Giant Fire Breathing Robot

Filamena Young Tells Us About Flatpack: Fix the Future!

Flatpack: Fix the Future! is a self-described “Optimistic Apocalyptic” role-playing game designed by Filamena Young for Machine Age Productions, and is currently being Kickstarted. I read the beta version and then had the chance to have a lovely conversation with Filamena about it.

 

Giant Fire Breathing Robot: What do players do in Flatpack? What do characters do?

Filamena Young: The assumption is you’re playing kids. You’re teens or otherwise inexperienced youths. They’ve lived their whole lives in emergency tunnel systems that used to be under the great cities of old. Their parents lived their whole lives in those tunnels. Their grandparents. As far back as anyone can remember, people have lived in those tunnels. Enough is enough. Gathering bits of “the manual”, the elders of the community have gathered the information they think will help the kids go out into the world. Their goal is simple: find the remnants of civilization in the past, represented by Flatpack Instant Buildings. Flatpacks are basically like Ikea furniture; if instead of having everything you need for a coffee table in one box, you had everything you needed to build an entire hospital complex. Or a town square.

The kids (called WRENCHs, thanks to the manual) return with the Flatpacks, their community climbs out of the tunnels, and then uses the Flatpacks to begin to rebuild a safe, sustainable city where they can not just survive, but thrive again. The WRENCHs are unarmed. Untrained. Really, pretty unprepared for the world outside their tunnels. But that’s okay, because they’re smart and cunning as well as creative. You can’t build a gun that can be more use than a brilliant mind, after all.

 

GFBR: Since the protagonists are all kids, coupled with the relative complexity of the rules, it strikes me that this is a game aimed primarily at families. Is that true?

FY: Well, I think a lot of American games come with this assumption that you’re starting off as 17 year-olds or even younger. Like we’re afraid to play full-grown adults (because adults aren’t fun anymore). Usually, I resist that a bit, but in this case, I wanted to make sure that younger players were encouraged to play people they could identify with. Really, the characters need to be “inexperienced” rather than young, but that’s a fine point. I’m sure most people will imagine playing bright and daring 14 year olds causing trouble. I remember that when I was that age we learned Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (It had to be harder, it was Advanced, right?), and we learned it from the book without any help from adults. I suspect your average kids can put this together on their own.

That said, a lot of the advice to Troublemakers and so on is written with a family playing together in mind. I want to play this with my kids, and I’m hoping the setting and subject matter will make the sort of games a family can play together (I also remember what we were playing at 14, and I’d be so embarrassed telling those stories with my parents in the room!).

 

GFBR: Is there a GM role in Flatpack? If so, what does the GM do?

FY: In Flatpack, the GMs role is actually called the Troublemaker. Her job is primarily to give the characters problems to overcome. Without problems and hindrances, frankly, you’re going to have a pretty boring game and the characters won’t get a chance to show off how cool they are. And I very much want characters to show off how cool they are! So the Troublemaker is tasked with setting up problems and obstacles with the idea that nothing is ever really failed, so much as not succeeded at yet. It’s a game about hope and the promise of tomorrow, so “you screwed this up so bad it’s over” doesn’t really jive with the themes, if that makes any sense. The “encounter” system, which is made up of what I call a Conflict Card and some description is really open to the players to handle however they like. A Troublemaker with an idea of what they want the post-apocalyptic world to look like, a few puzzles or brain teasers on hand, and a couple of Conflict Cards can, more or less, run the game by the seat of her pants. This is a low or no prep game.

 

GFBR: Is Flatpack designed as a single-session game or an ongoing game? Or both?

FY: I wrote Flatpack with many game sessions in mind. Part of play involves the characters collecting these flatpack buildings. Then, at the end of a game session, each player gets to put a building down on their part of the city map. The buildings give the players some advantages and sow story seeds, plus they’re kind of funny. This other “mode of play”, styled after games like Act Raiser or SimCity really works best when you’ve got a number of sessions to work with. It can work as a fast, two-to-four-hour convention sort of game, and in fact the free demo has suggestions on how to do that (with a bit more in the core book on the subject). Because it’s low prep, I could imagine whipping it out when you’re out of other ideas at a convention, no problem.

