Crush Depth Apparition is the latest RPG release from author and artist Amanda Lee Franck. Amanda was kind enough to talk to me about Crush Depth Apparition, her other watery works, and about ghosts and ships and hauntings.
Charles Dunwoody (CD): Thank you for talking with me, Amanda. Your nautical adventures include incredible maps depicting amazing locations. Does the map seem to spring into your mind mostly fully formed or do you create the map in another way (maybe one room at a time with the next rooms flowing organically from the previous room)?
Amanda Lee Franck (AF): Thanks so much! The map in Crush Depth is unusual in that I wrote the room descriptions first and did the layout second. It's an unreal, liminal space, so the individual rooms don't really relate to each other (except in all being submarines).
CD: Does one come first or do the map and descriptive locations for an adventure develop at the same time?
AF: I try to think about maps as an active, lived-in, 3D space (if there is something on fire in one room, smoke will be filling up the room above). So I usually start with at least a rough idea of the map before writing. You can get a lot of story ideas out of where things are in relation to other things.
where the corridor jutting out from the sub leads to
CD: Do you playtest your adventures or have them playtested, or do you use another method to refine them?
AF: I run playtests (sometimes entire campaigns) with my friends, and have an editor who fixes my writing mistakes. For Crush Depth Apparition, I was incredibly lucky to get to interview a real submariner who also took a look through the final text to make sure there were not any terrible submarine errors.
CD: Do further edits substantially change the final adventure from what you first envisioned and how do you incorporate changes into the final version?
AF: Most often I end up throwing out lots of stuff that I thought would be fun, but isn't. Sometimes I learn things that are really surprising - for example, in the first Crush Depth playtest, the players were really cautious about interacting with the haunted stuff because they knew they were part of a hierarchy with very specific responsibilities, none of which were paranormal investigation. I rewrote the text to make it clear that the captain already knows that something is wrong, and the PCs have been assigned to fix it. I wanted this to be a one to two session game, and in that case you want to get everyone to the fun (scary) part right away.
CD: Your adventures are stuffed with NPCs from vampires and victims on a cruise ship to an entire submarine crew. This approach gives a depth (heh) to your adventures as they take place in places that seem to be alive with other people living lives separate from the player characters. How do you decide to tackle covering all the NPCs surrounding the PCs; do you have one approach or a variety of ways to depict how the NPCs interact with the PCs in a crowded space for an extended time?
AF: I always try to keep my NPC descriptions as short as possible. Zedeck Siew and Mun Kao's work in A Thousand Thousand Islands is a huge influence here! Many of their adventures are built mostly out of NPCS and their relationships - but if I am running one of their games, I can skim the text in a second, look at the picture, and know exactly how to play that character. For Crush Depth, instead of character descriptions, I wrote a quotation in the voice of each NPC that hopefully contains everything you'd need to play them. I also wrote advice into the text about only introducing NPCs when they come into the story, and acting as though the PCs already know them well. It's kind of more cinematic, and it lets you get to the action very quickly.
CD: In Crush Depth Apparition when the haunting begins the image of a newly appearing watertight door opening into a corridor that juts out perpendicular from the sub into the ocean freaked me out. The unknown and impossible appearing in such a dangerous environment and yet still waiting for the PCs to act or eventually react is brilliant horror RPG design work. How did this vision of unearthly (and ultimately ghastly) impossibility not only come to mind but get translated so well into placing the need to act (or react) firmly in the hands of the PCs?
AF: I cannot remember when I thought up the corridor, but I am indebted to the many spooky impossible hallways of fiction (House of Leaves, of course, and the short story The Sladen Suit by Brian Evenson if you would like to read something really dreadful and good). I spent a lot of time early in the writing process thinking about how the structure of horror films and fiction works, and how that could be done in an RPG. One of the things I was trying to capture is the moment when the characters think they have figured out the rules of whatever paranormal thing is happening, only to discover that they are wrong and something even more inexplicable is now happening. I love that part. I tried to write the submarine haunting so that it responds to character actions in a way that is not random, but a little too complex to totally understand.
