RUINER
Fresh Perspective VS Retrospective PART 2: Mark Conway
To celebrate my return, I’m serving up a triumphant double-feature. This is PART 2!
If you haven’t read PART 1 of this double-feature, go back and check it out! Our last interviewee gave us an inside look at how he planned the scope of his debut title, but today we have the benefit of hindsight— blark is looking back at one of their early titles with more practice under their belt. I think there is some value in comparing how these authors’ experience levels informs their design process.
If you want to follow along, why not grab a digital copy? At the time of writing there are some community copies available, but a copy of RUINER only costs $5 USD. Small but mighty, this tiny little booklet is worth every penny. We’ll deconstruct it a bit after the interview, so stick around!
Mark Conway AKA blark
Yes, blark. I double-checked: this RPG writer’s nom de plume is intentionally uncapitalized. Conway has thirty projects published on their itch page. An RPG writer learns a lot of things over the course of thirty projects, my friends. Those are not rookie numbers.
I am a screaming blark fanboy. If you follow me on the website formerly known as Twitter you’ve probably seen me wax poetic about their work before. You may have seen blark waxing poetic in their own writing. SWINE, in particular, was written in a way that made me profoundly sad and deeply uncomfortable. This excerpt rolls through my head every time I struggle to put something on a back-cover:
You are a pig farmer; you adore your pigs. Speaking of their beautiful heft brings tears to your eyes. Sweet cherubs knowing nothing of the world. The extent of the cruelty man commits is rebuked by their muddy pen. You would die for them - you would absolutely kill for them. Treachery from hungry neighbors, soldiers, and hog thieves is a nightly horror which rattles your mind.
Brilliant stuff. I could never. If you read nothing else by Conway, please check out their latest project, MEATHEADS. It’s a more lighthearted and goofy system that is extremely well supported already, but blark and their collaborator Eric are crowdfunding a 250 page megadungeon to go along with it. Meatheads contains the single best diagram known to TTRPGs and you’ll know it the second you see the muscle-bound lineup.
But we’re not really here to talk about MEATHEADS. We’re here to talk about something ancient.
The Interview
Q) RUINER might be your “smallest but mightiest” game. This tiny A6 booklet weighs in at only 16 pages— including the cover— and my print copy boasts a pretty chunky display font throughout. There’s no art but your writer’s voice does a lot of heavy lifting: every single sentence does double duty, defining the rules of play while giving your readers an impression of a universe full of terrible beauty and a sense of profound loss. This is a game where players get to be the bad guy, but these aptly-named ruiners must also be the final witnesses of the realms they plunder to survive. It’s grim stuff.
I have to ask: what possessed you to make such a strange, sad game, and how did you evoke so much in so small a space? To frame the question in a broader way: what were you originally trying to accomplish with this project and how did you manage those expectations?
BLARK: You know, honestly, I just made the cover randomly one day while messing around in Affinity Publisher and was really struck with the color palate. Seeing the harshness of the yellow and white on the scarlet background with the soft green in the center just sorta struck me. It was around that time where a number of people where having a hand at making Retro-Clone Dungeon Crawlers and I wanted to try my hand at one.
At the time I was getting into dungeon synth (Longsword, Knights of Nvrul, Secret Stairwell, Blood Tower) and just started reading Book of the New Sun. It was near then that on twitter I followed an artbot of Zdzisław Beksiński, whose paintings I knew through some internet images but for the first time I was seeing work from across his entire career. It was just astonishing how much he painted, each day I'd be seeing a painting that was new to me. I suppose that sorta played into the immensity and placelessness I wanted to get across in RUINER as you cut through a gutted reality.
Despite art being a big inspiration the book has none! This was a choice I teetered on for a while, having plans to draw spot art and an isometric map for the adventure. Nothing I did sufficed for me so I went with a simpler map, which was the stronger choice in hindsight!
I set out making RUINER with some design ambitions I guess you could say. I knew I wanted to distill tests, including combat, down to a single roll. The system does that but it's not as elegant as I'd like. Truth be told I walked away from it never quite figuring it out. It's funny though because I can't really ever see it becoming something "bigger". It very much spun itself into existence it seem as I poured more into it and tried to figure out what it was about. Ultimately it did take shape and I think it served it's purpose, I'm happy with where it fits in my body of work.
Q) Bigger is not always better. RUINER probably succeeds at feeling vast and sparse because it leaves a lot unspoken. This is absolutely delicious to me, because the magic system is based on syllables. So... I agree. Why add clutter to a dungeon-crawler that quite literally fits in your back pocket? RUINER is great the way it is. It works. It's elegant enough. I honestly think it'll become an OSR classic with time.
You're not actually planning on remaking this title, but looking back at old work is difficult for most RPG writers. You have made a lot of games over the last few years, gaining experience and new skills with each title. You are bigger, better, stronger. MEATHEADS is a testament to that. Dare I ask... what do you think you learned from making RUINER? Do you see its footprint in anything you have made since?
