyone gets an opportunity to shine. I don’t need a Big Damn Hero Moment, but if we’re sitting around a table for a few hours, each of us should get up being able to say, “Holy crap! That thing you did with the McGuffin that guard was holding!”

Ones that approach the game in new and interesting ways: a wizard who’s kind of a jock, a wholesome marshmellow in a brutal setting, a Jekyll/Hyde character struggling to figure out who they are (and hiding it from other players for as long as possible), etc. So long as I can do something interesting without spoiling anyone else’s fun, it’s all good.

I’ve done a bunch of work as a developer, line developer, and cultural consultant, but in my heart I’m primarily a writer.

I was an adjunct English professor (lecturer and instructor, technically) when Trump became president. See, a huge portion of Seattle’s students are international students, and his foreign policies alarmed a *lot* of folks from other countries. When enrollment numbers dropped, those of us without tenure track positions were left to fend for ourselves.

So, I pinged my friend Satyr (Phil Brucato, writer/developer for many White Wolf books) to ask for his advice in getting writing work in the industry. As it happened, he really liked my writing style and had some Mage: The Ascension books in the pipeline. So, he hired me to write on M20’s Gods & Monsters.

Uhhh. A lot. Mage: The Ascension, Magic: The Gathering, Avatar, Root, Scion, Modern AGE, Cthulhu Awakens, Chronicles of Darkness, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Scarred Lands, Exalted, Pathfinder, D&D (kind of), Capers, Eldritch Century, Pugmire, They Came from…, Trinity Continuum, Demon Castle Mononoke, and a few that I can’t name because they’re unannounced.

The books were a huge draw. I’m not Black, so some elements undoubtedly went over my head or didn’t land as squarely as they might have for other folks, but the novels still spoke volumes to me. The absolutely casual “this isn’t weird; this is just how the world is” way N.K. Jemisin handled multiracial, queer, trans, and polyamorous characters was beautiful. There was a lot in the books about literally and figuratively finding family, being comfortable in your own skin, choosing whether to hide parts of who you are, and choosing to let people in. Those themes are pretty powerful, and I needed to at least try to get onto the book.

Probably the climax of the Quickstart. I’m not going to spoil what happens, but it’s a very me way to bring an adventure to its boiling point.

Challenging. I wanted to explore and expand her world without taking away from the feel or contradicting lore — well, without contradicting lore besides Imperial/Yumenescene propoganda, at least. I spent a lot of time going through my e-book copies of the trilogy, mashing ctrl+f and searching for anything remotely connected to the topic I was writing about.

I really want people to think about the Stillness (and our own world) in terms of how they can come together and help each other survive.

Native Ryukyuans are a group of Indigenous peoples with our own cultures and languages. The Japanese government has worked fairly hard to irradicate our languages, but the internet has made it possible for us to connect with each other and help us learn our languages. If you’re Uchinaanchu (Okinawan) or any other kind of Ryukyuan, I highly encourage you to learn more about your heritage. A good starting place is your local kenjinkai; there are over a hundred of them around the world. You can find them at https://wun.jp/en/network 

Many people live on the ancestral lands of Indigenous people. Very few of these lands were obtained without deception, threats of violence, or both. https://native-land.ca/ is a useful tool for figuring out who lived in your neighborhood before you did. It’s also useful for figuring out which local tribe(s) you can donate to. 

Website: hiromicota.com 

Tumblr/TikTok/Twitter: @HiromiCota

Game play in the Fifth Season RPG proceeds on two distinct scales. The story of the comm unfolds in seasons, each of which is a “turn” of part of the year, and features an event, a check of the comm’s prosperity, and an opportunity for the comm to work together on an activity to achieve a particular goal. Within the unfolding of the seasons are stories focusing on the individual characters from the comm. These adventures are often tied to the events of the season, but not necessarily, and the encounters the characters have during them may have impact on the comm as a whole. In some cases an adventure is meant to address a misfortune suffered by the comm during a seasonal event, and may be able to mitigate that misfortune or eliminate it altogether.