CD: Players characters in Vampire Cruise can be passengers, crews, or vampires. Any of them not only have to deal with the other vampires but also a dangerous cult and the powerful being they are trying to sacrifice back into power. When did you decide that vampires weren’t dangerous enough and a godlike being also needed to be on the refurbished cruise ship and how did you condense it all into a two day itinerary that manages to also squeeze in a ping-pong tournament?
AF: When I was running this game for my friends, I had such a good time pretending to be different kinds of vampires that I wanted a reason that the players might (temporarily) join forces with them. I was also thinking about how, in pop culture at least, mummies and vampires are kinda in a similar space (undead, wealthy, convinced of their own importance). I have never been on a cruise but I downloaded a lot of brochures, and they all have hugely overstuffed itineraries- so the idea isn't that you would do all of this stuff in the game because that's impossible, but it is all happening anyway. I wrote this game during the worst part of pandemic lockdown, and for me it was completely about the fantasy of going to a party with your friends and defeating evil, which at the time were both impossible.
CD: You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge was delightful to run (like Vampire Cruise, I ran it using Troika!). But I have to ask how you came up with this idea. A vampire cruise ship and a haunted submarine have other versions in fiction, but where did the garbage barge idea originate and how/why did you develop it into a full adventure?
AF: I had been thinking about trying to GM my first ever game for a few weeks, and one day I biked past a big barge full of scrap metal and junk on the Chicago river, and I thought 'I'll set my game on a garbage barge. I'm gonna call it You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge.' The adventure is just my notes from all the games I ran, but organized better. I wasn't trying to do anything but put in stuff I like (beetles, radio stations) and stuff I know about (failing infrastructure, the possibility of having a good life in bad circumstances). I love running other people's adventures because it is a collaboration between you and the writer and the players - every one of you is getting a slightly different picture of the world you are playing in. It can feel like you are getting to experience someone else's ideas about the world, what they think about it, what parts of it they find most interesting. The Garbage Barge is probably the best view of what you would find in my brain if you could just look in there.
Charles Dunwoody (CD): Thank you for talking with me, Amanda. Your nautical adventures include incredible maps depicting amazing locations. Does the map seem to spring into your mind mostly fully formed or do you create the map in another way (maybe one room at a time with the next rooms flowing organically from the previous room)?
Amanda Lee Franck (AF): Thanks so much! The map in Crush Depth is unusual in that I wrote the room descriptions first and did the layout second. It's an unreal, liminal space, so the individual rooms don't really relate to each other (except in all being submarines).
CD: Does one come first or do the map and descriptive locations for an adventure develop at the same time?
AF: I try to think about maps as an active, lived-in, 3D space (if there is something on fire in one room, smoke will be filling up the room above). So I usually start with at least a rough idea of the map before writing. You can get a lot of story ideas out of where things are in relation to other things.
where the corridor jutting out from the sub leads to
CD: Do you playtest your adventures or have them playtested, or do you use another method to refine them?
AF: I run playtests (sometimes entire campaigns) with my friends, and have an editor who fixes my writing mistakes. For Crush Depth Apparition, I was incredibly lucky to get to interview a real submariner who also took a look through the final text to make sure there were not any terrible submarine errors.
CD: Do further edits substantially change the final adventure from what you first envisioned and how do you incorporate changes into the final version?
AF: Most often I end up throwing out lots of stuff that I thought would be fun, but isn't. Sometimes I learn things that are really surprising - for example, in the first Crush Depth playtest, the players were really cautious about interacting with the haunted stuff because they knew they were part of a hierarchy with very specific responsibilities, none of which were paranormal investigation. I rewrote the text to make it clear that the captain already knows that something is wrong, and the PCs have been assigned to fix it. I wanted this to be a one to two session game, and in that case you want to get everyone to the fun (scary) part right away.
