Interview with SGH, the Excellent Author of the PTFO Actual Play

Well we are all in for a treat this week! SGH, the author, GM, player, game-runner, publisists, etc of PTFO, an actual play of the highest quality has agreed to be interviewed by the blog! Let's jump straight into it.

PTFO is seriously good. Give it a read! Source: SGH

My questions and comments will be in italics and green whereas SGH's answers will be in plain text.

Welcome to Croaker's RPG Corner, SGH. And thank you so much for answering some questions, as I'm a huge fan of your Stonetop campaign and it's actually what inspired me to start publishing actual plays, which eventually led to this very Blog!

First, thank you so much for these questions – I’m excited for a chance to talk a bit about the project. I try to keep PTFO itself focused on the story and game, so it’s nice to take a step back and think about the whole thing. 

I would also like to take a moment to invite your readers to check out PTFO:Stonetop if they find any of the below interesting or insightful. It’s the story of three very different friends – Anwen, Padrig and Vahid – making their way and fighting for their village in a magical iron age at the edge of the world. I try to put everything I’ve learned over decades of playing these games into the writing and the story – I learn things about GMing and playership every week when I do this project and try to share that stuff in the notes and asides. If you want a head start, you can check out the Act 1 Recap, which (spoilers!) summarizes the first four sessions. If you want to start from the beginning, the Table of Contents is where it’s at. 

So let's start off by talking about RPGs and Solo RPGs. 

I’d love to hear how you got introduced to Table-Top RPGs, who introduced you, and what was your first RPG?

Like a lot of little brothers, I was introduced to AD&D by my older brother. He played with a group of his friends, and I was allowed to watch from the sidelines. I remember very fondly a specific module they played – a Spelljammer adventure called “Under the Dark Fist”- an epic campaign involving Krynnspace, Realmspace, and Greyspace being attacked by a powerful interstellar empire of lycanthropes called the Vodoni. It was a wild ride, but I was sent out of the room during the climactic fight with the BBEG for being an annoying little brother (something I was almost certainly guilty of), so I had to hear how it ended second-hand.

Why Solo RPGs? Why did you decide to play and publish written stories in this format instead of playing traditionally or publishing traditional fiction?

I’ve always had much more creative success as a gamemaster than a writer – when I tried to write a novel, I got bogged down in trying to plan every twist and turn, whereas when I was at the gaming table, I could go with the flow more and put some things in the hands of the players, and I’ve run some memorable campaigns, starting with 2e, through 4e, and then into PbtA and Dungeon World.

Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn introduced me to solo play – I saw the solo play flowchart he designed for that system, and I saw some of the other solo play reports people were starting to put out. It seemed like an interesting secret door to writing something fun and exciting. As I ramped up, I saw other writers doing similar things – folks like Tavon at Gatling.xyz and Margot Hutton on itch.io, and it feels like collectively, we’re onto something. 

Ironsworn flow of play. For many of us, Ironswon opened our eyes to what Solo RPGs could be. Credit: Shawn Tomkin.

Since then, I’ve found the semi-live nature of the work and the interaction with the audience to be really rewarding. PTFO’s readership is small, but it’s many times larger than the biggest group I’ve ever GMed for, so I see this project as a way to expand our gaming table. 

Now I'd like to ask a few questions about the current campaign you are publishing weekly.

You’ve chosen Stonetop (by Jeremy Strandberg), a game about a low-magic iron age village and its heroes as your first setting. Why did you pick Stonetop?

Lots of reasons – the tl;dr is just that I think it’s great from top to bottom. I love PbtA, both as a GM and a player, and I believe Strandberg’s design supports players in playing heartfelt stories about themes that are underdeveloped in many TTRPGs – things like hearth and home and family (whether blood or found). It has many great ideas found in other PbtA games – Stonetop’s “Keep Company” move is a great example. I’ve seen it in other games, but Strandberg added a lot of value with a thoughtful list of questions and advice about when to use it. Likewise, I found the game’s structure for building expeditions to be really tight and useful – similar to what you see in some of his previous work, Perilous Wilds. 

I also appreciate the thoughtful worldbuilding – Strandberg’s ability to embrace the simple beauty of Iron Age life alongside really cool fantastical elements and sci-fi touches with the Makers and their works with his worldbuilding. Despite the specificity of it all, he still leaves gaps for GMs like me to come up with stuff that’s our own. 

