Exit, the Outsider - Character Building is Worldbuilding with Sam Dunnewold (Apocalypse World)

I think characters really come alive with context. Just imagine, , a whole office just filled with some weirdo's collection of traffic cones., what does that say about them? Everyone comes and tells you when you're sick, oh, you're so brave for getting through this, you're doing such a good job. At least that's what they told me. And I was always , yeah? What would you do?, I, I don't know, , I could be scared, This is just what's happening in my life right now. I want to keep living. So I'm going to do it.

Hello friends. Welcome to Characters Without Stories, a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled. I'm Star. This episode, I'm joined by Sam Dunnewold. Sam is a Minnesotan game designer, screenwriter, and podcaster living in Hollywood, a chump. His podcast, Dice Exploder, breaks down a game mechanic every week with a friend. He's the designer of Doskvol Breathes and Space Train Space Heist, and he was a judge for the 2022 The Awards. Sam used to work for The Onion as a video editor, and he has no colon. Sam, why don't you have a colon, if it's not too much to ask?

Oh, yeah, because I've got horrible debilitating Crohn's disease, and, or I did at one point, and now I don't because I had the offending organ removed.

All right. I imagine that it feels better not to have Crohn's disease.

Yeah. I mean, it, it, yeah, I eating stuff again, you know, it's a, it's a wonderful time, but that, that was over a decade ago at this point. So, very much in the past.

Yeah. So is there anything else you want to tell listeners about yourself?

I don't know. I'm just excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah. I want to say I have listened to a couple episodes of your podcast and I'm really enjoying it. I highly recommend that people check it out. Yeah. Thanks. So, Sam, who are you bringing to the table today?

So, I am bringing in a weird little guy named Exit, who is I don't know, where do I start? You want me to start with the origin of who this person is?

What was the situation you made the character for?

I have a really hard time, un most people I think you have on this show, seeing characters outside of context that they're in, relationships to other people and the world they live in. And this character very much comes from an Apocalypse World campaign that I was emceeing. And we created this world, we were all really excited about this campaign, we were playing Apocalypse World for the first time. We, did all this world building on Discord, before our first session even, and ended up with this world that is, everyone lives in one skyscraper, basically, and there's horrible mist at the ground that will do psychic damage to you, so you can't go down in the ground. Everyone just lives in the one skyscraper. And we thought that was a kind of cool way to sort of bound the world into a limited space and also create this cool mythology of what's going down in the mist, what sort of weird psychic monsters are down there. And this was a super cool world. We came up with all kinds of details. You know, I was running this game and there was a character, a hard holder who made all of his underlings dress in old marching band uniforms that they had stockpiled around for some reason. And they didn't understand what a marching band was. They just had old photos of band kids in the middle of marching. So they thought that posing their body like they were mid march was essentially a salute because the photos were, yeah, they didn't realize the photos were in the middle of motion. It was just weird character and world building details throughout this thing. And there was one character in particular named Trout that one of my players was playing, who was essentially a weird little cult leader who lived on the floor of this skyscraper that was too far down for everyone else's comfort, but not so far down that Trout would die. But they and their followers were a bunch of weirdos down there. And we only got to play this campaign for a few sessions, but I really loved the whole world. I loved Trout especially. I just loved this weirdo on the outskirts of society who was sort of straddling the line between living in the real world and living in this sort of dream psychedelic world of whatever the mist was below these skyscrapers. And I had my vision for who I wanted that person to be that was very different from the player who was playing as Trout. I wanted a loner who lived down there, who did not have a cult following them around. I wanted just the one weird of the hermit down there. And I also, at some point, this image popped into my head of someone in a gas mask and with a shopping cart joyfully walking through these mists looking for salvage and listening to music and jamming out. I was listening to Channel Orange, the album a lot at the time. And it's just this kind of poppy but kind of sad Frank Ocean album that I think is really lovely. And I had this image of this gas masked person in these horrible circumstances, jamming out to my favorite album, and walking around with a fire extinguisher that's been converted into an oxygen canister on their back a shopping cart full of you know, rebar and copper wire and stuff. And I was, I want to play that character. Another piece of apocalypse world for me is I'm obsessed with the savvy head playbook. I really love this playbook that is all about talking to machines and not really understanding other people very well, but really understanding things and being able to do almost magical things with machines and workshops and devices. And I knew I wasn't really going to get a chance to be that person because no one was out here interested in running Apocalypse World for me. So I had this whole vision for this, my version of this Trout character. And because I'm a screenwriter, I was, great, well, I'll just go write it. I can't play this game with anyone, or it would be hard to put together the game that allowed me to do this. But I'm gonna just go write my screenplay about this little guy. And that's what I did. I just started writing about it. And so the character very much came out of, you know, all that background influence, but then Exit became this weirdo. Who, you know, is in conversation with a leader in the skyscraper and is in conversation with the strange creatures that live down in the mist and who has a collection of traffic cones because traffic cones are neat and no one else wants them and they make a nice little hat. And I, I just wanted to go explore all of that. And so I did on my own.

