By Ronald Gordon

Tim (Moth) Rodriguez is the co-founder of Galileo Games, a Tabletop games developer who makes all types of interesting projects to be played and explored. Having recently fallen heavily into the trap of Tabletop Role Playing Games, I was excited to see some more representation at this con, especially from Indie Developers.  

Ronald: How have you felt about Tabletop over the years and its fluctuating popularity? 

Moth: The fluctuation is all upwards. I don’t think it’s fluctuating downwards at all. The rise of Actual Play Podcasts, Video Games based on TableTop games, all of that is actually bringing people into the hobby and into the industry as little independent creators and the tools for doing that and the outlets for making those things available to people are so much easier and so much more powerful and more inclusive then they’ve ever been. You say fluctuation, everything is on such an amazing upwards trajectory. I’ve been involved for about 13 years from my first game that I’ve published and it’s just skyrocketed. 

Ronald: How do you feel about the recognition Tabletop has been getting? 

Moth: It’s fun. I was at the first Flame Con; I backed it on KickStarter as an exhibitor to take one or two of these games (which he was displaying for sale) back ten years ago. Everybody was really receptive, but it was such a squirrely space, it was out at the Grand Prospect Hall which is kind of a weird location. It was a lot of fun and I got a lot of good reception, but it was hard to find things, and that was the biggest thing about that. GenCon is almost exactly the opposite kind of problem because it’s so big and one of the things I’ve been a part of is a group called the Indie Game Developer Network which is a trade organization for independent designers and publishers. What we’ve been able to do with 140 members, get our own booth at GenCon and become a real destination for really awesome high quality Indie Games. It’s very very hard for one person but when you find community in these spaces, you can almost go to the moon with it. 

Ronald: What do you suggest for just beginning creators of TableTop and things like it?

Moth: There are some really really great outlets for going to meet and see industry people for board games. There’s a group called UnPub which some of my friends are on the board for, it’s a group about designing board games, unpublished board games. A lot of people who are the elder statesmen or to say people who run publishing companies show up and come play games. So it’s a really great way to meet people and network and get noticed and find community/find your peers. UnPub has presences at lots of conventions, they do a yearly one down in Baltimore which they’ve been doing recently. There’s one that happens in Morristown New Jersey called Metatopia which I’m a huge fan of. It’s a playtesting convention so it’s all about tabletop games and board games and live action role playing and people come with their unfinished games to test them and meet their peers and really find that professional space for that. Beyond that, people do amazing things with Instagram that I can’t keep up with, platforms like Itch.Io are becoming much more friendly to tabletop things, DriveThruRPG.com is an old standby, it’s not as Indie as it has been in the past, but everything grows. So, all of these things have things that are coming up to replace them, it all bubbles and it all roils and it’s actually really supportive. 

Ronald: How do you feel about using Tabletop RPGs to embrace stories from the LGBTQ+ perspective?

Moth: I love that stuff. I think there are so many exciting people doing so many exciting things with role playing games, and I have things that reflect myself and my interests. It comes anywhere from the 90’s supernatural drama game to the whacky post-apocalypse, here’s sort of my personal nostalgia spaces and things that really mean a lot to me. Then there’s things like The Quiet Year and Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. The Quiet Year is all about community and that’s written by my friend Avery (Avery Alder) who is an amazing trans game designer out of the northwest. Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast has such an enormous team and is doing such an interesting and fascinating thing with a cast of characters. It’s almost like if the show Faulty Towers was run by Baba Yaga in a super cozy kind of thing with a rotating cast of characters. I’ve played one session of it and I’ve just been chewing on it. It’s done up as a legacy game so it’s not like your traditional D&D where you consume the book and make your own stories. The book unlocks things overtime as you play it and unlocks new characters, some characters go away, and it’s this fascinating story of juxtaposed energies. It’s been sitting in my head rent free. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this game. If you think D&D is the only thing, you’re just incorrect, which is okay because D&D sucks the air out of everyone. There are so many things that there’s something for everyone because there are so many people from so many different backgrounds and making so many different things that it blows my mind. 

Ronald: What’s a game that has left you with a surprised moment where you went “What?” 

Moth: That’s hard, because there are so many different things. So, there’s a game out there called Honey Heist, which spawned a number of derivative games based on that same one-page model. A friend of mine that I had met at one of these METATOPIAs, had put together a game called Possums & Programmers, and we decided we would just play on the New Jersey Transit Train from Morristown back to the city, and we played Possums & Programmers on the train. It’s all sorts of wacky trash energy plus coding and tech industry, having that jammed together was so much fun and so weird. I think that’s my answer. 

Inside YuriSoft Games’ The Songbird Guild

YuriSoft is an indie developer and publisher of a new Queer RPG/Visual novel titled The Songbird Guild, which is all about magical girls falling in love. I was more than happy to interview Tess Wainwright, the writer and programmer for the team, about the game. More importantly, I wanted to find what was different about it, since most romance titles tend to fall into a bit of a rinse-and-repeat structure in terms of plot. 

Ronald: How does Yuri and RPG blend here?

Tess: So being a Magical girl is a very tough job, and that’s part of the romance. People who are Magical Girls kind of get each other in a way that people outside that industry don’t necessarily understand. So, you are going around trying to survive in these places as you do your job. In this world, being a Magical Girl is just a regular 9-5 job essentially, you’re trying to pay the bills with it. But you’re still going out into the area where these shadow creatures live and fighting them for a living. So as your characters are going out and fighting these monsters and doing this really hard work, they start to grow closer to each other and our two main characters Kotori and Kaida develop a romantic relationship with each other through it as well. 

