By the skin of our teeth, we’ve been lucky enough to secure and publish an RPG Publisher Spotlight on Calamity Punk Publishing.
Each month Patrons get to vote on a tabletop RPG publisher, creator, illustrator, curator or someone(s) who contributes to the hobby to benefit from a bit of extra attention from Geek Native. In May, that winner was Calamity Punk Publishing. They’ve been mentioned in the podcast, highlighted in Routinely Itemised, listed (forever) on the Spotlight page and now we’re squeaking this interview out before the end of the month.
Introducing Calamity Punk Publishing
Calamity Punk Publishing has 12 products up on DriveThruRPG, the most recent The Tempest’s Eye and the first, from the start of the year, Arden Floating Market. Impressively for such a young company, there’s a DTRPG alternative with a webstore on their site.
In this interview, we chatted with the creative director, Mike, and his brother, the systems designer Nick. As with many indie publishers, the talent behind Calamity Punk Publishing wears many hats. We’re also probably talking to the marketing bosses, logistics planning, finance team and so forth!
Who are Calamity Punk?
Mike: We’re a small team of family and friends obsessed with worldbuilding! My brother Nick is our systems designer, video editor, and ‘how broken is this?’ tester. My friend Spens is one of writers, cartographers, and ‘actually you forgot about…’ lore consultant who corrects me when I forget my OWN lore. Finally, my friend Ronin is our amazing artist and key monster/NPC designer and my ‘social media sounding board’ buddy.
What would you like to be known for and what do you think you are currently known for?
Mike: I would love to be known for making highly-detailed, modular setting guides that Game Masters love using to add new touches of depth to their games, and for presenting a fun overall setting that players fall in love with. Being rather new, I don’t think we’re known for much, but I would like to think with the finishing of our first complete city Ardenfell in the coming months, that we’re working towards that vision.
Nick: We’d like to be known for content that people genuinely enjoy, and inspire those who want to create to take the steps to do so! We’d be known for Ardenfell and its many setting guides broken down into neighborhoods. Which offers GMs with plenty of tools to help take these settings and incorporate them into their games, as well as encounters, and quests for players to explore. Either as a part of our major narrative, or as a modular resource that a GM can plug into their world space.
What makes a good tabletop RPG?
Mike: I think the ability to turn strangers into friends, and friends into BEST friends over a love of shared storytelling is the cornerstone of a good tabletop RPG. When I talk with people about their favorite games or systems, it almost always turns into a story about some amazing adventure, and many times how it brought that group of people together as well. I think it’s what kind of story they tell that informs how ‘good’ that game’s systems were, like if they end up focused on all the crazy rolls and modifiers, that TTRPG was good because that group LOVES stories about crazy luck and good optimization. If they spent 40 minutes talking about the lore of the world and how it informed the story of their character, that game was ‘good’ because that group probably loved learning more about the world and their character’s place in it.
I’ll admit that sounds a bit like a cop-out, but we genuinely try to design games that we think would allow us to tell the types of stories we love, and make interesting mechanics and lore that hopefully compliment those kinds of stories. I’ll know we’ve made something really good when I get to hear someone’s favorite story about a wild adventure they had in our world.
Nick: A good tabletop RPG is one that everyone is having fun interacting with, and its sessions leave lasting memories with all who play within it. A great game is one that carries that enjoyment from the times not in session, and builds anticipation to the next time you can get your group together.
Worldbulding with the Punks…
The love for worldbuilding is coming out loud and clear at this point. World building in tabletop RPGs is the collaborative process of creating a fictional setting, complete with its history, geography, cultures, and inhabitants. It provides the stage for players to embark on adventures, shaping their characters’ experiences and the stories they tell together.
What makes a good world setting?
Mike: I think a good world setting provides the players with enough information to reasonably infer answers to almost any question, while having enough mystery and blank space to allow them to build something both unique and fitting. As someone who tends to overbuild EVERYTHING, this is something I try to think about a lot because leaving room for people to carve out some of their own lore or build upon it at your table leads to some of the coolest realizations as a Game Master. I think a lot of the coolest parts of our world setting were directly inspired by my players coming to me with an idea or concept I’d never thought of before, so big shout out to all the players that help make good world settings even better!