BLARK: I definitely do! I think it may have been the first fledged system I ever wrote. Before then I was mostly making stuff for Troika. RUINER helped me to really figure out what it was I wanted to write and how I wanted to present myself. It's useful for TTRPG makers to have a go at making a system I think, even if it's a hack or reworking of another system, it's immensely helpful to know how to build from the ground up. I was writing, designing, and doing layout by myself with edits done largely by my roommate. More so RUINER was a great crash course in the zine making process. It helped solidify experience with developing a zine, taking it to printers and then finding distributors and shops to stock it.
Q) Self-publishing that first print project is tougher than it looks, eh? You don't know how much you don't know until you've picked up three new skill-sets and find out there's a fourth, fifth, sixth thing you've never done before and now you need to figure it out. You have definitely figured it out, blark. Did RUINER actually start as a one-page game before you made it a zine, though? On the project page it is listed as a submission to the One Page RPG jam in 2021.
BLARK: It was? Oops! I don't ever recall RUINER starting as a one-page rpg, but you can probably fit all the rules on one page! The only real one-page rpg I've done is Redcaps, a classic game about being shitty little guys. Any other questions?
Q) Yeah, but the next one is a doozie! You posted something about RUINER on twitter a little while ago that inspired me to reach out:
Hypothetically, if you were to “… tighten up the system, or just cut it out completely…” what would it even look like? What would be left? Talk about killing your darlings. Would RUINER be the same format? Would it be presented as an agnostic adventure? You're a different blark than you were back then, how does what you have learned in the interim inform this imaginary facelift? I realize there's an obvious irony in asking this whole line of questioning about a game where, mechanically, you can never revisit a place once you have left it, but humour me.
BLARK: Oh geez, I painted myself into a corner here because I have no solid answer! Part of me thinks it could serve as an agonistic adventure if it were stretched out an given more content. It would give the opportunity to experiment with making NPCs and thinking how they exist. Maybe that is over thinking it. I guess the answer from my gut would be expand on concepts of location and identity and dip into some moral quandaries. Maybe I haven't fully explored all there was to RUINER!
It definitely felt like a game I was discovering as I wrote, so there can only be more to discover.
Q) That answer really plays to your strengths. You have written SO MANY great adventures. I think about SWINE at least once a week, the writing in it is so thematic. I'm willing to bet you also read a lot. What is your favourite module of all time, and why? Digging down, what I really want to ask is "What do you think makes a really good adventure?"
BLARK: It might surprise you to hear but I don't read many adventures if I'm being honest! If I had to reach into my gut and yank something out it would be Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgas by Evey Lockheart. Evey can synthesize emotions into a text like no other person I've seen, you can fully feel her words without it becoming overbearing or overly sentimental. It's a material sadness that is grounded and can be felt. That's why I think her work is so relatable. I'd say Evey's works bear a particular truth that is absent or is disingenuous in other works. I admire the hell out of her. I think what makes for a good adventure is not dissimilar to what makes for any good art; if you're at the very least genuine and joyful with your work then someone will value it. But to give a short answer: polyamorous orcs.
The Deconstruction
I have spent a lot of time with this little zine. My personal copy is too dinged-up and dog-eared to be photogenic, but I could probably recite the words from memory. Do I understand the rules? Yes, easily. Is the layout perplexing? No. (Well, actually, the white text on a red background used throughout is striking, but a bit rough on the eyes. Somehow it’s all legible.) So why am I confused today?
I don’t understand how Conway made something so tiny feel like… enough.
Let’s figure out how he did that with a walk-through of some critical spreads.
Spread #1: Everything you need to know about character creation takes up the inside cover of RUINER. You learn how to roll up your stats— three abilities, vigor (health), and your true name (damage avoidance)— and what those stats mean. You also get instructions on how to get yourself some starter equipment, though the various gear tables are on other spreads. Last of all, you get an anointment: a little perk that makes your character mechanically unique.
On the other half of the spread, blark fleshes out what we have learned on the character creation page by giving us a tidy little roll-under mechanic and a guideline for how to set difficulty ratings. It’s simple enough to understand at a glance. Elegant, even, despite the author’s concerns. The only thing not touched upon whatsoever is what sorceries are and how they work.
Spread #2: Flip the page and you find yourself reading something that feels more like a pitch. Conway gives us some lore unique to this game and ties it straight away into the mechanics: you can only move forward, you cannot go back. Your character is a destroyer of worlds. When you leave, you strip a realm of its light and power. Everything dies in your wake.
