Last month, I woke up at 4:40 AM to join a tabletop roleplaying convention half the world away: in one click I logged onto the Session Zero Online convention, where 150 designers, fans, and merchants met from the Philippines, Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, and more to discuss, buy, and playtest games. This year’s Session Zero convention, the first one held online thanks to the pandemic, focused specifically on RPGSEA, the acronym for Southeast Asian RPGs, and no group on the convention hall better summarized the variety and skill of the growing RPGSEA community than the team from Our Shores.
This compilation of RPGs is currently finishing out its Kickstarter campaign, and just a few days before the Session Zero Online event began, the Our Shore team reached their goal of $26,000. “It really has been more than a little overwhelming to see all the outpouring of support,” designer Sinta Posadas told me.
Kickstarters are one of the main economic drivers of a flourishing indie TTRPG industry, but the website only allows projects from a couple dozen countries, and the only Southeast Asian country is Singapore. Our Shores’ main three games—Navathem’s End, Capitalites, and Maharlika—are Filipino and Malaysian, so the individual designers would normally be locked out of using Kickstarter on their own. They came together through Sandy Pug Games, a US-based design house, to Kickstart all of their games at once and open up this avenue of support available to so many TTRPG designers. “Over the past couple of years, we've seen how designers over here have had to make do with trying their best to make their own materials for their games and hoping that they can afford editing fees, artist commission fees, among many others,” Posadas said. “I strongly believe that things would have been easier had I had easy access to Kickstarter.” Posadas also points to the real lack of full-line game stores in the Philippines, meaning physical copies of RPGs can be hard to market or reach potentially interested people in the area. Gamers and Gaming Meets, the organization behind Session Zero, has been trying to build this physical community for years in the Philippines, and Kickstarters will help this process too, as they guarantee hundreds or thousands of people will be receiving copies of your RPG. “What more if full access to Kickstarter gets granted?” Posadas daydreamed. “I'd love to see the day.”
The three main RPGSEA games compiled in Our Shores span the genres. There’s Posadas and Pam Punzalan’s Navathem’s End, a Powered By The Apocalypse/Forged In the Dark kitbash that takes place in an art-deco-inspired epic fantasy world that spans three megacontinents where not-so-dead Colossals wander the coasts and the Apocalypse is due any minute now.
Capitalites is nearly the opposite: a GM-less urban slice-of-life game where players take on the role of 20-somethings going to parties, getting in fights, and interning at crappy jobs. “There's still a huge amount of people who want to tell mundane stories and put a melodramatic/comedic spin on it,” Capitalites designer Samuel Mui explains. “Most games of Capitalites have had a blend of funny and tragic elements and I think it's that duality that people seem to be attracted to—like what's the humour in a terrible breakup or the underlying sadness in a fun night out?”
Then there’s Maharlika, a science fantasy RPG equal parts mythological and cyberpunk, where you play as Maharlika, the pilots of Mekas, fighting and exploring across the galaxy. The rulebook is full of wonderful lore and megacorporations to align yourself with, but designer Joaquin Kyle Vincent “Waks” Saavedra knows why you’re here: “To be frank: you probably bought this RPG for the Meka. I’m here to say that you NEED to show awesome meka fighting,” the rules explain. It’s a fantastic system for throwing those mechanized punches and that energy.
Now that their campaign has reached their stretch goal of $30,000, they’ll be expanding Our Shores with an additional zine of smaller games from 9 RPGSEA designers. The variety of regional designers is astounding.
In Session Zero Online convention, that was evident just from walking through the virtual landscape. Since the convention was held in Gather.town instead of Zoom, every person was represented as a Zelda-like pixelated avatars who could wander through the area, with video chatting options appearing and disappearing as avatars walked by each other. Inside the merchant quarters, I found John Harness of Knucklebone Magazine meeting and recruiting new writers to analyze RPGs. Deeper in, I found a man playing a piano to no one in particular, and four explorers journeying into a hidden part of the convention to access a treasure chest. Dozens of attendees took seats in an open-air amphitheater to hear designers discuss how to best write RPGSEA projects in other languages: how could designers translate Malay pronouns into English editions? What about Tagalog loan words, or words with no equivalent? “Most people here do not think in English, so they should not create in English,” a speaker suggested. The entire event was as lively, diverse, and fascinating as any convention I’ve attended.
When the convention had ended, attendees had participated in 40 demonstrations and playtests, from Hindu-Buddhist rural horror adventures to my 5 AM session of Sin Posadas’ Lutong Banwa, a game that revolved around cooking a damn fine chicken adobo. Our Shores designers had loved the experience, meeting more people in their region to finally seeing faces of mutual they’d only interacted with on the RPG Twittersphere. “Online cons can be messy or hard to follow but Gamers and Gaming Meets’ choice to use Gather.Town as a virtual space was a brilliant move that paid off exponentially,” Capitalites’s Sam Mui said. “If you're a convention organizer, hire the Gamers and Gaming Meets folx to help you out. No joke, I feel like the approach has changed the way people are going to approach convention organization in the future.”
Saavedra sees the event more as a Pandora’s box that has opened, showing everyone the potential pros and cons of conventions in virtual space, but also inviting others to learn from Session Zero Online. In the same way, Our Shores is a Pandora’s box, a fresh and exciting example of how designers can bypass Kickstarter’s restrictions and burst onto the scene. Now that Our Shores is a success, how many other international designers will use their techniques to Kickstart their games: Salvadoran designers, Nepali designers, Uzbek designers, Zimbabwean designers? I’m excited to see—and purchase—all of their games.