Your campaign has been described as the “Game of Thrones’’ of Actual Plays. Your stories are great but your characters are where it really shines in my opinion. How do you create such fleshed-out characters and how do you keep track of all their personality traits and competing motivations?

Oh my, what a kind characterization! Hopefully, it doesn’t jinx me to leave the campaign unfinished, though.

In terms of how I create player characters that I love (and I hope other people love!), I find assiduously following the principles laid out in PbtA generally and Stonetop specifically is valuable. The Playbook mechanic that PbtA uses gives you a clear and flavorful package to start with in terms of identity, history, and connection to other players and the world. The Instinct trait in Stonetop is excellent for giving a character a good starting posture in a given situation which you can then develop into a scene where they either hold course or are swayed or turned back. The Session Zero questions are great drivers of connection to the NPCs in the village and to the other PCs.

Beyond that, I have a (somewhat embarrassingly) simple framework for working with ensemble casts: In a classic foursome, you need a dutiful one, a clever one, a fiery one, and a lover of life. If you look at a wide range of ensemble casts, you’ll see elements of these archetypes – it gives the characters a clear point of view to start from, and they can play off one another well. 

Obviously, you don’t want it to be locked down – all three PTFO:Stonetop player characters have all these elements to a lesser or greater extent, but Padrig’s core is dutifulness, Anwen’s is fieriness (and she pinch-hits as the lover of life) and Vahid’s is cleverness. From there, I can flex them into other roles as need be for the scene, since people are complicated and we all have a bit of everything in us. 

Do you have a favourite character? (You don’t have to answer that!)

I can’t answer that for the PCs – when I’m writing one of the player characters, I find it best to put myself in a headspace where they are my favorite character at that moment. PbtA tells us to ‘be a fan of the player characters,’ and I do my best to be a super fan of Anwen, Padrig, and Vahid in turn. 

My favorite NPC so far has been Bertrim, from the Marshedge arc. He was only in three scenes, and I think his character and the danger he represented came together almost immediately. He was also very fun to write – he’s a smarmy, sneaky, snake of a man, and in every scene, he got to play those notes at max volume.

Now I'd like to as a few questions about your writing process and your newsletter itself.

Your weekly stories are hefty affairs, well-written and edited. What is your writing and editing process?

I know a few readers who would dispute the ‘well edited’ part of that – I always find typos and errors after things get published. I do try to be respectful of a reader’s time and attention, and not spend a lot of time in scenes that aren’t going anywhere, which I suppose is an aspect of editing. 

I actually laid out my workflow in a recent comment thread with longtime reader Imperious Rex (@_ImperiousRex on Twitter), so I’ll reproduce that here and embellish a bit for your readers: 

I generally “play” the session on Wednesday or Thursday night for 1-2 hours. The notes consist of major beats and the rolls they trigger, plus the gist of conversations between PCs and NPCs -- I try to record their mindset as the conversation begins and when it ends as well as decisions they make during the conversation, plus any worldbuilding we need to establish. I also make a note of specific GM/player thoughts I want to include about how a specific situation was narrated, or information about Ironsworn Oracles or Stonetop’s own random tables I use to generate NPCs during GM prep and on the fly. 

The notes phase also includes making a decision about the episode poll -- as I get close to the end of the second or third scene, I try to identify interesting decision points to use for the poll. The process of identifying the poll is very similar to the kind of structural thinking I used to do as an at-the-table GM: What are the big dilemmas that I might be able to engineer for the players? How can I give them a big, meaty decision that gives them a sense of agency, and feels like it will define the course of the campaign, or helps them strongly express their character's values? 

Then, on Friday/Saturday and sometimes (but hopefully not) Sunday, I spend 6-10 hours doing the fiction -- writing up the prose and the scene breakdowns -- and editing (though as I said, my copy editing leaves much to be desired). I also do one final read before the episode goes live on Monday, just for typos and whatnot (again, with mediocre results).

PTFO is delivered weekly to our inboxes using Substack. What about that platform works well for your storytelling?