Ronald: How does it handle the relationship aspect when it comes to gameplay? 

Tess: In certain ways it is very much like, there’s magic that is provided by the Five Goddesses and there’s all these creatures out in this forest that do all these supernatural things, but at the same time it’s all kind of been industrialized a little bit. From the love perspective, it also falls in between where I do like the mushy fluffy stuff from time to time but I do want to try to make the core of it have a foundation in a much more practical “We’ve been through the lowest lows together.” type of love rather than Love at First Sight type of stuff. 

Ronald: What’re your hopes for this game and other romance games in terms of changing up the format? 

Tess: In the future it would be cool to experiment more with stuff where the story is much more driven by your actions rather than: You’re presented with a challenge, you overcome it, you get to the next part of the story, and the love grows deeper. We’ve got a few different ideas that we are playing around with that all fall on different places on the spectrum of Narrative Control vs Player Control. That’ll be something interesting to play around with. 

Ronald: How has it been being a developer in the LGBTQ+ community? 

Tess: It’s really interesting, when I first pitched this game, I was told by the few people I pitched it to “There is no market for LGBT stuff, that’s just too small of a niche.” and I just went “ok” and went back to making mainstream stuff. I actually played a Yuri video game a couple years later by a company that entirely specializes in Yuri, and I was like “How does this company exist if this Magical Girl game doesn’t have any sort of audience?” To a certain extent the growing LGBT and Yuri stuff blazed the trail for this to exist because I was originally one of the people deterred by society being like “You can’t do that.” 

Ronald: From society telling you you can’t to ending up at a table at Flame Con, How has the journey been and how has it felt? 

Tess: It’s been simultaneously the best thing in my life and also the most anxiety inducing thing in my life. There’s a lot of love in making it and I think this is something that every one of us has made into something very special to us. I hope that shows in the final product. At the same time there’s a lot of crunch! We’re all still working day jobs to pay the bills while trying to make this company work out and lots of traveling to places like here to try to make things happen. I could fill up an entire interview with just stories. It has been an absolutely amazing experience, and it takes so much blood, sweat and tears, but it’s worth it. 

The Wonderful World of J. P. Karliak

J. P. Karliak is a talented Voice Actor for movies, games, and shows. He’s most notable for his performance as Boss Baby from Dreamworks comedic spy movie of the same name, and more recently voices like Joker in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and Morph from the recent X-Men ‘97 animated show. When first talking to him, I didn’t fully know what to ask until he began talking about his work as a Queer activist for Voice Actors like himself. I thought it would only be fair to bolster his work with an interview, which went as follows. 

Ronald: How has it been being a Queer Activist?

Karliak: I run a nonprofit called QueerVox which is an academy and community for LGBTQIA+ voice actors, and it’s all about education, showcasing Queer voice actors and advocating on their behalf in the industry to encourage more authentic and diverse casting. 

Ronald: How have you felt being a Queer voice in the community? 

Karliak: I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to play some amazing roles as a Voice Actor, especially Morph who is a non-binary character in X-Men 97. I also have passing privilege with my voice that I’ve been able to play a variety of characters like Boss Baby. But there’s so many people in our community that wouldn’t be considered “passing” physically or vocally, but that doesn’t mean they’re not talented voice actors and have acting chops and character abilities that other people don’t. Our advocacy is really about making sure that the entirety of our community that wants to pursue this work is being taken seriously and considered for all the possible roles they could play, not just the stereotypes that people think that they should fit into. 

Ronald: What are some words of advice you’d give to someone starting out as a VA? 

Karliak: I think a lot of people want to rush their process with Voice Over, they go from taking one class to wanting to do a demo to wanting to just jump in immediately. It takes time like any craft, it takes a period of putting many hours into becoming excellent at it, and becoming ready for it. It’s not a race! Voice over is one of those wonderful things like on camera acting for instance where it doesn’t matter if you get older, your voice can stay the same. Nancy Cartwright has been playing Bart Simpson for 30 years, it’s not a rush. 

Ronald: What’s the most fun role you’ve played? 

Karliak: Honestly all the roles that I’ve played are so fun in many ways. Morph is so socially impactful and so funny being this non-binary character that a lot of people identify with, but then there’s also the Boss Baby who is absolutely ridiculous, a serious business man in the body of a baby. There’s so many things that are so much fun about the roles I’ve played. 

Ronald: Last remarks for any Queer Voice Actors out there? 

Karliak: Visit Queervox.org, join our Discord. No matter where you’re at in your Voice Over journey, there are people on our Discord to chat with, to commensurate with, to get tips from, or learn about where you should be taking class, or even to complain about “Where are the jobs?”. It’s a wonderful community and Voice Over can be such solitary work, we all record in little rooms by ourselves so having community is so important so come on by! 

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All in all, Flame Con 2024 was an amazing time full of amazing people. I’ve never felt more at home with geeks and nerds than I did there, and seeing so many vendors/cosplayers/fans in general show up to support one another was a sight to behold that warmed my heart. If I were to make it a habit of going to at least one convention every year, I’d likely make it Flame Con solely for the amazing time I had and the praise I heard from countless others who have been going for much longer. Whether you’re a member of the Queer community or not and looking for a community of nerds just like you, Flame Con is always there when you need it. 

Ronald Gordon is a New York Videogame Critics Circle Member & Mentor. He was the first of our writers – or any intern anywhere – to complete an internship at Rockstar Games.

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