THE CORRUPTED
Fresh Perspective VS Retrospective PART 1: Navaar Seik-Jackson
To celebrate my return, I’m serving up a triumphant double-feature. This is part 1.
Navaar is an exciting new designer who just had their big debut project published in print. I think that’s worth celebrating! Navaar and I talked about what they learned creating THE CORRUPTED.
If you want to follow along, why not grab a digital copy? The PDF for THE CORRUPTED runs a little higher than what I typically review, weighing in at $16 USD. Don’t let that discourage you: even if you’re not looking to dabble in a new system, this game has plenty of interesting ideas to offer anyone who enjoys running survival-horror games.
Two Authors, Alike in Dignity
I’d like to set the stage before we begin: one of our interviewees for this double-feature has very few titles under their belt, the other has a beefy catalogue (hint, hint). Don’t let that contrast fool you, though! Both designers have valuable lessons to share and I think we’ll appreciate them more if we examine their experiences side-by-side. Let’s start with our new author:
Navaar Seik-Jackson
Today’s fresh perspective is offered by Navaar Seik-Jackson. THE CORRUPTED might be his first game that has reached print but this designer has been part of the TTRPG community for a long time. Notably, Navaar is the host of the Secret Nerd Podcast which is currently on hiatus.
The Corrupted Interview
Q) Navaar, I want to start off by saying THE CORRUPTED is a really wonderful bit of work. You've fit a whole system and the bones of a setting into a scant 32 pages-- the tiny body typeset and double-column dominated layout squeeze a lot of writing into a small space. You still made it beautiful, though. Literally. You are credited with all the interior art! Your character portraits give us a glimpse into the stress of survival.
Would you consider this your debut release? You have two other titles on Itch, but neither really aspires to the same scope or scale. What was it about this project that prompted you to take the idea so much farther?
NAVAAR: Thank you! I do feel like this is my debut. The Last Detective was my first game I made. Though it has made some small circulation, and has even been translated into Spanish, it’s something I think of as jumping off point, rather than a true debut. It gave me the confidence to create The Corrupted. So once I knew I could make a game, I decided I would try something bigger. In my head I was thinking this would be my multi-hundred page premiere! But two things moved me toward a smaller sized game.
My friend Indrani helped me with a lot of the initial planning of what the game could be. We both agreed that starting out with something small and building off of that would make the most sense, since I don’t have a huge audience (and at the time didn’t even consider that I might get published).
I’ve talked to a lot of folks about the things they like and don’t like about TTRPG books, and one of those was having to read 60+ pages to understand how to make a character.
With those things in mind, I gave myself the challenge of writing a complete game in 25 pages. It wasn’t until I met Tony with Plus One Exp, that I added the additional content for print. As far as the themes and subject matter, that’s easy. I am a massive fan of The Last of Us, and the apocalypse genre. I love stories about survival and starting over, and I wanted to give my own voice to game mechanics in a way that would make me excited about playing a TTRPG with those elements.
Q) It sounds like you sat down and planned the scope of the project right at the very beginning, and I really love that. Can we talk a little bit more about page count as a personal challenge? When you sat down to write a compact game, what did your early design process look like? Did you decide how many pages you would dedicate to certain subjects in advance, did you just write all the rules out and trim until things fit? I'm basically asking how you made the process work for you. Also: when you brought it to a publisher, what did they suggest you add to round things out, and did those suggestions surprise you at all?
NAVAAR: When I started writing it, I just knew I wanted it to be concise but still contain my style and voice. And for me, even if I have all the lore and flavor stuff in mind, I HAVE to start with the rules. My brain has to know it’s all gonna “work” before I move forward. I don’t mind this though, because even if technical writing isn’t my favorite part, I LOVE designing rules. So I set off doing that.
I didn’t really give myself a page count on the rules so much as “this whole game iteration should fit into around 25 pages”. Right around this time I read a thread by Kazumi Chin @/kazumiochin on Twitter. I don’t think it’s available anymore, but they were talking about rules layout and mechanics editing. And that informed a lot of how I tried to write the game. Because there are base elements that needed to have the rules laid out, but anytime I defined a new variable I had to make sure the player wasn’t going to have to flip to another page in the book to understand the meaning of a word in the context of the game (because they’ll have already read it). Or at the very least, it’s the immediate following section or only relevant to the GM. So I started writing those.
NOTE: Kazumi shares a lot of valuable tips on twitter, but I think this thread is possibly the one Navaar was so strongly influenced by. If not, it is definitely still worth reading!
