Here’s a succinct evocative description of Studio Hermitage’s new RPG, Our Brilliant Ruin, from the back cover:
Studio Hermitage sent me a copy of the core rulebook and the three pack of Whisper to help me prepare for this interview. Paxton Galvanek, the CEO, also wrote me a hand written card thanking me for the work I do that is published on EN World and for checking out his company’s RPG. Thank you, Paxton! The card and the sentiments mean a lot.
Charlie Dunwoody (CD): Our Brilliant Ruin combines a dying gilded age world inflicted with Ruin with the interactions between aristocracy, truefolk, and unbonded. How did the idea for this setting first develop and how did it change from initial conception to the final RPG work?
Justin Achilli (JA): Quite simply, it grew. The original idea had the characters never leaving a single estate, with players portraying a variety of aristocrats, household staff, and unbonded outsiders who had some agenda involving the estate, all threatened by a malignant force with the placeholder name of “the Dark.” But as we worked through the circumstances and opportunities, we wanted to see more of the world and what was happening in it, especially to give context to “the Dark” (which became the Ruin, and we detailed its origins and function) and the household staff, which Rachel proposed to expand into the guilds. The unbonded, as well, gained more substance, with different ways of being an outsider in a world with a brittle, calcified social order. They were originally highwaymen and cardsharps lurking at the edges of the estates who somehow made their way inside, such as by sneaking in or procuring an ill-advised invitation. The syllokinetics became more, as well. They were originally conceived almost as “dungeons,” sites where enterprising characters could plunder lost technologies and gain resources. But as we developed them, we decided that, as machines, some of them might as well become mobile, too, and they could become active threats to communities and estates that the characters held dear, and force difficult decisions. You’ve got an estate that you’ve been cultivating, and a village nearby and the two mutually depend on each other. But here comes a malfunctioning syllokinetic over the hills and meadow, with your estate in its path. You can divert it, but that risks putting the village in its way, with many more lives endangered. How do you manage that quandary? So now, in addition to being destinations, the syllokinetics can become unreasoning antagonists themselves.
CD: For someone brand new to Our Brilliant Ruin, what is a major theme of the setting, why is that them important, and what tone should a GM seek to invoke?
JA: The big cornerstones are social dynamics and existential horror. The world is unjust, having started to unravel because of the Ruin at the same time the remnants of its feudal society proved unsuited to the task of protecting the people who live in it. So you have aristocrats who command much of the resources of the setting — do you want to help them and hopefully buy a little more time in comfort? Do you want to be one of them, celebrating the approaching end of the world in privilege? Do you want to tear them down and replace them with… something else? And for mixed groups, with characters from all three of the social factions, are you the exception to the rule, who somehow find harmony in your differences? Or do the expectations of the prevailing social order sow discord among you? And for the existential horror, even if you’re not directly facing down a vampire or ravening chimera, the Ruin is a force that pushes people into proximity, often uncomfortably. It may be an environmental threat, like in the mines of Ripper’s Fork, encroaching on the spaces that provide a community with its livelihood, or it can be a looming dread that pushes people into one of the estates for a “country weekend” and keeps them trapped within. It works for everything from individual monsters to the reason everyone’s trapped in the haunted manor, if your group enjoys one type of horror over another.
CD: What might be the most challenging part of running a campaign set in this world and what advice would you give GMs to help overcome this challenge?
JA: The resolution system provides really swingy results because of the emotional weight of the setting, and those results aim to provide grand success or crushing catastrophe. Lean into that! Many of the best stories come as a result from someone failing at something they’ve tried to achieve. Failure doesn’t mean that the story stops moving forward. In most cases, it means that a complication has arisen, like someone’s been seen doing something dodgy, or someone’s left evidence as to their presence. Many games set up their dice resolutions to indicate pass/ fail for whether things progress, such as if a character can unlock a door or survives an attack. For OBR, though, the resolution system is as often or more an indicator of what happens next. It’s influenced by fail-forward systems and systems like GUMSHOE that assume characters, for example, find information when investigating and if any complications arise from that or the character performs remarkably well. Let the systems keep the story moving; roll dice only when an outcome is in question.