A comm “turn” is a “season.” Ordinarily there are four seasons in a year. During each season, the GM rolls for a seasonal event, the comm makes a prosperity test, and can initiate a comm activity.

Seasonal Events

Seasonal events represent the random fortunes of a comm surviving in the Stillness. They are not the only things to happen in the entire season, just particularly noteworthy events. The Game Master rolls on the Seasonal Events Table to determine what the key event will be for that season and integrates the event into the narrative of the campaign as desired. 

Many seasonal events are misfortunes that can befall a comm. These are similar to hazards encountered by characters but on a comm-wide scale. Misfortunes can weaken a comm, reducing its Stability and, if severe enough, even bring about the comm’s eventual dissolution. Also like hazards, many misfortunes can be mitigated or avoided altogether. This usually involves a test using one of the comm’s traits, although in some cases the Game Moderator may substitute an adventure for the test if characters intervene in the event.

Intervention

The tests and outcomes for seasonal events assume the comm is bringing what resources it can to bear, but that the player’s characters are not doing anything in particular apart from assisting like any other members of the comm. However, in some cases, the GM may wish to set up an adventure either based on the season’s event, or in place of it. In these cases, the player characters are said to be intervening in the seasonal event, and their intervention may affect its outcome. Essentially, the adventure takes the place of the usual test or tests involving the event and the characters’ actions decide its outcome.

Comm Prosperity

Once the event of the season is determined, the comm’s prosperity is tested. This is a measure of the comm’s overall success and survivability. Failure means the comm suffers misfortune and loses Stability. If the test succeeds, the comm continues to do well, at least meeting its essential needs, perhaps even succeeding well enough to apply an advancement to the comm’s Cache score.

Comm Activity

Each season, a comm can also initiate an activity, similar to a character’s action, such as Conflict with another comm or group, Growth to build up the comm, Improvement of one of the comm’s traits, Innovation to add a new focus to a trait, Preparation to add a bonus to the comm’s next prosperity test, or Recovery to restore lost Stability to the comm.

Comm Conditions

Comms can take on certain conditions to deal with a loss of Stability, like characters do to mitigate damage. The comm then needs to recover from the condition using the recovery activity. Conditions are not as necessary for comms to avoid Stability loss, as they tend to be more resilient than individual characters.

“Everything changes in a Fifth Season” according to stonelore, and that is true of Seasonal play and events as well. The Game Moderator ultimately decides when a Fifth Season occurs in the context of the game, although there is a guideline for a Fifth Season to begin as a Seasonal Event. During a Fifth Season, the difficulty of a comm’s tests increase, seasonal events differ, and the comm relies upon its Cache for prosperity tests rather than its other traits, and Cache slowly diminishes over the course of the Season. A Fifth Season makes it more difficult for a comm to survive, and to recover from its misfortunes. A comm with a strong Cache score can last through a Fifth Season … if it is not too long.

With your help, we managed to smash through another stretch goal last night! We've unlocked the People of the Stillness free PDF!

"This will give the GM a ready supply of named and described characters useful for populating their campaign. If your pledge includes any edition of The Fifth Season RPG, People of the Stillness will be included in your rewards for free."

We're well on our way now to the next one, which will be a Digital Map Pack for all backers, another incredibly useful tool, which we suspect folks who play primarily through VTT platforms will be particularly excited about. We're in the final hours of the campaign now, but we still have a few Signed Bookplates Bundles available, and plenty of add-ons to help us get there! (be sure to check out the Crystal Shard Dice, if you missed that update yesterday!)

This morning we also have another interview with one of the writers who worked on the book!

Can you tell folks a little about yourself?