Nick: A good world setting is one that can stand up on its own, but is also flexible to allow those who ingest it to shape things to their own interests. We are proud of the content we make! At its core we do our best to make compelling modules, like locales, combat encounters, or NPCs, and then Empower GMs to take our concepts and mold them to their needs.
What’s a modular setting, and how does it work?
Mike: So to me a modular setting is one that is designed with the intent to be modified, re-fitted, or lifted completely for inclusion in another world or universe. In the early days of TTRPGs, I think the idea of modular development was something of a given. You didn’t have the internet, or some other source of information to tell you about the world setting outside the book(s) you may have bought, so Game Masters had no other choice than to make their own modifications and changes to fit their table.
But today, I think we have such a wealth of world building that’s been done for so many of our favorite settings it’s easy for new Game Masters especially to forget how much control they have in shaping the worlds they’re playing in, even if it’s not one they created all on their own. We design our settings to be modular to take an almost ‘lego-like’ approach to each shop, NPC, and neighborhood so that Game Masters can more easily make minor changes to our content so that it can easily be ‘snapped into’ their world without having to spend hours trying to force it to fit.
Nick: A modular setting is one where any of its parts can be plucked out from our design document and used to your liking. Have it be a puzzle, combat encounter, or simply a building or local. We design these parts with intention to both be weaved into our greater setting, but also with the intention for GMs to either drag and drop into their world creation, or use it as a foundation on how they might want to design something similar.
Can you give me an example of a modular setting in action using Greyhook as an example?
Mike: Greyhook was honestly one of my favorite neighborhoods that we designed for Ardenfell because we got to explore the city’s love of crafting and artistry more indirectly due to Greyhook being the residential section of the city. I think the two best examples of some of our modular setting content can be seen in the “A Fond Farewell” encounter. The encounter is designed for one of the taverns in this neighborhood setting guide known as the Old Oak Inn, and is designed to be a more roleplay-focused event that lets players interact with a retired adventuring group.
The encounter has a lot of tools and parts for Game Masters to tinker with to give each player at the table a counterpart/parallel in this retired adventuring party that now runs a tavern. I think the reason I love it so much is because I got to take the concept of an old adventuring party I played with and imagine them in this new way, and to turn those characters more into larger kind of ‘archetypes’ that players could relate to and engage with. It’s also a more somber beat as they are celebrating the lift of one of their friends who has now passed, and I think it creates a lot of great roleplay moments for an adventuring party as the players think about their character’s opinions on an adventuring life.
Nick: Greyhook is one of Ardenfell’s many neighborhoods. It’s the primary residential arena of the city. With a good amount of shops, and locales to explore. One great example of modular design we have is a Beer Generator. A constructed table designed to allow individuals to make a beer that fits a fantasy setting with 4d20. Slippery Kraken Breweries Banana Beak Bock is a personal favorite of mine. You could take our table and simply use it to your liking or alter it to your own design. Maybe you wanted to make wine or mead. It’s a great example of what we aim to do with our work.
Some gamers prefer homebrew worlds, and others prefer published settings. Do you think these two groups fundamentally differ in mindset, and why?
Mike: I don’t think it’s a different mindset as much as it’s different levels of comfort and time commitment each player tends to have. I originally made Cealla so I could GM a game for my brothers, but I didn’t know anything about the standard D&D setting. I remember being so self-conscious about being a new GM and not knowing the lore, especially when I knew my brothers both knew it fairly well. So for me I found comfort in the idea of building a new world, and taking solace in the fact that “Hey, I made this lore so I’ll know it well, and if there’s something I don’t know, I can make it up!” But I have other friends that GM who hear that and the idea of having to make all that stuff up AND then make more sounds way too anxiety-inducing to them. They prefer learning all of this existing lore at their own pace, and then referencing answers and making minor calls here and there knowing the setting guide will back them up. This same dichotomy exists for players too; some players love learning a new world each game and carving a little space for a character into it, while others are more excited knowing the lore well and being able to quickly come up with a 100 different ideas that they know will fit, work well, and be fun for them to play at the drop of a hat.