Is that something that you do a lot where you take a character that maybe you want to explore, but don't get the chance to within play and then write them into a screenplay or some, some sort of writing that you're doing?

You know, I don't think it is that common for me. I think it is not uncommon in my screenwriting that I'm starting with a character, but it's usually that I'm starting with a character relationship. I think a character in isolation, I kind of said this before, it's just hard for me to conceptualize. I think characters really come alive with context. And so in a lot of ways, actually, the screenplay I started writing, about Exit came from me having this sort of vision for this person and then imagining a mentor figure for them. Someone who lived up in civilization, who was not afraid of them everyone else, did not find them unnerving and who cared for them, who wanted to see what was best for them and thought that they were sort of being self destructive and destroying their life by living away by themselves. And that mentor mentee kind of relationship, the sort of old person who thinks they know a little bit better, and the young person who's being a little self destructive, but, you gotta let them do their thing. That relationship was really interesting. And I've written a lot of other screenplays that sort of start with a relationship like that, but it's rare that that comes from an RPG moment. Although, there are other things that come from RPGs and make it into my writing a lot. I think big character decisions sometimes do. I have an idea for a sort of Star Wars-y sci fi action movie that would be based on one character decision that someone made in a Scum and Villainy game that I was running that I thought was really powerful. And also had this big action set piece attached to it that set up the moment of decision making. And in some ways that's kind of bringing in the character, but I think it is more about, well, and what is a character, but the actions that they take in a lot of ways, at least when it comes to screenplays, that's something that we talk about a lot. And so that, that is sort of a character coming in, but it is a lot less bringing in the accoutrement around a character in the way that I did with Exit and that I think, you know, on this show, I've heard a lot of people talk about as being the sort of defining things for the character.

Yeah, I think there's lots of different ways that that spark comes to people.

Yeah.

I wanted to go back, you said something about Exit being scary or unnerving.

Yeah.

What makes them unnerving?

Yeah, I think In this world that my friends and I created, the mist down below these skyscrapers is this scary place to go. If you go down there, you don't have a gas mask on, you come back sick. You come back different. You come back weird. And, that's off putting especially in a world that's gonna feel so unstable to begin with. I think most post apocalyptic kinds of settings tell stories about people trying to find safety and stability in a very uncertain world. I think that's part of the reason they're so popular right now, you know? And people living in a world that, who see someone living on the edge, living outside of that safety deliberately, I think would be a very unnerving, unsettling kind of thing. There was also a, an element, I created this job for Exit of, alright, let's get into my weird world building. So at the bottom of the skyscraper, there's sort of two classes of people. There's a hard holder who kind of runs a marketplace for anyone in the skyscraper to come to. And he and his people rent out shopping carts to scavengers who then go down the elevators out into the mist and come back with stuff to sell at the market. And then the hard holder takes a cut of whatever they bring back. And so the scavengers all resent him because he's exploiting them. And Exit is the best of these scavengers, the most reliably good at bringing back a good haul of salvage. So there's a lot of resentment towards them for being better than anyone else at this and refusing to share. They have found that they don't fit in well with the scavengers, they don't fit well with the hard hold or any of those people. They just doing their own thing on their own and being extraordinarily good at their job. And I think all of those things put together lead to a very outsider-y status and a lack of understanding from everyone else. This scavenger society is so built around all supporting each other because there's so little to go around. And someone who has told that sentiment to fuck off because they're not treating Exit well is not a person that anyone understands or wants to have around.

Hmm. What's interesting to me about post apocalyptic stories is often this kind of push pull between individualism and being selfish.

Hmm.

And contributing to any sort of collective, whatever kind of outpost people have been able to form in, in this troubled world, which also makes me think God, I can't remember the name of the movie is. High Rise? That takes place in a single apartment building.

Been on my to watch list for a long time. I'm intending to watch it next week, actually.

Yeah, I think it's interesting because that movie is very much about class. And I think when you're talking about this apartment building and the relationship, the proximity to this dangerous mist. Is there sort of a, that kind of stratification within this building?

Yeah, absolutely. I had a friend describe this world as vertical Snowpiercer, which having not seen High Rise, we were not thinking about Snowpiercer specifically as we were building this world out. But I, yeah in retrospect was, oh yeah, that is absolutely the vibe. There's this kind of silliness that Snowpiercer has definitely kind of influenced this world, even though a lot of that silliness is sort of underneath horrible darkness in Snowpiercer. But it has that same thing of major class stratification, impending revolt, and just outside the walls of the train, life cannot exist anymore. You're all really trapped in a box together. And that's very much the kind of powder keg that I wanted to create with this world.

Let's back up a little bit to Apocalypse World, which is the originator for the Powered by the Apocalypse system, which is now incredibly ubiquitous as a mechanical system. What is Apocalypse World?