I'm kind of split in between two industries. In one, I'm a writer and copy editor for tabletop role-playing games, and I've worked on Fantasy Flight's (now Edge's) Star Wars, Legend of Five Rings, and Twilight Imperium/Genesys lines, a couple of projects for Green Ronin, Magpie Games's Avatar: Legends and Root, and others. I'm Staff Editor for Angry Hamster Press and I've worked on Afterlife: Wandering Souls and some of their supplements.

In the other industry, I write short speculative fiction, and I have some short stories in Cossmass Infinities, Cast of Wonders, Flame Tree Press anthologies, and other markets. I have a Ignyte nomination for a nonfiction essay in Strange Horizons, and I'm also Managing Editor for Uncanny Magazine, an award-winning publication that produces six issues a year.

What did you do for the Fifth Season Roleplaying Game?

I wrote about life in the comms and touched upon the use-castes. I described basically the day-to-day life of people in regular society, how they govern themselves, what sort of work they might do, how they approach the Seasons. I also got to make up a few "weird" places, leftover technologies from previous civilizations, or just weird phenomenon.

What got you started writing?

Maybe it was role-playing games, like the old Red Box D&D set! So I was always writing something down ever since I was a kid, but I really didn't start thinking about writing as a regular thing until the early '00s with a screenwriting workshop, and then not as focused or seriously until about a decade ago, when I got my first assignment on a Fantasy Flight Star Wars splatbook and then published my first short story a few years later.

What kinds of things do you like writing? (In general, not necessarily games)

For short stories, I'm still in my experimental phase, trying out different styles and genres. I think I have a couple of sci-fi shorts, a few fantasy shorts, and some horror shorts out there now. I of course have a notebook of half-scribbled game design ideas, but who knows if I'll flesh them out. I have a horror YA novel I'm trying to hammer into shape. Like a Cthulhu-squid-monster it keeps getting out of control, sadlol

What do you think are some of the signature elements in your writing? What makes a Monte Lin piece?

I'd like to think I'm good at figuring out how an average character would live in a given sci-fi, fantasy, or maybe even horror setting, and that informs my worldbuilding. I've also been told I'm pretty good at making complex NPCs, especially villains or anti-heroes. Since I tend to work on established IPs (Star Wars, Cthulhu Mythos, etc.), I'm also pretty good at imitating the style of that IP, if it's high fantasy or dirty cyberpunk and the like.

Is there anything about you/your background/your skills that you think shapes the way you approach writing?

There's that joke: "I don't have any applicable job skills so I became a writer." But seriously, I used to work in mobile game QA so I think I'm good at finding rules loopholes or unclear language. I'm interested in a lot of things (but I'm just not great at them or have a good memory to be become an expert) so I hope that means I have some breadth of knowledge (or at least know who to ask).

What was your first TTRPG experience like?

This was the Red Box D&D set, and I suppose looking back there was a lot of lack of reading comprehension! Like for a while I thought if your character gained a level you automatically went to the next level of the dungeon. I misunderstood hit points somehow. I remember not realizing that "staves" was the plural of "staff," so I never used the Saving Throw vs Staves. I also remembering playing at school at the concrete windbreak, so our character sheets took on the texture of the concrete we were writing on!

What’s your favorite TTRPG and why?

This seems to be an unfair question, lol! I like reading and learning new rule systems in general, and I'm impressed at the sheer number of and creativity in a lot of the small press, indie rpgs out there. I had a fun time with Good Society, where you are playing in a Jane Austin rom-com. I'm a fan of Thorny Games's play with language, such as Dialect and the up-and-coming Xenolanguage. I'm a sucker for speciality dice, so I like Fantasy Flight's/Edge's Star Wars Narrative Dice system. I've played almost every edition of D&D. I'm running a Blades in the Dark game. In fact, it's gotten to the point that I've both lost track of what's out there and my to-play list is much too long.

What kind of games do you like playing?

