When Craig Campbell of Nerdburger Games shared The Means of Magick Kickstarter on his social media, I looked it up and was intrigued. Fortunately, Jessica Geyer had the bandwidth to answer my questions about her game.
EGG EMBRY (EGG): Thanks for talking with me about your project. What is The Means of Magick?
JESSICA GEYER (JESSICA): Thanks for giving me the chance to talk about it! The Means of Magick is a fantasy TTRPG set in the post-magick-industrial revolution. It’s a world where megacorporations are destroying the planet–there are magical floods, wildfires and other disasters, and even the plants and animals are changing in dangerous and unpredictable ways. The players have to fight back to protect their communities while still trying to make a living and survive. So I hope the climate crisis allegory is clear, there. As for mechanics, it uses Wannabe Games’s Pace System, which amps up personal stakes in tense scenes and lets you really play around with each character’s individual skills and personalities. In particular, we wanted a character creation system that links your character to the world and gives you a reason not to just loot and kill. So the storytelling is highly collaborative and every player gets to add something unique to the table.
EGG: This is cyberpunk/magicpunk? Or do you see it as something else?
JESSICA: Magicpunk or magepunk would be a great way to put it. Cyberpunk implies, for me, a more futuristic, tech-driven world. The Means of Magick is explicitly low-tech and high-magic. But whatever you want to label it, punk is definitely it. Punk is at the heart of Wannabe Games, and to us, punk is all about being anti-authoritarian, pro-self-expression. It doesn’t lean in on the punk rock aesthetic like our last project, MoonPunk, did, but The Means of Magick lets you fight against authoritarian megacorps and hones in on the uniqueness of each character. Plus magic. So, yeah, magicpunk.
EGG: You said this is low-tech and not cyberpunk. To be clear, this is not the future with magic?
JESSICA: It’s more of an alternate world. It’s imagining what the world would be like if you had this magic all around and it could be used and exploited for profit. We have a world that’s sort of like that now. I grew up in Michigan, and I grew up learning about the importance of freshwater and how the Great Lakes are the largest source of it. And water’s free and it literally falls out of the sky and we need it to live, and guess what? Nestlé would love to privatize the whole thing, bottle it up and sell it back to us. That’s the role magick has in the game–a natural resource that is free and abundant but at risk of being all bottled up at everyone’s expense but a corporation’s profit margins. So, no, this isn’t the future with magic. It’s the present. It’s happening right now.
EGG: That’s spot-on. What the corporations are doing is destroying the planet. That pulls in some real world parallels. Do you have NPCs setup to stand in for Gates, Musk, Bezos, etc.?
JESSICA: Definitely not in any legally actionable way! But if a billionaire sees themself in the outlandishly evil leaders of Th.inc, Normal Corp, and Presto!, I hope they take a moment to reflect because, wow, imagine being that evil. Also, we definitely took a full quote from one of them in our promo video. In all seriousness, though, the game is made to make players think a little bit outside their gaming table and into the real world. Maybe get a little cathartic release from the powerlessness so many of us feel when facing these enormous problems in society like climate disaster. Maybe get a little practice organizing and actually doing something about it.
EGG: I’m thinking about the world in which magic is power, is it also the currency of this world? Or is there a separate physical money or something else altogether?
JESSICA: In many ways, power is currency. One of the other real-world parallels we have in the game is the idea of the company town that pays you in company scrip. But unlike the real world, you can gain power independent of currency with magic and everything that goes into making your character a real hero. Unfortunately, magic won’t pay your rent and bills, so players are going to have to take on some jobs from these corps from time to time! As far as the actual currency, we have a wealth system in place, but it’s being tweaked in playtesting so we can balance it and not make it feel like a drag. We’re also floating the idea that if your character gets too rich, you have to retire them. Or something worse.
EGG: There are factions, correct? What are they in the game?
JESSICA: Yes, I mentioned three of them earlier: Presto!, Th.inc, and Normal Corp. Those are the big bad megacorporations. Then there’s the Academy, which is a representation of higher education. They were harder to develop, for me, because I value education a lot and don’t want to trash the concept of academia altogether, but anyone who’s ever had to take out a student loan knows there are some issues there. Last but not least is my favorite faction, the FAI. They are sentient magic robot fairies and elves. I wanted to combine the otherworldly aspects of both artificial intelligence and fey, two topics I could talk about for hours. The factions are a tool for the narrator to drive the story forward and make the world feel more real. You can have these factions making moves and reacting to the things the PCs are doing. And the PCs can have connections to those factions in their backstories and through play, which can impact their reputations, which in turn impact the way the PCs can interact with everything else. There are also magical artifacts in the game that can stop working for you if you have certain reputations or get too cozy with the wrong faction.
EGG: This game sounds interesting. Who is on the team creating this project?
JESSICA: Wannabe Games is just me and my partner Alex Sprague, but for this project, we brought on Aaron Radney as our art director. We wanted someone who knows how to create inspiring, interesting fantasy art, and Alex and I both fell in love with what Aaron had in his portfolio. The majority of our budget for the Kickstarter is going towards art so people can get a real sense of the world. Plus, Aaron’s art focuses on challenging the eurocentric type of fantasy that’s embedded in the genre, and I love that he’s bringing that to the table.
EGG: You’re offering a hardship backer’s tier for this game. Can you talk about the tier and why you’re offering it?
JESSICA: It would be pretty wild to make a game that centers on oppression and poverty and not try to make the game available to everyone. Not everyone can afford to back or buy the games they want to play. I’ve been there, and I’ve been there very recently. When I was younger, buying a game meant not buying something necessary like clothes or a meal. That hardship tier lets people hop on board for $10, and the hardship support tier lets us offer even more slots at the $10 price. I don’t want to get preachy about it, because at the end of the day I’m still selling a game, but it’s people helping people, which is what The Means of Magick is all about.
EGG: Right on. Beyond The Means of Magick, what else are you working on?
JESSICA: After dealing with some serious, heavy themes in The Means of Magick and our last game, MoonPunk, we’re thinking about taking a break to do some lighter projects. So be on the lookout for Dungeon Crawler, where you’re babies crawling through a dungeon, and also the dad builder game, a game where you build the best dad and make him fight other dads. Our first ever game we made was a microgame called Let’s Be Grandma! so we’re really going back to our roots here. You can also catch me on my podcast RPG R&D with Craig Campbell from Nerdburger Games every Thursday.
EGG: Thanks for talking with me. Where can fans learn more about this project?
JESSICA: Thank you! Right now, our Kickstarter campaign is the best place to go to find info There’s a ton of information there, plus you can help fund the art for the book! There’s also an open playtest available on our Itch.io page, where you can try out the mechanics and read through a FAI-centered adventure.
The Means of Magick from Wannabe Games
End Date: Thu, December 16 2021 5:20 PM EST.
“Fight back against megacorps and their cataclysmic pursuit of magick in this fantasy TTRPG.”
Egg Embry participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, Noble Knight Games’ Affiliate Program, and is an Amazon Associate. These programs provide advertising fees by linking to DriveThruRPG, Noble Knight Games, and Amazon.
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