NAVAAR: I considered a lot about what I wanted in the game. Like, I knew I wanted it to be d20 based, because I enjoy rolling a d20. I knew I wanted to have abilities and skills, but make it more narrative based. I knew I didn’t want there to be too many calculations though, that’s why I went with set successes and failures instead of enemies with an armor class. And the biggest thing was I wanted mechanics that would help drive the narrative: Stress, Conflict, and the Compromised condition. So basically, my goal was fit all of that into something informative but not bloated. My first digital publishing of it was fairly similar to what is in print now, in terms of the content. Ultimately I went with Plus One Exp, but I did talk to another publisher about the book from just the aspect of feedback.
There was a section that I basically parsed down survival into something less meticulous, and [the publishers] talked to me about how that kind of takes away from the intended goal of the game. I also was advised to clarify the vision a bit more, and those helped me clean that up a bit. When I talked to Tony (POE) he got more into the nitty gritty about how the book would need to be set up for print, and gave me the option to have the layout be spruced up. I took him up on that offer, as I’m not a graphic designer, and this was the first time I even touched InDesign. So the format of the pages stayed pretty much the same but Johnny Isorena made it look beautiful in a way I just couldn’t. I used the funds from my digital release to get the cover redone so it would have some curb appeal. The old cover that I did is now the back cover with a color overlay applied to mute it a bit. But mostly, Tony just needed me to add some pages for printing purposes. So I used the extra word count to add a faction, a new monster, and improve on details throughout the book.
Q) Last question, and this one could potentially retread a little ground: THE CORRUPTED is in print. It exists in the real world. Anyone can just… pick it up and read it. That’s a big, landmark-style achievement and you should be intensely proud of what you have wrought. My question is, what parts of it are you especially proud of? What have you learned that you will carry forward into your next project? What do you hope will become a hallmark of your style as a game designer?
NAVAAR: Thank you! It feels like a huge achievement, and I’m proud to have had the opportunity to get where I am. In regards to the design, I am especially proud of the stress and conflict mechanics, and the compromised condition.
For anyone who hasn’t played the game, players accumulate stress depending on their roll. They get 1 for partial success, 2 for failure, and 3 for critical failure. When their stress reaches multiples of 4, they have immediate conditions, such as Falter and Overcompensate, and they also have Conflict points. Each conflict point has a narrative question that requires the characters to come to terms with a conflict they have with their fellow player(s). Some things I’ve seen in game are fundamental beliefs in opposing concepts (one player doesn’t want to kill Corrupted for instance), or a goal that doesn’t align with the other player (this character wants to make a documentary and does risky things to get footage). Each question advances the discussion on conflict between the players. They can also have multiple, and add new ones as they come up so they’re not dealing with the same thing the whole campaign.
This mechanic came to me when I was trying to think about how to express narrative in an apocalypse game without it just being where is food coming from. To go back to The Last of Us, it’s full of conflict. Joel and Ellie are at odds at first, and it’s only through dealing with things together that they start to bond. But in the end, they still have a MAJOR conflict. This concept works great for survivor stories, but I think it can work for other games as well. And if people decide one day to hack the system, they can always find a different dichotomy to build narratives from.
The compromised condition was another big one that really came to me out of frustration for traditional d20 fantasy games. You crit fail, and nothing happens. Or something silly happens. Occasionally, depending on GM, something significant MAY happen. I wanted critical fails in a survivor horror game to be drastic. When you crit fail while running from a horde that should be TERRIFYING. When you’re trying to make a risky jump and crit fail, that should change the priority of the moment.
In comes Compromised. A player who rolls a critical failure (either a natural 1, or having their roll hit one or under because of negative modifiers), they become compromised. Their focus suddenly shifts from whatever they were doing to getting out of the compromised condition. All of the results for rolls after that are based on a separate chart that has some new consequences. So in some situations, you can make it farther than others while being compromised. But if a corrupted (the monsters) grab you, and try to turn you into one of them, you HAVE TO PASS THOSE ROLLS.
And the other PC(s) can help as well, but their rolls to help someone Compromised also roll on the same result table. That said, I love how this changes the game. Even if one player is fighting other monsters, do they stop to try and help? Or do they do their own thing. And what does that do to the narrative afterwards? I’ve had some amazing moments with this, and I’m excited to hear how it turns out for other people as well.
Q) Navaar, you are incredible. Thank you so much for taking the time to give such well thought out responses. I am really excited to see where you go next. Do you have anything specific planned for the future? What can we expect to see next?
NAVAAR: I appreciate that! Thank you for taking the time to talk to me about my game!