It seems to change every few years. I've answered for ttrpgs in the previous question, but for board games I'm a fan of the Gale Force Nine reprint of the classic Dune board game (but it's hard to get several friends with 6-8 hours to spare to play). There were a couple years in which I was obsessed with co-op games. Lately, it's been small, carry in your pocket games like Scout or Cockroach Poker. For video games, lately it's deck-builders like Slay the Spire, but half a decade ago it was narrative, choose-your-own-adventure style games like from Telltale Games or Life is Strange. Again, there just doesn't seem to be enough time (or money) to play everything...

When you're playing TTRPGs, what kind of characters do you enjoy playing and why?

I tend to play characters with some kind of overwhelming family obligation to give the GM NPCs to torture me with. Like a Peter Parker-like superhero but with a dad who hates superheroes. Or a guy who just needs one-last-job to provide for his family. But lately I've been going for more comedy: the classic good-hearted himbo who is best friends with the morally dubious PC or the braggy egoist who gets into trouble for opening his mouth.

What kinds of things do you do within the games industry?

Mostly writing (flavor text, background worldbuilding, NPC descriptions, occasional in-game intro fiction) and some light mechanics but more copy editing lately (not just sentence polishing but checking that the text makes sense in the context of the rules and making sure that the text doesn't seem to contradict what the rules say). I've run games at conventions individually and managing a group of GMs for a company. I've done a little production work basically getting the assembled text to the printer, proofed, and shipped.

How did you get started in the games industry?

Early '00s I wrote an adventure for Paizo's Dungeon Magazine and wrote a couple of articles for Dragon Magazine, but I didn't start getting any regular work until the mid-2010s with Fantasy Flight. I emailed the company and asked if they needed freelancers, and they happened to need one at the time. I gave them a writing sample, they liked it, and then they brought me on to write some Star Wars stuff.

What other games have you worked on?

editing: Avatar: Legends, Cartel, Zombie World, Afterlife: Wandering Souls, Nahual, some 7th Sea 2nd edition nation books 

writing: Cthulhu Awakens and 5th Season for Green Ronin; Star Wars, Legend of Five Rings, Genesys stuff for Edge/Fantasy Flight; a setting for Cortex Prime; and currently a couple of projects for Paizo

Is there anything you'd like to see more of in the games industry?

honestly this is a tough and big question... the ttrpg industry and the speculative fiction industry have a lot of parallels... it's hard for a creator to make money, much less a living. Since the ttpg industry relies on freelancers, more support for those doing freelance work, be it union or guild or networking resources. Also, more support for the smaller indie devs, be it eyes on their games or just plain money. I've heard with the recent kerfuffle with a specific big rpg publisher, that sales went significantly up for both mid-tier rpg companies and small press games, and I hope that's a continual trend rather than a one-off

Is there anything else you'd like people to know?

As Staff Editor for Angry Hamster Publishing, the Kickstarter for Witch: Fated Souls 2nd edition is done, but keep an eye out for product updates. It's a horror rpg where you have sold your soul for power, and what you can do with that power. https://www.angryhamsterpublishing.com/
As Managing Editor for Uncanny Magazine, if you are looking for science fiction or fantasy short stories, new releases come out the first Tuesday of each month on the website. There are ways to support the magazine there.
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/

How can people get a hold of you? (i.e. website, social media, etc.)

my site: www.monte-lin.com  

Twitter: @Monte_Lin

Mastodon (fiction): [email protected] 

Mastodon (gaming): [email protected] 

You know what goes great with a new RPG? Dice! That’s why we are now offering AGE Crystal Shard Dice as an add-on! We thought some of our backers—particularly those of you new to tabletop RPGs—might want dice to go with your pledge, and the style of these is a great match for the game. You have your choice of red & white dice or black & purple dice. Each bag contains six dice, which will give you two sets ready for the table of your AGE campaign. 



If you've pledged already, and would like to increase your total to help us reach more stretch goals, you can follow this link to adjust your amount. But the Dice will also be available in the pledge manager after the campaign ends.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/users#pledges

Dice manufactured by Crystal Cast. Crystal dice covered by patents: #5,938,197; #6,318,720; #D455,462.