Hello, all!
Today we’re rolling out a design Q&A with Jason Morningstar that will take you behind the creation of The Blue Way. Jason is the designer behind big hits like Fiasco, Desperation, and, recently, Zhenya’s Wonder Tales. (Is June 16th here yet?!) Without any further ado, please enjoy his thoughts on The Blue Way:
Q: What motivated you to create this game? Where did the first idea come from?
JM: The Blue Way was the result of a deep dive into the fall of the Ēxcān Tlahtōlōyān to the Tlaxcalans and their Spanish allies, starting in 1519. I was particularly struck by the conquest’s aftermath, where indigenous art, religion, politics, and culture were simultaneously overtly destroyed and also assimilated into Spanish colonial rule. In some cases historians have little to go on in understanding pre-contact Aztec life and in others they must rely on pretty suspect primary sources literally written by the victors and their proxies. What remains is sometimes a patchwork that tells a story, but not, perhaps, the whole story. You have to read between the lines. This dynamic plays out again and again all over our world (The Roman arrival in Britain in 43 AD is another great example of this process), and we’ve lost so much. It got me thinking, and as a game designer that’s usually trouble.
There are lots of games about colonialism, most of them sort of horrifying at a slight remove (I’m looking at you, Puerto Rico). I think you can argue that even games like Dungeons and Dragons are colonial enterprises at heart. Most of them are written from the point of view of the colonizer – traditionally, someone making a roleplaying game about the the fall of the Ēxcān Tlahtōlōyān would position the player’s characters as heroic Spanish adventurers. I wondered how to invert that tired formula.
Q: What surprised you during the development of this game? Did you learn/try anything new?
JM: Something I learned in playtesting The Blue Way was that players often approached the game from wildly different points of view that made for a great shared experience. When one player really digs in and resists the Dusians, and another cares so deeply for all the things they hold dear that they are willing to make painful sacrifices to accommodate the newcomer’s demands, a spectrum of responses emerges that is both useful and entertaining for everyone to observe. There’s no wrong way to approach play, but the game really sings when you get diverse opinions and decisions.
Q: Did the story or the mechanics come first? How did you pair them together?
JM: In designing the game, I knew I’d need a destructive mechanism to simulate the loss of cultural assets, and that drove the design process. The “story” bits – both the actual stories and the many difficult, card-based inputs that would challenge the players to make awful choices, came later. The societies of the Dusians and the Sathani sort of grew organically as I wrote the prompts, but the framework was in place.
Q: How did you develop the world of The Blue Way? What were some of your influences?
JM: Throughout the design process, the Spanish colonial rule of the Valley of Mexico in the 1520s and beyond, was on my mind. My other two touchstones were the Roman conquest of Britain and the much-later Norman conquest. I think you could easily make a list of dozens of similar events worldwide. I wanted big, obvious differences, so the invading culture is sort of medieval in its outlook and a little hierarchical and effete perhaps. It doesn’t really have a clue about, or respect for, Sathani culture, which is pastoral, agrarian, and tied to the land in specific, religious, ways. There’s no cultural value judgment implied, but all the Dusian colonizers you meet are terrible people, just the worst.
Q: What was something you chose not to include in this game?
JM: One of my initial decisions was about abstraction – did I want to make a game about a historical moment, like the Norman conquest, or did I want to abstract it into a low fantasy analog? The advantages of the former are obvious – historical grounding, the ability for the participants to become WIkipedia-level authorities if they want, maybe lessons made more impactful by being pulled from real life. The advantages of the latter were persuasive, though – abstraction made the themes universal and – more importantly – removed the participants from any responsibility for “getting it right”. I make a lot of games where I make the opposite decision, and in those, I need to be very careful about supporting the players and helping them avoid what I call “history panic” – excessively worrying about making mistakes when playing out real events. It’s counterproductive and no fun at all. If The Blue Way was going to be about the cultural impacts of colonialism and assimilation, I wanted to foreground that – not historical minutia. I would abstract it, make up my own low fantasy analogs, and make it approachable.
Q: What do you want players to take away from your game? What do you want them to learn/feel/reflect upon?
JM: I feel like games like The Blue Way are a really good way to provoke a little empathy and help people wonder about the topic. I don’t pretend to be an expert or authority, and my ultimate goals are to create a fun experience (by some definition of fun) and infect the participants with a little curiosity about the subject matter. In the case of The Blue Way, I’d love it if they’d emerge from the game reconsidering how the topics of colonialism and assimilation are generally addressed (or ignored) in games.
Q: How do you see this project as unique compared to your others? How does it borrow/connect to your other games?
JM: The Blue Way is a logical extension of my design work both procedurally and thematically. Procedurally I love card-based play, which has so many great advantages in a contained-but-replayable experience. You see that all over my design work, from the second edition of Fiasco to my latest game, Zhenya’s Wonder Tales. In terms of theme, it aligns with other games of mine that are history-inflected or even history-dominated. The Blue Way is abstracted the way games like The Lesser Players’ Tale or The Broadcast are, and for all the same reasons (approachability, universality, avoiding “history panic”).
Q: Is there anything else you’d like players to know about this game or how it was created?
JM: I’m really proud of The Blue Way and I hope that people will engage with it thoughtfully but enthusiastically. It’s a pretty heavy game, so be kind to yourself and your friends when you play. In my experience it is very rewarding and fun.
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Thanks, Jason!
We can’t wait for the launch of The Blue Way‘s crowdfunding campaign in ONE WEEK! Follow the prelaunch page now to be one of the first to back this standout project and explore its secrets for yourself.