Kelsey Dion
speaker
131 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Kelsey Dion’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Right, right. You don't have to define every corner case in every spell. I think that. You're going to let the people playing and running the game use their knowledge of fantasy and real world to sort of make rulings as needed when needed. Yeah.
Thank you, ethereal bandersnatch.
Thank you. Yeah. Well, I have to give credit too to other games and other people who have sort of developed these concepts out throughout the last 20 years. Like Dungeon Crawl Classics has a really interesting and certainly more complex but comparable spellcasting system to Shadow Dark.
Yeah, I think some of their ideas were very pioneering and the design space grabbed onto those and took off with it and another 15 years have gone by of crunching these ideas around and discussing them. I think what I've written has been born out of that whole primordial soup of ideas that have come about in the last 15 years.
That's very fair and true. I think that's an element that's sort of pulled from the OSR where it's like, well, player skill is really considered a large element in the gameplay. And I wanted to be true to that given that we're making an OSR-style game, but it can be difficult. Like, for example, people who don't feel comfortable role-playing like a...
charisma based situation where they're trying to persuade somebody to do something there are people who genuinely don't feel comfortable doing that and for them having like a charisma bonus or a charisma skill that they can roll on is great because then they can say my character is good at this I'm going to let my character handle it and in old school games and in Shadow Dark there's a little bit more like well what do you say to him you know and it's not right for everybody so that's a good thing to point it out yeah and
I'd say that's fair because a longer backstory for a character is probably not really going to come into play. Your backstory is what you do in your early levels if you survive them. And then you gain your character's backstory in those moments. Whereas in a more heroic style game, your character is a little bit more capable from the start. So you come in...
I, you know, I hadn't officially prepared a speech, not because I didn't take it seriously, but because it was, again, a little bit of a superstition thing for me where I was like, well, if I prepare this whole big speech and then I don't win anything, I'll feel kind of silly.
And then, and I really genuinely, seeing what I was up against, I was like, oh, there's, you know, we'll be lucky if we win one, right? And so it's funny because I got to really say everything I wanted to say that I would have put into a speech before. sort of parsed out across a couple different times on stage, which was really special. So I did not expect to win four at all. Maybe just one.
And definitely not something like Best Rules, for example, where we were up against some incredibly big contenders. That was shocking and humbling. And I had a little bit of survivor's guilt where I was like, I'm sorry, Pathfinder. I'm sorry this happened. But it was very, very vindicating and humbling and exciting, too.
I did not realize how many people were in the audience because I was sitting more towards the front. And I got there a little early. So, you know, I was facing forward and then I turned around to look out at the stage and I was like, there are people all the way to the back.
this is crazy so thank goodness I'm a dungeon master because I had to go into dungeon master mode and just be like I you know instead of totally blanking out and having nothing to say you know I think being a game master gives you the ability to speak through uncertainty so that's what I ended up doing and yeah it was not something I thought I would experience once let alone four times in one night yeah
Well, I'm writing more Shadow Dark stuff because now I get to. I get to make this my focus for my career. So I'm writing some, there's some zines for the game that I write called Curse Scroll zines and they're each.
I love writing. I think they're my favorite thing to write because they're micro settings and I get to put all the really concrete world building into them that I left out of the core rules to make the core rules usable chameleon style across multiple universes. So I'm writing three more curse scrolls right now. And I think we're going to try to kickstart them in March.
So we're going to do some fancy fun stuff. And that's currently what I'm working on. It takes a little while to write each one. So, you know, deadlines. I'm going to make these deadlines.
Oh, who knows? I think it's... Pressure, pressure. Right, the pressure. Because corals always do so well. And then supplements are sort of... I don't think they're expected to do that well, so if we did anywhere close to how the Shadow Dark main Kickstarter did, I would be floored. But I've been surprised a lot the last year, so you never know.
Yeah, probably since maybe like 2018 is when I really started to think I wanted to write a system. I commissioned the first piece of art for the game in like 2018. Oh, okay. And it's actually the piece that's on the cover.
It's like this beholder that's got all this dripping metal-looking feature.
Right, the Ten-Eyed Oracle. Exactly. There's just the one in the game, so he's a unique character. I commissioned that piece of art and then stared at it for two years while the rest of the game was sort of formulating. And it's funny, it's almost like I feel like having that piece of art made me be like, I can't put this incredible piece of art to waste. I have to really take it seriously.
Because the artist Lucas Cort, he took it seriously. He did this incredible piece. And I was like, I have to write something that can rise to the occasion of this just stunning piece of art he did. So I started writing it in my mind then and then put it to paper starting in about 2019.
Showing 101–120 of 131 · page 6 of 7
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