 

GFBR: Was the community/city map creation a part of the game from the beginning, or did it come about as a necessary outgrowth of the fiction that Flatpack is trying to produce?

FY: I sat down with David (Filamena’s collaborator in Machine Age Productions -ed.) and told him what I wanted to play. I said I wanted a game that was like Act Raiser. I wanted a game where we were building cities like SimCity. That was actually the first concrete thing we had in place. Everything else kind of built off of that desire. David’s first suggestion was something like an old board game he’d play as a kid called Cathedral. Its sort of like Tetris and SimCity, kind of, and there’s some of that in Flatpack.

 

GFBR: I think it’s ten kinds of awesome that you specifically call out fighting as something to be avoided with both the rules and with the in-world fiction. You also say that WRENCHs are “recycling society” and that “being wasteful may be the sort of thing that brought our people down in the past”. In a lot of ways Flatpack seems like a really breezy, fun game that one doesn’t have to think too deeply about to play, but there’s this layer of social/political commentary at the heart of it. Do you see a particular social viewpoint at the heart of Flatpack? What led you to include that in its design?

FY: Yeah, there’s some politics and sociology going on in the background of this, well, kids’ game. Most of our games have a bit of a political edge (when we put out our first game, we were accused of being ghost written by Howard Zinn, a thing my partner is pleased by to no end). Basically, there are A LOT of games out there that fit a formula. Kill things, win loot. Even one of D&D’s bigger competitors in the U.S., White Wolf, has a HUGE focus on combat and fighting and killing. I don’t have a problem with violence in games, I understand many people have demons to slay, and that gaming is a constructive way to do that. I also believe that there’s more than one answer to any problem. I believe that if you give younger people, and even adults, the challenge that non-violent resolution is both viable and even desirable, it’s something they take with them away from the gaming table. I look at Doctor Who, for example, a creative and well-loved setting where brains are put before brawn, and killing is the worst possible outcome, not just the easiest.

I also feel that many games tend to value male-centric concepts over any alternative. Emotionless lone wolves who exert their strength through violence make for exciting characters, certainly, but there’s more to value out there. In more female-oriented stories, you have a focus on community and creation as well as building (that’s not to say there isn’t crossover, there is always crossover, but these tend to be key points when discussing what makes up a “woman’s story” vs. a “man’s story”). There are plenty of great designers handling the common material. The common Campbell’s Hero’s Quest. No need for me to cover that ground again.

 

GFBR: What sticks out to you as the major inspirations in the design and writing of Flatpack (games, movies, tv, fiction, comics, etc.)?

FY: I love Fallout, which plays a big part in this game. When I was young I loved Rifts and other post-apocalyptic games, but I never had the same focus as other players. I wasn’t so interested in destroying and killing off monsters and bad guys. I wanted to explore what was left. I always wanted to find old military bases, take advantage of the old technology, and build up communities and cities where survivors could live more safely. This was not a focus my GMs ever really grokked, sadly. I guess the idea of people alive PAST the end of the world appeals to my hopeful side. If there are people left, we can still make it right, and that’s a big part of this game. Beyond that, Doctor Who, building video games like SimCity and Minecraft, and a lot of women’s studies in video game and media literacy.

But that’s all sort of secondary. The main inspiration is my girls. I have two currently, one is five. I want to make sure when she’s older, there’s plenty of games she can play that make her feel welcomed. More and more, designers are considering inclusion in their game design, and I’m happy to be a part of that movement.

 

 

If you’re interested in Flatpack, it’ll be on Kickstarter until February 13th, and after that you can find it on the Machine Age Productions website.