Then we get a sense of urgency: you must rest to regain health, but your enemies are always seeking you out. There is no guarantee of safety. Roll to see if they find you. Speaking of enemies, the other half of this spread describes encounters in better detail. Blark tells us how to apply our character’s three abilities to interactions with the denizens of the realms we visit (and ultimately destroy). Then we learn about how combat works— player characters and enemies have a certain number of actions per turn, they die when they run out of vigor, when enemies flee or beg to enter your service as a sycophant.
Spread #3: The third spread is a series of three tables. The first page shows us weapons and armour. Blark takes the time to fully explain the meanings of key words that will appear elsewhere in the book— notably, the stat blocks for enemies.
Conway doesn’t explain every detail— the reader is expected to take these general guidelines and make a ruling if they stumble across an unlisted edge-case. There’s at least one or two of those on this spread: there is a note about enchanted items that uses several key words that do not appear anywhere else in the book.
What does it mean to be a fruitful or frivolous enchanted item? It’s never explicitly stated, but house-ruling this kind of instance is what makes Old School styled games feel familiar to me.
On the other half of the page, we find… enchanted items. Curios, technically. Blark’s writing really shines here. The descriptions for curios are brief, conjuring mechanical benefits within the flavour text. These are REALLY well done. My favourite:
“Ashes of yourself: This was once you. Rub on body to avoid death.”
Coming across one of these in-game absolutely rattled my table. It brought up difficult questions about the origins of the player-characters, but answering those questions as the adventure progressed gave the ruiners a sense of purpose. Magic items that encourage emotional investment are hard to design, but Conway nailed it.
Spread #4: I mentioned this offhand during the interview, but the magic system in this game is based on rolling against your Presence ability, and the difficulty is determined by the number of syllables in your spell. Blark gives us a sample table of sorcerous words that can be learned and spoken on the first page of this spread, but doesn’t limit what these words can do. Players and game masters have to negotiate that part.
The other half of the fourth spread talks about sycophants and setting. Sycophants are… interesting, to put it mildly. I have too much to say about the exchange of service for power and the illusion of safety for this little newsletter. To avoid derailing the conversation, let’s focus on the powerful tools Conway gives us on the bottom half of this page. In a few stark sentences, they teach us how to effectively characterize and describe. Once sentence in particular offers good advice for anyone who writes adventures:
“When designing a Rung, consider who made it, what it is made from, how it is connected, who is meant to dwell there, and who is not.”
Spread #5 and #6: The rest of the book is entirely dedicated to a module defining a doomed Rung called the Chain Absolute. I love a good sample adventure, and I love the way blark constructed this one. As mentioned previously, there is no art in this book, but there is a simple map on the first page of the fifth spread.
Note that light colour doesn’t just act as a general vibe-check, it actually has a significant mechanical impact on how the denizens of those places behave. Because you have to roll on the light table each time you rest, it encourages players to linger when conditions are poor and push ahead when conditions are beneficial.
The page following the map, and the spread beyond that one, are dedicated to describing what the characters will find in each link in the chain.
The room descriptions are short but sweet, giving us a sense of a distinctly alien place that feels very lived in. For example, there is a merchant in the fifth link who has no interest in coin. Instead they trade curios and some unique items for the corpses of a particular kind of foe that generates wealth. The servants of a dismembered lordling in the ninth link have gifts for anyone who can destroy the monstrous creator-god guarding the tenth. Oh, the implications!
Bad things went down before you got here. They’re still happening, and the people living in these places are constantly inviting adventurers to participate in the story. The very last sentence hints at a continuation of the adventure— a Rung beyond this one that smells “faintly of a rancid sea”. Using Conway’s excellent example, enterprising game masters have all the tools they need to carry on without further guidance. The format is easy to follow, if nothing else.
Final Spread: The last bit of the book is dedicated entirely to six enemy stat blocks. I love it when the monsters are at the back of a book. Here they are listed in ascending order from mildest to wildest, but this is also how they appear in the adventure text. It’s well organized and makes it easy for game masters to find the right foe at a glance.
Physical Copies
Finding a physical copy of RUINER is easy if you’re in Canada, and there’s one US retailer with copies still in stock:
Monkey's Paw
Ratti Incantati
Spear Witch
That being said, blark has generously provided a print-friendly black and white version on their itch page. This is a great opportunity to get your stapler out and really channel your inner old school grog.
THANK YOU
The core premise— the draw, even— of most old school games boils down to “your team of adventurers murder and pillage their way across a strange land, to the great detriment of the locals”. RUINER preserves that trope but obliges us to acknowledge how terrible it is to be a parasite feeding on someone else’s light. Every word in the book reinforces that concept, clearly demonstrating the idea that sometimes less really is more.
I love games like this. I love you, blark. One day I will defeat you in combat. Until that moment, keep kicking ass out there. You were so real with me during our interview.
I feel like Ruiner has some bastards. DNA in it. Not sure if that is true but it just strikes me as close in form and substance. This is not a bad thing IMHO.