Month: July 2016

07/30/16

GrogHeads Interviews Terry Sofian of Hive, Queen and Country

We connected at Origins, and continued the electronic conversation afterwards ~

Corinne Mahaffey, 30 July 2016

I sat down for an email interview with Terry Sofian, the creator of Hive, Queen and Country, a steampunk world where the European powers are, with the help of the mineral aerolith, extending their imperial reach to the rest of the solar system. They recently ran a 3 day game at Origins wherein a hive in Brazil was besieged by American and British forces.

 

What are your games and world about? 

Our games are about telling stories in an altered Victorian era, one in which the already stunning challenges of exploring frontiers on six continents, the seas and the polar ice cap, making scientific discoveries that fashioned the world in which we live today and developing amazing new technologies, are compounded with air and space travel and explorations both in deep space but also on several worlds within our solar system. The stories can be about fighting hordes of angry alien bugs. They could be about building a city on Venus. Perhaps they are about solving murder mysteries on any of a number of worlds.

The Hive, Queen and Country Universe was started as a sandbox in which a bunch of folks could get together to and discuss ideas set in such an altered time line. We designed the Universe to be a place where gamers, writers, artists, model builders and any other creative types could build “sand castles”. The games and world are designed to provide a framework for people to work within.

HQC in action at Origins
HQC in action at Origins

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07/15/16

GrogHeads Interviews Craig Stern of True Messiah

True Messiah is coming soon on Kickstarter; designer Craig Stern sits down for a chat ~

Brant Guillory, 15 July 2016

OK, so True Messiah has a totally off-the-wall-crazy backstory.  Where did it come from?  What was the original inspiration and how was it refined over time as it developed?

I thought it up in the shower one morning. (The ideas underlying the backstory had been percolating in me for a long time prior, mind you—they merely chose that moment to congeal. Maybe it was the steam?)

Anyway. You might think that this this game’s premise is meant to critique extremist religious groups like ISIS, people so certain in their beliefs that they are willing to slaughter tens of thousands of innocent people in the name of prophecies that they want to be (but have no good reason to believe are) true. You wouldn’t be wrong.

But True Messiah is really about magical thinking in all of its forms: about people privileging subjective beliefs over empirical facts, about valuing tribal loyalties over shared humanity. “What if,” I wondered, “we lived in a world in which believing something—and nothing more—really did make it so? What if ‘speaking your truth’ were literal?”

True Messiah - Logo w Box Art

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