CD: The player characters live on a shared estate and develop their home during a campaign. What game purpose does the estate serve (beyond being a base of course) and what is one of your favorite rules pertaining to estates?
JA: Indeed, the estate is definitely a base, and that creates some key outcomes. The first is that it’s a common asset that everyone has to agree or compromise on how to develop. The estate gains its own progression currency, so players are encouraged to mutually shape how they want it to develop, and that serves to bring the player group together. Nobody gets caught out by spending too much of their own progression currency; it’s a mutual accumulation. Second, it invests the characters in the area around them, which creates a host of NPCs and familiar locations that the players hopefully want to see thrive or get their comeuppance. That could be NPCs who are also part of the estate staff or people on the periphery who have a claim to the estate and want to take it back or people in a nearby village who have a personal or even romantic connection to the individuals at the estate. When you look at some of the inspiration material, you see houses like Downton Abbey and the show is named after them; they almost become a character themselves, and the estate is the place that serves to pull all the people together to reveal their stories. “Estates” is also a pretty flexibly used word in OBR. The assumption is a mixed-faction game where some characters are aristocrats, others are truefolk, and some are unbonded, so the estate has place for those who luxuriate in it and those who have some sort of professional attachment to it or some other interest. But if you’re playing an all-truefolk game, for example, your characters’ “estate” may be a multi-guild chapterhouse or a performers’ enclave or a Union workshop. If you’re unbonded, you may have your own syndicate hideout or homesteaders’ property. It’s a place to care about and build together. As to my favorite rules, I love the press-your-luck mechanics attached to using the estates’ attributes and features. So the more you rely on the estate, the more you take advantage of what it has to offer, the more you risk its Ruin and all the complications that come from that. And you can use the Schemes system to mitigate the Ruin accumulating there, so the risk-reward mechanic eventually highlights opportunity cost as well.
CD: Do you have an anecdote or two from a campaign you have run or played in using Our Brilliant Ruin?
JA: In one of our house games, our characters were investigating a missing person. We wrangled some information about an underground boxing match that we crashed, where most of the attendance was truefolk and unbonded. We were found out when our group’s aristocrat was deemed to have had “too nice” teeth, which sounds absurd on the surface, but also speaks to the quality of life differences between the haves and the have-nots. In another game, the group had discovered a flesh-eater in town near the estate and cornered the thing during a harvest season fun-fair. The characters ended up using fire against the flesh-eater, which is especially effective against Ruin and Ruined creatures. When the rest of the community convened at the village square, all they saw was a pair of aristocrats and their flunkies burning someone to death, not knowing that the “victim” was in fact a Ruined monstrosity. A horrific Frankenstein moment, when the gathered truefolk took up torches and rifles against the group for shivaree. The only thing that saved their skins was a Triumph earlier in the session where one of the players gave an impromptu oration on what the estate meant to them and how many community lives it had touched, and how they promised to bring that back. So they squeaked by on goodwill earned a few scenes prior.
CD: What was one of the biggest design challenges you faced in creating Our Brilliant Ruin and how did you overcome that challenge?
JA: We knew that we wanted the resolution to model the characters’ emotional states and personal motivations, so one of our early prototypes had individual passions like Love, Hate, Fear, etc. working in the same way the Personality attributes do now. But we found that players weren’t really feeling those particular emotions even when they wanted to use the dice pool for them — you’d get these comical deadpan moments of “Huh, well, I guess I’m doing this out of love.” So that wasn’t working, obviously, and we moved Passion into being the press-your-luck system that the players could call upon when they and/ or their characters were actually passionate about having something succeed.
CD: Any final thoughts you would like to share with EN World?
JA: Never trust a smiling aristocrat. Or a seemingly functional syllokinetic.
Charlie is a participant in the Noble Knight Affiliate Program and the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, both of which are affiliate programs that provide a means for participants to earn money by advertising and linking to Noble Knight Games and DriveThruRPG respectively. Posts and articles posted here by others do not reflect the views of Charlie Dunwoody. If you like the articles at EN World please consider supporting the Patreon.