Apocalypse World is a game by Vincent Baker and Maguey Baker, published in 2010, and everything you said about it is true, it is the first powered by the Apocalypse game, it is the Apocalypse that other games are powered by, and it is explicitly a post apocalyptic game. but it doesn't do a lot more to decide what the apocalypse looks like. It leaves that up to your table. But it does indicate that in your world is a psychic maelstrom. It doesn't tell you what that is. It gives you some tools for sort of interrogating what your psychic maelstrom might be. But it is explicitly a sort of social and emotional apocalypse that you are living through, not just a external world apocalypse. And I find that this game is really interesting for a lot of reasons. The voice of the book is incredible, it has some of the best sort of generic GM advice I've ever read, but it is also notable, I think, for the way it centers the kinds of characters, it makes you as players take on the roles of characters who in many older RPGs would have been NPCs. One of the main playbooks is The maestro D who owns a bar or the hard holder who I mentioned earlier who just is the local mayor, basically the person who's running the local community you're a part of and you can be a cult leader right and have a bunch of followers you can be a gang leader and have a bunch of followers and all of those kinds of people would typically be the people back in town while you are out adventuring. And instead, in this game, you are playing as those people and making hard decisions about scarcity and relationships, and how you are going to make a place for yourself in the world, and what you are going to choose to prioritize. So, in this game, you're less of a roving band of adventurers and more part of a community that then would kind of venture into.

I imagine you want to, in this game, venture into this psychic maelstrom, because otherwise, why is it there, right?

Yeah, but the psychic maelstrom, maybe it's everywhere. Maybe it only exists in the hard holder's basement. But also maybe it exists all around you and it's truly psychic. Or maybe it's the leftovers of the internet. It's the matrix. Or maybe it's an alien technology. It can be really whatever you want it to be. In our case it was whatever is down there in the mist, right? But yeah, it is a game in which, yes, Probably the story is going to take you away from town, but probably you are leaving town because you have to in order to save town. You're not going to the next place for loot. You're not going to the next place to travel or see what's out there. You're going one town over, because there's a cold war brewing between your two towns and you want to make peace and then you want to go home and have it be peaceful. Or you're venturing out to the solar panel fields out in the wastes that have started malfunctioning and someone needs to check on them. It's much more community centered, I think. You are going to spend a lot more time talking with people around town and dealing with their various wants and needs then you are going to be dealing with practical problems.

So it sounds there's an element of world building that's built into the game where collectively the players and the game runner are working together to build the world that their characters are placed in.

Very much so. Yeah, the game is very explicit that no one, not even the GM Master of Ceremonies or MC in Apocalypse World, not even the MC should show up with any kind of idea about what the world looks or what they want to do. It just tells you before your first session to daydream, to just, imagine cool apocalyptic ideas and images, and then bring a few, don't lock anything in, but workshop with your table to find what you think is cool. And every time I have gotten to play this game, we have ended up in a unique, really compelling post apocalyptic world. To me, it seems building a character for Apocalypse World, or probably a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games, is really contextual. It's not something that you would often do as a solo player.

You're not bringing in something fully realized. You're coming to the table with something sketchy.

Yeah, it's definitely a game that encourages you to do that, to come in with ideas, but to be really open to whatever ideas everyone else is coming in with and whatever riffs on your ideas other people take and run with. I will say the playbooks are fairly strong character archetypes in their own right. I think I've made it clear at this point that I think building out a world really helps you flesh out your Apocalypse World character and it really helps you flesh out whatever game character you're coming up with, or story character you're thinking about. But it is also true that if you just sat down and filled out the Hardholder playbook without a world, First of all, you would start making some decisions about the world as you filled out the playbook because you would have to, and the playbook prompts you to do so. But you would also make some character choices that give you a cool person that you might be able to drop into any campaign.

We're talking about playbooks. Playbooks are kind of a collection of tropes that are genre specific, usually. What is the playbook that you're using for this character?

So, Exit never got a playbook really explicitly because they started as Trout. The character that Exit is based on started as the Hocus, who is basically a cult leader from Apocalypse World 2nd edition. But the playbook that I was always really excited about, that I mentioned earlier, was the Savvy Head, who is more of a tech person. I don't have an actual character sheet for Exit, but I conceive of them as a Savvy Head in the world.

What are the choices that the game asks you to make when building a character?