Substack was a bit of an impulse – I read a bunch of substacks, including Thomas Manuel’s Indie RPG Newsletter, Astral Codex Ten by Scott Alexander, Continuing Ed by Edward Snowden, and Freddie Deboer’s substack. Since trying it on a lark, I value how it brings a bit of the personal connection of Twitter to the longread format of a blog. If I ever decide to start recording audio versions, it’ll also support me in that, which is nice. 

What is your motivation behind creating such involved work week by week? It certainly is a great amount of effort so I’d love to know the ‘why’ behind it.

It scratches a lot of itches for me. I value the creative practice it allows me, as I’m trying to be more creative in my core career. I like that it lets me gamemaster to a high creative standard – often higher than I could possibly achieve when I’m collaborating with others in real-time, off-the-cuff. And I like that it lets me feel like I’m GMing for a table of dozens of people. 

What are your long-term hopes and dreams for the newsletter and for your actual-play writing?

I’m trying not to think too hard about the long-term possibilities of it – I’d be very proud just to complete this Stonetop campaign. Beyond that, it would be cool to figure out how to incorporate art more heavily into it – there are a few scenes that I would love to be able to have depicted, rather than only described, and I want to experiment with AI platforms like Midjourney that might be able to help. I’ve also considered having a voice actor read the fiction (and doing the GM notes myself) and then producing a podcast-like object for those folks who don’t want to slog through 4,000 words a week. 

Ultimately, though, that stuff all feels like a distant second priority to just delivering a satisfying conclusion to the story we’re telling now. 

Now you are not just an actual play machine, but you are an actual person also. I'd like to get to know the person behind the pen a bit more.

You’ve mentioned in your newsletter you have small children. How do you find the time to play and write with them running around and do you draw any inspiration from them?

I do! Two kids under three, and they are almost entirely delightful. I make time mostly by sacrificing all my other tabletop gaming – I don’t run any traditional TTRPGs anymore, all my GMing energy is poured into this. I also don’t go through TV series or books like I used to – though I have managed to catch the new season of Better Caul Saul and I’m about halfway through Jade City.

In terms of inspiration, I think my kids have raised the ceiling on how much I can worry about another human being. I deeply want my kids to do good and to do well – to succeed at their goals, and stick to their principles despite challenges – and I want the same thing for these characters. Channeling a bit of that helps me write them striving for those goals and grappling with those principles in what I hope is a heartfelt and sincere way, though obviously, the readers are the judges of that. 

Do your family and friends read PTFO? What do they think about it?

A few do, yes, though I recognize it’s very niche and a lot of work to read, so I don’t take it amiss if they don’t. My brother reads it; he’s a huge supporter, and he catches all of my typos – exactly what I would want and expect from a big brother. Another gaming buddy of mine, Machi, is probably the #1 fan of the project, and he is an outstanding supporter to have in my corner – he’s working on launching a similar project in the same universe. 

Finally, can you give us any clues or hints about the current campaign or what your next campaign could be?

For the current campaign, we’ll just have to play to find out. For the next one – I’m intrigued by the Avatar the Last Airbender RPG that’s in beta now. I dream of creating my own ATLA setting based on classical India rather than the East Asian inspirations of the original. I also like cyberpunk – particularly cyberpunk set outside the traditional megacity setting, in the places between. Highways, agricultural communities, abandoned suburbs, etc. I’m excited about the settings, of course, but the characters are always the most important things. When we wrap up Stonetop, the next step will be pulling together some exciting ensembles and sharing them with the readers to see whose story we want to follow next. 

Thank you so much SGH. I appreciate your time and your thoughtful answers. I look forward to seeing how your campaign unfolds and your adventures. 

---

Wow, what a fantastic interview. I think we can all agree SGH is an amazing author, GM and game runner. I recommend you check out the newsletter and subscribe! 

PTFO Sign Up Page

Thank you for reading yet again everyone. I hope you enjoyed this interview and I hope to do more of them in the future. If you are a Solo RPG author or an established Solo Actual Play creator, reach out!

And if you want to read one of my actual plays (which aren't as good as SGH, but are still fun) check out my recently completed The One Ring 2E with Strider Mode mini-campaign or my currently ongoing Agon campaign. 

Are you on Twitter? Follow me @croakersrpg. I talk about the blog, chat with other TTRPG creators, and have interesting conversations.

What questions would you ask SGH of PTFO?

- Croaker