Finally, I think time commitments also play a big part. Homebrewing can be incredibly time consuming, and many GMs don’t have that much time to build their own locations, cities, or even worlds. While I do think that every GM does some amount of homebrewing the dice hit the table, time is often one of the biggest factors in how much homebrewing gets done. This is why having something you can easily pull off the shelf and run it with little prep is a godsend for many gamers, and is a big part of our design philosophy for these modular setting guides, “Take what works, leave what doesn’t“.
Nick: Creation, and Immersion all go hand in hand. As an avid MMO enthusiast I’d love to use the Sandbox vs Theme Park Comparison. Homebrew worlds are only limited to how your table wants to interact with it. As long as everyone is having fun and enjoys the collaborative journey there is no limit to what you can do. Published settings are beautiful theme parks. Well designed with plenty of attractions, but you can’t really change the nature of what there is to see, and do. Our modular content is somewhere in the middle. We aim to create captivating locales, and systems for players to interact with. We also hope to inspire GMs to take aspects of what we make and incorporate or use as templates for their own design.
Dustbound and plans for the future
Geek Native covered DTRPG’s PocketQuest2024 and noticed Dustbound from Calamity Punk Publishing.
In Dustbound, which by PocketQuest’s rules, must be a self-contained RPG, characters are in dead world and fighting over water. I wondered whether this was a step away from the modular setting approach.
What can you tell me about Dustbound?
Mike: Dustbound was a challenge my brother and I were excited to take on since we’d never done any kind of Game Dev Jam like PocketQuest before, but always wanted to try. As a fun little aside, the setting of Dustbound is actually set in one of the far off regions of Cealla where all our setting guides are set in because I have a worldbuilding problem.
When we heard the theme was ‘Heists’ we both knew we wanted to do a kind of train robbing game, but from the perspective of the train crew trying NOT to get robbed. It’s a fun mix of Mad Max: Fury Road and I think 3:10 to Yuma, so we wanted to touch on both of those feelings in the game engine. It was Nick who originally thought up the idea of taking the base rules for Craps and modifying it into a game engine which I immediately fell in love with. We’ve played it a few times with friends and family, and the thing we enjoyed the most was watching the rush people got when they were on a hot streak, or hit a great roll and got to convert it into an epic action. I think the game engine does a great job complimenting the lore and aesthetic of the game, making you feel like a rough-and-tumble Weird West cowboy.
Nick: Dustbound is a rules light system made for PocketQuest 2024. We were tasked with creating a heist game, and thought about what aspects of that we found to be captivating. We landed on a reverse heist system where you defend a train from those who wish to steal the most precious resource in a post apocalyptic western inspired world. Water. With our concept solidified we thought it would be a compelling challenge to try to make a rules system based around Craps. Using the major dice rolls to determine how players navigate this tough environment. Players pick one of the roles we designed, each accompanied by a train car they can upgrade, and explore the harsh wastes of Khordeth.
What’s next for Calamity Punk Publishing?
Mike: Well we’re hoping to finish Ardenfell in the next few months, and potentially do a Kickstater for an omnibus of the entire city and the associated three-part adventure chain. I was actually just doing some of the initial planning and compiling and realized we’ve written about 300 or so pages of content for just a single city in the last 6-7 months, so I’m hoping by the time I’m 80 I’ll have finished most of Cealla hahah. Other than that, really focusing on our social media and YouTube presence is on the list, as we’re still pretty young publishing wise. Thankfully through PocketQuest we’ve managed to connect with a lot of really cool creators to get some advice on how to take those next steps and the like.
Calamity Punk Publishing
- Calamity Punk Publishing’s website.
- Calamity Punk Publishing on Instagram.
- Calamity Punk Publishing on TikTok.
- Calamity Punk Publishing on DriveThruRPG.
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