That is a great question that I am so glad you asked. So each of these playbooks is kind of double sided. And the front side has stats and moves. If you're not familiar with Apocalypse World and Powered by the Apocalypse Games, each move is a special ability, essentially, that triggers under some sort of specific circumstances in this story. So one of the Savvy Head moves is Oftener Right. When a character comes to you for advice, tell them what you honestly think the best course is. If they do it, they take plus one to any rules they make in the doing, and you mark an experience circle. Cool. Pretty self explanatory. Some of them are a lot longer than that. Some of them are a little shorter. Whatever. When you're making a Savvy Head, you are choosing your moves, you're choosing your stats, and you're doing all the sort of normal stuff of choosing a name, choosing some gear, choosing, in a Savvy Head's case, projects that you're working on and your look, of course, as with basically any character the thing that I love about Apocalypse World and many powered by the Apocalypse games is how it gives you pick lists for all these things. It's the savvy head has a list of names here Leah, Joshua, Ty, Ethan, Brand, Jeremy and so on and so forth. And the look is man, woman, ambiguous or transgressing. Utility wear plus tech scrounge wear plus tech vintage wear plus tech tech wear. Okay, cool. Apparently gonna be a techie, but then it gives you options for your face, your eyes, your body. It gives you these little bits of character I might have a hunched body. that really let you kind of run with the details in a fun direction. Hunched body is such a mood. It's not my entire character, but by just circling hunched body on this list of options, along with, let's say, dancing eyes and a pretty face, that person is coming together really quickly after just three choices on how I look.

So, if you're interested, listeners, in delving deeper into picklists Sam, you did an episode about picklists, right?

We did do an episode about picklists. Me and my friend, Ash Kreider, specifically started by talking about the gender picklists in Apocalypse World. And that's it. And we had a lot to say. By the time this releases, it's likely I'll also have put out an episode about random tables and random lists, which I think are really closely related and also very interesting. And of course, you know, if you're looking at your savvy head and you're, I know I want cool eyes, but which of these cool eyes do I want? You can always just roll a die and turn the pick list into a random list, right? We had a lot to say about picklists and the beauty of them.

You said that Exit, their job, is essentially salvage.

Yeah.

What made them good at their job? How did they get good at it?

I don't know that I've ever thought about that question. I always a little bit conceived of them as just sort of naturally good at it, naturally someone who is a little bit less social and a little bit more interested in things, who just has a keen eye for how to take something apart and put it back together and what makes it valuable or useful in the first place. And then I also think of them as someone who is just not afraid of these mists in the same way as other people, whose brain has always worked a little bit differently. And as a result is maybe less affected by whatever's going on in these mists and maybe just doesn't care as much or maybe has already been affected by the mists. And as a result just feels more comfortable out there and has been more willing to just put in the reps to get the practice. Whereas for anyone else, putting on a suit and going down there is kind of a scary experience. Exit always was someone who was I'll go take a look around, why not? That's how I make my money, it's my job. It's fun to come back with some prizes. And that lack of fear I think is really the thing that puts them up at the top.

Do you think they were always brave?

Yeah. Now we are digging down into the questions that are actually about me that I didn't realize were about me until I started answering them. I have Crohn's disease, right? I grew up with this chronic health condition that was really hard to deal with and that I spent a lot of time in hospitals. As a result of, and I never really felt afraid. I never really, it was just a thing I had to do, you know, there's this, everyone comes and tells you when you're sick, Oh, you're so brave for getting through this. You're doing such a good job. At least that's what they told me. And I was always, yeah, what would you do? I don't know, I could be scared, but this is just what's happening in my life right now. I want to keep living, so I'm going to do it. And I still to this day sort of don't know whether I got through that and felt that way because I genuinely wasn't afraid or because I took all that fear and repressed it way down. And I suspect that it's a little bit of both. I think I am a person who just isn't as afraid of my body and afraid of doctors and afraid of what might happen in the future as other people might be. And you know, as a teen, I was, well, yeah, I'm very sick right now, but also I'm immortal because I am a teenager. And so I think maybe I had less fear than adults did for me because of that. But it's also the case that, undoubtedly, some of what I needed to do to get through that experience was to just kind of shove it all down and not deal with it. That's something that I see in Exit the same way, right? This is someone who's in really terrible circumstances, who, this didn't even make it into the script that I wrote, but I have this idea that they had a mentor who was a tinkerer, who ultimately went into debt and had to let them go. And that meant sort of exiling them down into a lower class of people. And that, that would have been extremely hard for Exit to deal with. And part of why they didn't fit in with the scavenger community that they ended up in. And coming to terms with all of that would have been a process full of emotional repression for Exit. So were they afraid? Yeah, definitely. But I think that they learned how to stop feeling that. and never learned how to start again. And that comes with benefits and that comes with drawbacks.

I can imagine that it could be dangerous to your own safety if you're not afraid to go into a dangerous mist.

Yeah, yeah. But it could also be bad for you if your only way of supporting yourself in the world is to go down there into the mist and you're terrible at it because you're terrified.

Yeah, that's true. You said that for you, part of the bravery came from being young. Is Exit young?

Yeah, Exit's 19, real young.

We haven't really talked about just kind of the basics for this character, and I know probably some of these may come out in play and not really be decided yet. One of the things I often ask about is the character's sexuality, and that's oftentimes what I hear from people is that's something they haven't decided.