Studio Hermitage sent me a copy of the core rulebook and the three pack of Whisper to help me prepare for this interview. Paxton Galvanek, the CEO, also wrote me a hand written card thanking me for the work I do that is published on EN World and for checking out his company’s RPG. Thank you, Paxton! The card and the sentiments mean a lot.
Charlie Dunwoody (CD): Our Brilliant Ruin combines a dying gilded age world inflicted with Ruin with the interactions between aristocracy, truefolk, and unbonded. How did the idea for this setting first develop and how did it change from initial conception to the final RPG work?
Justin Achilli (JA): Quite simply, it grew. The original idea had the characters never leaving a single estate, with players portraying a variety of aristocrats, household staff, and unbonded outsiders who had some agenda involving the estate, all threatened by a malignant force with the placeholder name of “the Dark.” But as we worked through the circumstances and opportunities, we wanted to see more of the world and what was happening in it, especially to give context to “the Dark” (which became the Ruin, and we detailed its origins and function) and the household staff, which Rachel proposed to expand into the guilds. The unbonded, as well, gained more substance, with different ways of being an outsider in a world with a brittle, calcified social order. They were originally highwaymen and cardsharps lurking at the edges of the estates who somehow made their way inside, such as by sneaking in or procuring an ill-advised invitation. The syllokinetics became more, as well. They were originally conceived almost as “dungeons,” sites where enterprising characters could plunder lost technologies and gain resources. But as we developed them, we decided that, as machines, some of them might as well become mobile, too, and they could become active threats to communities and estates that the characters held dear, and force difficult decisions. You’ve got an estate that you’ve been cultivating, and a village nearby and the two mutually depend on each other. But here comes a malfunctioning syllokinetic over the hills and meadow, with your estate in its path. You can divert it, but that risks putting the village in its way, with many more lives endangered. How do you manage that quandary? So now, in addition to being destinations, the syllokinetics can become unreasoning antagonists themselves.
CD: For someone brand new to Our Brilliant Ruin, what is a major theme of the setting, why is that them important, and what tone should a GM seek to invoke?
JA: The big cornerstones are social dynamics and existential horror. The world is unjust, having started to unravel because of the Ruin at the same time the remnants of its feudal society proved unsuited to the task of protecting the people who live in it. So you have aristocrats who command much of the resources of the setting — do you want to help them and hopefully buy a little more time in comfort? Do you want to be one of them, celebrating the approaching end of the world in privilege? Do you want to tear them down and replace them with… something else? And for mixed groups, with characters from all three of the social factions, are you the exception to the rule, who somehow find harmony in your differences? Or do the expectations of the prevailing social order sow discord among you? And for the existential horror, even if you’re not directly facing down a vampire or ravening chimera, the Ruin is a force that pushes people into proximity, often uncomfortably. It may be an environmental threat, like in the mines of Ripper’s Fork, encroaching on the spaces that provide a community with its livelihood, or it can be a looming dread that pushes people into one of the estates for a “country weekend” and keeps them trapped within. It works for everything from individual monsters to the reason everyone’s trapped in the haunted manor, if your group enjoys one type of horror over another.
CD: What might be the most challenging part of running a campaign set in this world and what advice would you give GMs to help overcome this challenge?
JA: The resolution system provides really swingy results because of the emotional weight of the setting, and those results aim to provide grand success or crushing catastrophe. Lean into that! Many of the best stories come as a result from someone failing at something they’ve tried to achieve. Failure doesn’t mean that the story stops moving forward. In most cases, it means that a complication has arisen, like someone’s been seen doing something dodgy, or someone’s left evidence as to their presence. Many games set up their dice resolutions to indicate pass/ fail for whether things progress, such as if a character can unlock a door or survives an attack. For OBR, though, the resolution system is as often or more an indicator of what happens next. It’s influenced by fail-forward systems and systems like GUMSHOE that assume characters, for example, find information when investigating and if any complications arise from that or the character performs remarkably well. Let the systems keep the story moving; roll dice only when an outcome is in question.