Next up, I am working on a Sherlock game using the same system (with some modifications). I’ve been a huge Sherlock and detective media fan for a long time, and now that it’s public domain, I wanted to see what I can do with it. I have some other stuff in early development as well, but this is just the beginning. I’m just excited to have made a game I am obsessed with playing, and hoping to continue getting my name out there as a designer so other folks may enjoy my work as well.
Visual Hallmarks
I will admit that in the past, I have forgotten that This RPG Confuses Me promises a certain narrative: I am constantly overwhelmed by the rules and do not know what to do with all these zines I collect. Today we’re back on theme because 32 pages of content doesn’t seem like a lot until you see just how tiny that body font is. Seriously. This is the second time I have encountered something Johnny Isorena has touched and I am beginning to notice a theme.
I’m not complaining, of course. These full colour pages are notoriously expensive so every inch counts, and THE CORRUPTED never feels too crowded to read. Most of the mechanics here should be familiar enough to anyone who has played Dungeons and Dragons, with a little narrative leverage a-la Powered by the Apocalypse. There are touchpoints. The writing is all very beginner-friendly, even including a lovely little “what is this game” section at the very beginning to help set reader expectations. There’s a table of contents to help navigate the content. Yet somehow after my initial read-through I still felt like a deer in the headlights.
Don’t blame the game designer. The trouble lies with me.
I live a loud and crowded lifestyle. My attention is split a dozen ways at any given moment. I read a lot of zines because they tend to be small enough for me to read them in a single sitting, digesting the content for immediate use. (I run at least one game session every day.) I struggle to fully grasp games like THE CORRUPTED because they are laid out in a way that feels like a hardback compressed to fit in a stapled booklet.
Is it bad to be a “hardback compressed to fit in a stapled booklet”? No. This is not a negative critique. I do think the popularity of certain big hardbacks produced by bigger companies have a lot of influence on what a lot of people think a TTRPG should look like, and I think that’s worth examining.
I don’t buy a lot of hardbacks. I’m in the minority with that opinion, but hear me out: they look great on a shelf but tend to be ungainly to get to the table— they’re not portable enough to bring to social gatherings unless they are called for by name. They’re also expensive to produce and purchase, which reduces accessibility for designers and potential players. I wish more people sat down at the beginning of the design phase and asked themselves: could this be a softcover? Could there be a softcover version?
I want to applaud Navaar for setting a manageable goal and more or less sticking to it. That’s really difficult to do, but it is so important! Scope creep can bloat otherwise elegant projects and blow your print budget out of proportion.
I mentioned during the interview that this booklet uses a very small font and the layout is largely a two-column affair. Take a look at this page:
As long as your eyesight is good, the body text is still legible. Most of those columns contain a single idea. You don’t have to chase information around the page. The margins are reasonably wide which keeps important information from running too close to the edge of the page or being obscured in the center fold. Every single page has a wide red swath at the bottom, giving the title of the book and the page number. The background is a fairly neutral, off-white textured affair. This layout is repeated throughout the book. It is broken occasionally by a wide table or a body of text that occupies more than a single narrow column could contain.
It’s a tidy bit of work, easy to navigate, but if you photocopied and 2x magnified these half-pages… it wouldn’t look “too big”. It would look right at home inside the average fullsize hardback. Actually, if you made that background less grey and more yellow, it might look VERY familiar.
My personal design philosophy calls for more empty space and fewer words per page, but I’m not an industry expert or even a voice of authority on the subject. I just read a lot of zines. As designers, our visual expectations are strongly influenced by the games we gravitate to.
I can’t wait to see what Navaar’s next game looks like, and how his style develops. Right at the beginning of our interview, he said THE CORRUPTED was almost a magnum opus: a 100+ page project. Making a hardback is a landmark goal for a lot of designers, and I suspect Navaar will be working towards that goal very soon.
Physical Copies
To the best of my knowledge, if you want to get your hands on a physical copy of THE CORRUPTED you’ll have to go straight to the publisher. It was originally one two games released for Plus One EXP’s October Zine Club.
THANK YOU
This newsletter almost didn’t happen. The last few months have been an absolute roller-coaster for both me personally and also in the industry at large. There are a lot of reviews that I dropped the ball on while I grappled with politics and scheduling.
Navaar was very patient with me and I appreciate the time he took to give me such a wonderful and thoughtful interview.
Y’all are incredible for sticking around. Stay with us! Next week, I get to talk to blark (Mark Conway) about RUINER.
*witnesses the Your-RPG-Confuses-Me-shaped hole in his soul fill in*
You're back!!! So happy you are posting again!