Oh, yeah. Exit. I do know these things about Exit. I think I found some of these out in the play of writing a screenplay, right? Exit is explicitly non binary and uses they them pronouns. And Exit is largely not concerned with sex. I think largely because they don't like people, but I don't conceive of them as asexual. I think that they are open to anyone who meets their exacting high standards. I mentioned this kind of mentor relationship earlier, and I see them as having a crush on this mentor figure who is probably too old for them, but close enough that, you know, maybe you could fantasize about it, and who is one of the only other people around to Exit respects. Who has shown enough care for Exit to kind of get through all of their barriers and who also has shown enough competency to earn Exit's respect.

Have you had a mentorship relationship that informs this character choice?

That's also a great question. I don't think so, really. I certainly can't think of any mentors who I've been romantically attracted to, to just get that out of the way. It's not like I haven't had mentors in my life. I went to college, I can think of a lot of professors that I have very good relationships with. My first boss was a really great guy in his 40s who I think maybe kind of felt about me in a similar way to how this, this mentor feels about Exit. He worried about me because of my health. And he also really saw a lot of raw talent in me and wanted me to be able to grow into that and thrive and do the best and not get trapped in the place he had gotten trapped in. He wanted better things for me. He worked for a corporate company doing video production and really hated that he had never been able to go out and do the kind of video production that he was actually interested in. But he, you know, he cared for his family, and he made, I'm sure, a lot of money. And also, he hated basically everything that he made. And I wonder if the feelings of that relationship kind of made it into this one also.

I have empathy for his situation, having a family myself.

Yeah.

That's a hard choice to make.

Yeah.

Between security and creativity sometimes.

Yeah.

What does Exit look like?

Yeah, this is a great question. Also, because the iconic image of Exit in my head is completely covered. They are in a gas mask. They are in a full body suit where all the seams are wrapped up in duct tape. You know, they have cargo boots and rubber gloves on, and they're carrying a fishing pole. Actually, since I sent in the original form, I found a sketch that I did of Exit at one point that I'll share with you, but they're a mess. They're covered in dirt and grime. They're wearing this suit all the time. When they get home, they take the suit off because it's sweaty in there and maybe not the most fun to sleep in, but they're in that suit, basically all hours of the day. It's their one outfit. And as much as they would take the gas mask off when they're kind of hanging out at home. You know, I wrote all this before COVID, but also there's a lot of vibes of, if I'm out in the world, I'm putting my mask on just because I don't trust the mist, and I don't trust the other people. I like the sort of protection, the feeling of protection that having that mask gives me. I'm speaking in character as Exit there, less as myself. But, with the mask off, I see them as pretty thin, wild hair. You know, no one's taking care of them, and they're not really taking care of themselves. Probably a good amount of acne, and I think fairly cold and distant eyes. To to go back to one of the things on the pick list for the savvy head, I think that they have deep inside of them this want for a connection and want to find a place for themselves in the world. But I think they have given up on finding that in anyone else and have very much felt they need to make that for themselves and are only going to be capable of making that for themselves. And I think that's really reflected in the way they look at other people and the sort of default resting dismissive face that they have.

Will the mist or being exposed to it, even with the protection of a gas mask, do you imagine that that would have kind of long term effects? I mean.

Yeah.

Even a mask is not necessarily completely protective.

Yeah. You know, no matter how good you are, if you do something a thousand times, one of those times you're going to make a mistake, right? I do see that happening. I thought a lot about this as we were both playing this original campaign. And then as I was conceiving of this character in this world on my own and in this screenplay. What does happen to you when you're exposed to the mist? We went through a lot of different ideas about this because I didn't want to get too deep into something that could be ableist or being, you go crazy or your brain starts to melt out your ears or you become an invalid or anything else that would just be really uncomfortable to me. I wanted it to be something specific. And something that would not end your life. A big exposure, maybe it would end your life. But the sort of mild or brief exposures that these scavengers were likely to have could be career ending, but that that wouldn't be fair. You know what I mean? I feel that's how I feel about disability a lot is the ways in which it holds you back are totally surmountable. Society doesn't necessarily agree, and that's a problem with society, not a problem with you. So the thing I ended up settling on was memory issues. And frailness, muscle pains and aches that made physical exertion difficult. As the sort of first symptoms of what the mist would do to you, and that the scavengers who were going out and doing this for a long period of time, they knew, and other people around them would carefully watch, for these symptoms. And some of them would just go until they burned out or had some sort of horrible accident and would just keep going and keep going to sort of devote themselves to the community. And some, when those first symptoms of a little bit more forgetfulness would come in, would retire. And that the decision on when to do so was very much up to the individual, but a hard one to make.

Playing a role playing game, a lot of times you discover your character's backstory or you build things about your character's backstory and that prior relationships that they might have had with each other through play.

Yeah.

And so role playing memory loss could be difficult because how do you portray that when the other people don't know that these things are memories?

Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking now of an episode I did of my show with Jason Morningstar about this concept of transparency, which is the level of how much knowledge goes between player and character. In a high transparency game, you as players have essentially all the information that is going on, even if your characters don't. And in a low transparency game, you might be keeping big secrets from each other, right? And I agree with Jason in that episode that I think more transparency typically leads to better games, that the more information that we can have as players, the more we can help each lean into the most interesting parts of our characters stories. And so, to me, you are absolutely right that there's an interesting challenge here in, coming in and, as players, not knowing what memories aren't there. But I think, as players, we also have the ability to say, what if this is a thing that happened, and I don't, and my character doesn't remember it? Exit has forgotten. We can always do that. And I think that that is a really fun thing to be able to do to bring in kind of dramatic irony, to always be able to keep that conversation open about the exact thing that you were bringing up. What do we remember? What don't we remember? What did happen? What do we think happened? Keeping that line open on the player level is just gonna be fun, I think? Even if on a character level, things are more confusing.

Yeah, I can see that. That makes sense.

I did have one other thing that has happened with this character since I filled out the form. I did actually get to play as Exit in a game, eventually. I got to play this solo game, VOID 1680 AM, which came out this year and which I adore. This is a solo game in which you are a AM radio DJ in real life or in some sort of fantastical world. You get to make it up and in the course of play you do a nightly radio broadcast. You put together a playlist and you take callers and you sort of journal or imagine for yourself what your interactions with the callers are. And then you record yourself in character breaks between different sets of music. And it's a really lovely kind of lonely fun experience that really evokes the feeling of being a late night radio DJ. I was one in college and had a blast doing it, but there's this intense melancholy, I think, to the act of being a radio DJ with an unknown number of listeners. And when I sat down to play this game, I was , Oh, I want to be Exit. Let's do this as Exit. I took the character and I changed them to be a sort of support person for a bunch of scavengers who would be out there on the ground. Someone who would stay back home. And play music for those people and via the music and their broadcast, keep them up to date on how long they had been down there because you don't want to spend too much time down there and also to provide them with a comforting voice from home to a connection back to home. And a place within the community for other people to listen in and sort of, by listening, express a connection to and support for everyone who's risking their lives down scavenging. And that really changed the nature of the community and the world that I had set up for Exit, and it certainly really changed who Exit is as a person. It would bring them back into the world, the community. But I also really loved the result. There was something so kind about it that was nice to play around with, and a nice, maybe 12 skyscrapers down, there's a different skyscraper that is functioning in this way, you know? It was a very fun game to play by myself.

Interesting. Do you, in the course of playing this game, actually record the radio show, or are you writing it?

I played as Exit by actually recording it. That is what the game intends for you to do, too. That's what it says to do in its rules. I felt so on the spot that I felt I did a bad job, I let myself down. And so I ended up playing it again with a different premise, actually based on a different screenplay that I'd written. Whatever. That's another story. And that time I wrote down what all my DJ breaks would be, what my character would be saying into the microphone instead of recording myself, but then I did go back and record them and put it all together as a broadcast because The author of this game, Ken Lowery, has a weekly stream where if you send him your broadcast of the game, he will play it on his actual AM radio station and broadcast it live on YouTube. So I ended up doing that with my second playthrough of this game, and he's got this great little community going of people who just listen to these playlists and weird little fiction along with them every week. It is a really fun, lovely place to be. And I felt bad. I did not feel my play through as Exit lived up to the standards that I wanted to broadcast even to only 10 people live on YouTube. But it is, it is a real fun thing that Ken has put together in a community that I've come to love.

That is really beautiful to me. A way to take a solo game and add a collective element to it. It's really interesting.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about solo games is on the one hand, I think that they are so much a different medium from other RPGs because I think at their best the purpose of a solo game is not to collaboratively tell a story. It is self reflection. It is learning about yourself through journaling or It is experiencing someone else's pretty scripted out story. It's almost a choose your own adventure novel, right, where, yeah, I might be adding details to this story, but fundamentally I'm just experiencing an author's work. But I think we often play solo games when we wish we were playing them with other people, when we wish we were playing more collaborative multiplayer RPGs. And that dissonance between why me and many of my friends seek out solo games to get the multiplayer experience but alone, and what I think the medium is actually good at, doing a novel thing and self reflection, is tough to bridge at times. And VOID 1680am does such a good job of that by having this community out there, but also by being about. an experience that is so inherently self reflective and so much about loneliness. I really think it is special in that way for a solo game.

So you mentioned that playing solo games often is about self reflection, but I know that a lot of people when playing collaborative games also find that a way to self reflect.

Yes. Absolutely.

I know that for a lot of people, this is a completely subconscious thing, but is that the case for you?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you heard me doing it earlier in this episode. Yes, absolutely. My friend, Ash Kreider, who I mentioned earlier, often says to me, yes, everyone is playing themselves all the time, regardless of what they tell you. And I think that's 85 percent true. I do think that most people are deriving enjoyment in this hobby from trying on a persona. And I think mostly we are trying on personas that we find compelling in a way, enthralling, intriguing, something that we would to seek out and play around with a little bit. Maybe even, you know, outside of RPGs in the rest of our lives. I know I have made a lot of characters. I've been called out by many friends for playing almost exclusively characters who are extremely emotionally repressed. And I will leave it to listeners to maybe think about why that is given what else I have talked about in this episode. But yeah. Absolutely everyone's out there using RPGs as a way of self reflection. That's not the only thing they're doing. It's usually not the most intentional thing that they're doing. And some people, I think, aren't doing it at all, some people really are just showing up to hang out and meme around with their friends. And some people really just want to play a board game and fight goblins or loot around in a dungeon or whatever. But I think it leaks through for a lot of people, even in those kinds of play experiences. And I think there are absolutely people out there being really intentional about the kinds of characters they're interested in putting on for a while.