CD: The player characters live on a shared estate and develop their home during a campaign. What game purpose does the estate serve (beyond being a base of course) and what is one of your favorite rules pertaining to estates?
JA: Indeed, the estate is definitely a base, and that creates some key outcomes. The first is that it’s a common asset that everyone has to agree or compromise on how to develop. The estate gains its own progression currency, so players are encouraged to mutually shape how they want it to develop, and that serves to bring the player group together. Nobody gets caught out by spending too much of their own progression currency; it’s a mutual accumulation. Second, it invests the characters in the area around them, which creates a host of NPCs and familiar locations that the players hopefully want to see thrive or get their comeuppance. That could be NPCs who are also part of the estate staff or people on the periphery who have a claim to the estate and want to take it back or people in a nearby village who have a personal or even romantic connection to the individuals at the estate. When you look at some of the inspiration material, you see houses like Downton Abbey and the show is named after them; they almost become a character themselves, and the estate is the place that serves to pull all the people together to reveal their stories. “Estates” is also a pretty flexibly used word in OBR. The assumption is a mixed-faction game where some characters are aristocrats, others are truefolk, and some are unbonded, so the estate has place for those who luxuriate in it and those who have some sort of professional attachment to it or some other interest. But if you’re playing an all-truefolk game, for example, your characters’ “estate” may be a multi-guild chapterhouse or a performers’ enclave or a Union workshop. If you’re unbonded, you may have your own syndicate hideout or homesteaders’ property. It’s a place to care about and build together. As to my favorite rules, I love the press-your-luck mechanics attached to using the estates’ attributes and features. So the more you rely on the estate, the more you take advantage of what it has to offer, the more you risk its Ruin and all the complications that come from that. And you can use the Schemes system to mitigate the Ruin accumulating there, so the risk-reward mechanic eventually highlights opportunity cost as well.
CD: Do you have an anecdote or two from a campaign you have run or played in using Our Brilliant Ruin?
JA: In one of our house games, our characters were investigating a missing person. We wrangled some information about an underground boxing match that we crashed, where most of the attendance was truefolk and unbonded. We were found out when our group’s aristocrat was deemed to have had “too nice” teeth, which sounds absurd on the surface, but also speaks to the quality of life differences between the haves and the have-nots. In another game, the group had discovered a flesh-eater in town near the estate and cornered the thing during a harvest season fun-fair. The characters ended up using fire against the flesh-eater, which is especially effective against Ruin and Ruined creatures. When the rest of the community convened at the village square, all they saw was a pair of aristocrats and their flunkies burning someone to death, not knowing that the “victim” was in fact a Ruined monstrosity. A horrific Frankenstein moment, when the gathered truefolk took up torches and rifles against the group for shivaree. The only thing that saved their skins was a Triumph earlier in the session where one of the players gave an impromptu oration on what the estate meant to them and how many community lives it had touched, and how they promised to bring that back. So they squeaked by on goodwill earned a few scenes prior.
CD: What was one of the biggest design challenges you faced in creating Our Brilliant Ruin and how did you overcome that challenge?
JA: We knew that we wanted the resolution to model the characters’ emotional states and personal motivations, so one of our early prototypes had individual passions like Love, Hate, Fear, etc. working in the same way the Personality attributes do now. But we found that players weren’t really feeling those particular emotions even when they wanted to use the dice pool for them — you’d get these comical deadpan moments of “Huh, well, I guess I’m doing this out of love.” So that wasn’t working, obviously, and we moved Passion into being the press-your-luck system that the players could call upon when they and/ or their characters were actually passionate about having something succeed.
CD: Any final thoughts you would like to share with EN World?
JA: Never trust a smiling aristocrat. Or a seemingly functional syllokinetic.
Charlie is a participant in the Noble Knight Affiliate Program and the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, both of which are affiliate programs that provide a means for participants to earn money by advertising and linking to Noble Knight Games and DriveThruRPG respectively. Posts and articles posted here by others do not reflect the views of Charlie Dunwoody. If you like the articles at EN World please consider supporting the Patreon.