CD: Your adventures are stuffed with NPCs from vampires and victims on a cruise ship to an entire submarine crew. This approach gives a depth (heh) to your adventures as they take place in places that seem to be alive with other people living lives separate from the player characters. How do you decide to tackle covering all the NPCs surrounding the PCs; do you have one approach or a variety of ways to depict how the NPCs interact with the PCs in a crowded space for an extended time?
AF: I always try to keep my NPC descriptions as short as possible. Zedeck Siew and Mun Kao's work in A Thousand Thousand Islands is a huge influence here! Many of their adventures are built mostly out of NPCS and their relationships - but if I am running one of their games, I can skim the text in a second, look at the picture, and know exactly how to play that character. For Crush Depth, instead of character descriptions, I wrote a quotation in the voice of each NPC that hopefully contains everything you'd need to play them. I also wrote advice into the text about only introducing NPCs when they come into the story, and acting as though the PCs already know them well. It's kind of more cinematic, and it lets you get to the action very quickly.
CD: In Crush Depth Apparition when the haunting begins the image of a newly appearing watertight door opening into a corridor that juts out perpendicular from the sub into the ocean freaked me out. The unknown and impossible appearing in such a dangerous environment and yet still waiting for the PCs to act or eventually react is brilliant horror RPG design work. How did this vision of unearthly (and ultimately ghastly) impossibility not only come to mind but get translated so well into placing the need to act (or react) firmly in the hands of the PCs?
AF: I cannot remember when I thought up the corridor, but I am indebted to the many spooky impossible hallways of fiction (House of Leaves, of course, and the short story The Sladen Suit by Brian Evenson if you would like to read something really dreadful and good). I spent a lot of time early in the writing process thinking about how the structure of horror films and fiction works, and how that could be done in an RPG. One of the things I was trying to capture is the moment when the characters think they have figured out the rules of whatever paranormal thing is happening, only to discover that they are wrong and something even more inexplicable is now happening. I love that part. I tried to write the submarine haunting so that it responds to character actions in a way that is not random, but a little too complex to totally understand.
CD: Players characters in Vampire Cruise can be passengers, crews, or vampires. Any of them not only have to deal with the other vampires but also a dangerous cult and the powerful being they are trying to sacrifice back into power. When did you decide that vampires weren’t dangerous enough and a godlike being also needed to be on the refurbished cruise ship and how did you condense it all into a two day itinerary that manages to also squeeze in a ping-pong tournament?
AF: When I was running this game for my friends, I had such a good time pretending to be different kinds of vampires that I wanted a reason that the players might (temporarily) join forces with them. I was also thinking about how, in pop culture at least, mummies and vampires are kinda in a similar space (undead, wealthy, convinced of their own importance). I have never been on a cruise but I downloaded a lot of brochures, and they all have hugely overstuffed itineraries- so the idea isn't that you would do all of this stuff in the game because that's impossible, but it is all happening anyway. I wrote this game during the worst part of pandemic lockdown, and for me it was completely about the fantasy of going to a party with your friends and defeating evil, which at the time were both impossible.
CD: You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge was delightful to run (like Vampire Cruise, I ran it using Troika!). But I have to ask how you came up with this idea. A vampire cruise ship and a haunted submarine have other versions in fiction, but where did the garbage barge idea originate and how/why did you develop it into a full adventure?
AF: I had been thinking about trying to GM my first ever game for a few weeks, and one day I biked past a big barge full of scrap metal and junk on the Chicago river, and I thought 'I'll set my game on a garbage barge. I'm gonna call it You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge.' The adventure is just my notes from all the games I ran, but organized better. I wasn't trying to do anything but put in stuff I like (beetles, radio stations) and stuff I know about (failing infrastructure, the possibility of having a good life in bad circumstances). I love running other people's adventures because it is a collaboration between you and the writer and the players - every one of you is getting a slightly different picture of the world you are playing in. It can feel like you are getting to experience someone else's ideas about the world, what they think about it, what parts of it they find most interesting. The Garbage Barge is probably the best view of what you would find in my brain if you could just look in there.