The Our Shores: An RPG Compilation Kickstarter concludes on Wednesday, February 17th.
This compilation of RPGs is currently finishing out its Kickstarter campaign, and just a few days before the Session Zero Online event began, the Our Shore team reached their goal of $26,000. “It really has been more than a little overwhelming to see all the outpouring of support,” designer Sinta Posadas told me.
Kickstarters are one of the main economic drivers of a flourishing indie TTRPG industry, but the website only allows projects from a couple dozen countries, and the only Southeast Asian country is Singapore. Our Shores’ main three games—Navathem’s End, Capitalites, and Maharlika—are Filipino and Malaysian, so the individual designers would normally be locked out of using Kickstarter on their own. They came together through Sandy Pug Games, a US-based design house, to Kickstart all of their games at once and open up this avenue of support available to so many TTRPG designers. “Over the past couple of years, we've seen how designers over here have had to make do with trying their best to make their own materials for their games and hoping that they can afford editing fees, artist commission fees, among many others,” Posadas said. “I strongly believe that things would have been easier had I had easy access to Kickstarter.” Posadas also points to the real lack of full-line game stores in the Philippines, meaning physical copies of RPGs can be hard to market or reach potentially interested people in the area. Gamers and Gaming Meets, the organization behind Session Zero, has been trying to build this physical community for years in the Philippines, and Kickstarters will help this process too, as they guarantee hundreds or thousands of people will be receiving copies of your RPG. “What more if full access to Kickstarter gets granted?” Posadas daydreamed. “I'd love to see the day.”
The three main RPGSEA games compiled in Our Shores span the genres. There’s Posadas and Pam Punzalan’s Navathem’s End, a Powered By The Apocalypse/Forged In the Dark kitbash that takes place in an art-deco-inspired epic fantasy world that spans three megacontinents where not-so-dead Colossals wander the coasts and the Apocalypse is due any minute now.
Capitalites is nearly the opposite: a GM-less urban slice-of-life game where players take on the role of 20-somethings going to parties, getting in fights, and interning at crappy jobs. “There's still a huge amount of people who want to tell mundane stories and put a melodramatic/comedic spin on it,” Capitalites designer Samuel Mui explains. “Most games of Capitalites have had a blend of funny and tragic elements and I think it's that duality that people seem to be attracted to—like what's the humour in a terrible breakup or the underlying sadness in a fun night out?”
Then there’s Maharlika, a science fantasy RPG equal parts mythological and cyberpunk, where you play as Maharlika, the pilots of Mekas, fighting and exploring across the galaxy. The rulebook is full of wonderful lore and megacorporations to align yourself with, but designer Joaquin Kyle Vincent “Waks” Saavedra knows why you’re here: “To be frank: you probably bought this RPG for the Meka. I’m here to say that you NEED to show awesome meka fighting,” the rules explain. It’s a fantastic system for throwing those mechanized punches and that energy.
Now that their campaign has reached their stretch goal of $30,000, they’ll be expanding Our Shores with an additional zine of smaller games from 9 RPGSEA designers. The variety of regional designers is astounding.
In Session Zero Online convention, that was evident just from walking through the virtual landscape. Since the convention was held in Gather.town instead of Zoom, every person was represented as a Zelda-like pixelated avatars who could wander through the area, with video chatting options appearing and disappearing as avatars walked by each other. Inside the merchant quarters, I found John Harness of Knucklebone Magazine meeting and recruiting new writers to analyze RPGs. Deeper in, I found a man playing a piano to no one in particular, and four explorers journeying into a hidden part of the convention to access a treasure chest. Dozens of attendees took seats in an open-air amphitheater to hear designers discuss how to best write RPGSEA projects in other languages: how could designers translate Malay pronouns into English editions? What about Tagalog loan words, or words with no equivalent? “Most people here do not think in English, so they should not create in English,” a speaker suggested. The entire event was as lively, diverse, and fascinating as any convention I’ve attended.
When the convention had ended, attendees had participated in 40 demonstrations and playtests, from Hindu-Buddhist rural horror adventures to my 5 AM session of Sin Posadas’ Lutong Banwa, a game that revolved around cooking a damn fine chicken adobo. Our Shores designers had loved the experience, meeting more people in their region to finally seeing faces of mutual they’d only interacted with on the RPG Twittersphere. “Online cons can be messy or hard to follow but Gamers and Gaming Meets’ choice to use Gather.Town as a virtual space was a brilliant move that paid off exponentially,” Capitalites’s Sam Mui said. “If you're a convention organizer, hire the Gamers and Gaming Meets folx to help you out. No joke, I feel like the approach has changed the way people are going to approach convention organization in the future.”
Saavedra sees the event more as a Pandora’s box that has opened, showing everyone the potential pros and cons of conventions in virtual space, but also inviting others to learn from Session Zero Online. In the same way, Our Shores is a Pandora’s box, a fresh and exciting example of how designers can bypass Kickstarter’s restrictions and burst onto the scene. Now that Our Shores is a success, how many other international designers will use their techniques to Kickstart their games: Salvadoran designers, Nepali designers, Uzbek designers, Zimbabwean designers? I’m excited to see—and purchase—all of their games.
The Our Shores: An RPG Compilation Kickstarter concludes on Wednesday, February 17th.