When you find that you're doing it, is it something that you personally recognize or is it always other people recognizing it for you?

No, I know that I'm doing it a lot of the time. I think it is helpful for other people to point it out. Sometimes it's, yeah, I'm probably doing this thing, but, whatever, I'm not going to pay attention to it. And then someone will be like, damn. And you'll be like, Ooh, yeah, yeah, I see what's going on there. But I think in general, it's both. It's yeah, I'm trying some stuff on, but I'm also finding stuff that I don't know that I'm finding and when other people call it out, that's illuminating.

Oh yeah, that's a good word for it. Does Exit have any particular quirks?

I think the collection of traffic cones is the big quirk. That was a detail that was in my screenplay for a long time until several friends were like, this doesn't make any sense and you have to take it out. And I was like, no, I want Exit's weird little collection of traffic cones. That's something that I ripped off completely from my friend Sophie, who created the original Trout character. This collection of traffic cones was just such a weird little detail that could only exist for Trout or for my take on the character who lived down there. And I just think it's so fun. I think it's so fun. Just imagine a whole office just filled with some weirdo's collection of traffic cones. What does that say about them? They're not quite right. They're going out of their way in this dangerous world to create this strange art piece. And it's a magic, it's this fascination with this world that doesn't exist anymore, or maybe just with bright colors or something. It's opaque in what it means for Exit, and is just an indicator of how odd they are. And I love that combination about it.

Do you understand, or does Exit themselves understand the importance?, why do they collect these cones?

I think they probably do, but I never landed on what it was. I ended up actually, indeed, taking it out of the script and stopped thinking about it precisely because I didn't want to have to answer that question definitively. And I thought, that's the kind of thing where, I don't know that you do have to answer that question definitively if the character is on the fringes of your story, but if they're your protagonist, you should know what's going on there. I liked it being unclear.

Yeah. What does their home look like? You mentioned that having a big collection of traffic cones, having an office full of traffic cones, that would take up a lot of space. I imagine it takes up a lot of space in the shopping cart.

Yeah.

Maybe even giving up other forms of salvage in order to collect the traffic cones, which I find really interesting.

Yeah. I think they would usually bring back one at a time and wear them as a hat, and so it wouldn't take up a lot of space in the cart. You know, a traffic cone fits on top of a pile of junk pretty well. If there's a pole sticking out of your shopping cart, you can just slam a traffic cone on top of it, right? But I, I think if I'm recalling right, their living space, most people were kind of crammed into this skyscraper because, you know, there's just kind of limited real estate at large. But because Exit was willing to live down far enough, there was a lot more room. They had an entire floor to themselves. And I believe I conceived of this skyscraper as almost a Judge Dredd style mega scraper that was super tall and everyone lived in it, had everything that you would need in life, you'd never need to leave. And I grew up near the Mall of America, the mega mall. And I remember always going there and just being, wow, they've really set this place up specifically to trap you here, you know, to make it a place that you would never need to leave. I'd had this vision for a lot longer than this of a Walmart that just has apartments in it. And is that in our collective future? And so that kind of meant that anything could exist in this skyscraper. And so I believe they were living in an abandoned arcade. That there wasn't really a power anymore, but there were still all the old arcade machines laying around with all the brightly colored cool advertisements on top. Yeah, it's one fairly large arcade essentially in a big mall that no one was in. It would be like the last of us the episode of that TV show from this past year where they're going around this mall at night after a zombie apocalypse those vibes were in a big arcade. None of the machines work anymore. They all look really cool. And all of them are covered with traffic cones and the floor is covered with traffic cones and I got a little bed in the back and a personal sized solar panel sticking out the window doing its friggin best to collect what sunlight can make it down here to a fairly cloudy existence and, you know, snuggle up, put on the radio, recharge it overnight and then get up and catch a rat for breakfast.

It's funny how malls come up often in post apocalyptic stories. I was thinking of, oh gosh, is it Dawn of the Dead where they're in the mall?

You know, I've never seen any of those movies, but I believe it is Dawn of the Dead.

Yeah, I think it's Dawn of the Dead. Well, you should check them out if you like zombies because obviously they're the original. But yeah, really fun because yeah, a mall is designed to trap you. It has kind of some high security features because there's not a lot of entrances and exits and yet has all these divisions within the space that all have their own kind of character, which I think is a really fun idea because where you choose to kind of settle down, it says something about your character.

Yeah. I think malls are also so common in post apocalyptic settings because an empty, decaying mall is such a good symbol of the post apocalypse. Yeah. All our modern decadence. But for what? Oh, nature reclaims it, we will be nothing in the grand scheme of things. I think that that is a really powerful idea in those stories.

Yeah, definitely. Does Exit have any personal ethical or moral code, a vow, a motto?

Not particularly. I think that they're a little bit out for themselves. They don't want to hurt anyone else, but, you know, they're willing to fight back. So I don't think, pacifism is the right thing either. The scavengers that they are distinctly not a part of had a very distinct slogan, which was, we all pull together. We're all in this together. It was literal, too, because they had to operate the elevators with ropes. That was a slogan that Exit was very much pushing back against, and they didn't have an explicit motto in opposition, but they also distinctly were not pulling together. That they thought their own life was more important than other people, or at the very least, that the direction all the scavengers were pulling in was harmful for Exit, and so they rejected it.

Why was it harmful?

I think that it was a means of creating conformity. And conformity for that group meant safety, and Exit wanted safety. And the kind of conformity, I mean this was not a group that was racist or sexist or homophobic or anything that, but I think conformity is still something that not everyone wants. Some people, especially teenagers, kind of want to just push back, kind of want to blaze their own path, don't want anyone telling them what to do. And that having to conform is painful in some ways, kind of regardless of what you are conforming to. And that is what I feel Exit was pushing back against, sort of the idea of conformity itself, of having someone else define their place in the world.

Was Exit alive before the apocalypse and saw the apocalypse take place, or have they always lived within the apocalypse?

They were not alive for the apocalypse. I believe some of the oldest people were alive for it, but Exit is not one of them. Exit has only known this world.

It sounds they're very much a loner, but do they have a family living higher up in this skyscraper?

You know, they might. I had always imagined, I brought this up earlier, but them having this person that they grew up apprenticed to, sort of a surrogate father figure, I never considered blood relatives for them. I think that their blood family, their birth parents were either killed in the apocalypse or killed in the horrors afterwards. Or just lost Exit somehow. I don't know. That is a story that sounds very compelling to me that I never considered.

Is there anything else you'd to touch on?

You know, I will say the plot of this screenplay that I wrote, started with Exit, finding a bomb out in the mists and bringing it back home and being like, huh, this could really upend the social order of this place, huh? Is that a thing I want to do? I don't know. And I found it really interesting to take this unjust, stratified, unequal society and to give to the person who is most on the outside of that society, who's least invested in it, who's most trying to get away from it, the ability to make things right. to leverage the threat of a bomb that could bring down the whole skyscraper into making a better world? What happens when you give that person that leverage? The least invested person the most leverage? And everyone else in the place suddenly becomes very interested in this person who wants nothing to do with any of them and now has power over all of them. And I found that reversal. I mean, I haven't touched this screenplay in four years. I should go back to it. I mean, it's exciting to me just describing that story.

Exit. It sounds you're a loner. And I think a lot of people, when they feel sad, turn to others. What do you do to feel better when you're sad?

Well, I don't get really sad a lot, and I don't really, I don't really bother with that too much, but I think I turn mostly to music. I have this Walkman, and I listen to, I have a playlist, and the playlist is exactly the length of how long one outing is supposed to be, one scavenging run, and so when I get back home, I'm in a particular mood, you know, and the playlist really levels me. It's, it's a good one. And I have playlists for a lot of feelings, you know, if I need to level off from being anger, I got the, the anger playlist. And if I need to level off from being lonely, I've got the lonely playlist. And I'm a little bit worried about what happens when, you know, everything breaks down eventually. But I don't know, I guess hopefully I just hopefully my playlist won't break down until after I after I die.

Do you think that you'll live a long time?

Probably not.

Does that bother you?

I mean, I'd prefer I lived a long time. I don't know, I don't think anyone lives that long. I try to take it a day at a time. I focus on tomorrow, you know? I want to beat my high score. I want to come back with more stuff. Self improvement is important.

Sam, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for sharing your character with me and my listeners today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was a blast. I really really loved being here.

Thank you. I'm going to put links in the description to all of your channels and things, but are there any projects you'd to share?

Just the Dice Exploder podcast. Come on down and listen to it. We got a discord going too that I'm really happy with. If you like RPG mechanics and design, I got the show for you. That's the main thing.

Do you have a personal favorite when it comes to mechanics?

What is my favorite RPG mechanic? I ask everyone that question when they come into the discord. And I am only now realizing that I avoided answering it by virtue of having created the discord myself. I think a highlight for me is. The single word from the game We Are But Worms, a one word RPG. I will not give away what the word is, but I find that game inspiring. And the word in question, to be delightful. So I will answer that.

I, yeah, I think that's gonna make a lot of people look that up. I mean, how can you, how can you hear that and not want to know what the word is?

I did a 70 minute episode about that word, so, you know, come on down to the podcast after you check out the game and you can hear me talk about 433 and Fountain and high art and ranking games and how it's bad.