Geek Native’s patreons voted Sketchy Van RPG into RPG Publisher Spotlight.
Good news: We’ve been able to line up none other than ‘Space Wizard at Sketchy Van’, Andrew Duvall, for an interview. Now… there’s no ‘trigger warning’ per se in this interview, but Andrew annotes responses with comments like “I don’t know how much of this will get published” and then says something absolutely worth publishing and yet has a valid reason for concern.
I’ve just gone ahead and published the whole lot! So, buckle up for a ride!
Who is Sketchy Van RPG?
Before we get started the phrase Space Wizard had already been used. Now, I was all ready to challenge or, at least, confirm with Andrew that that was the correct phrase.. when it popped up again!
Who are Sketchy Van RPG?
I’m Andrew, the lunatic space wizard behind Sketchy Van. I’m a hermit who lives a few miles from the Appalachian Trail’s mid-point in rural Pennsylvania. COVID reignited my passion for TTRPG’s, and it turned out I was pretty good at drawing maps & doing pdf layout. A few lucky breaks had my early works published and so I’m now making a proper go at TTRPGs as a business.
What would you like to be known for, and what do you think you are currently known for?
I’d love to be known for my great maps & psychedelic tinged adventure design. That’s really the part of all this that sets my head on fire.
I have extreme imposter syndrome so I’m not sure I’m currently known much at all lol. I’m probably most known for my adventure that was published through Exalted Funeral called Desiccated Temple of Locha or the one page version of it in Knock #2.
If not for that, it’s being the neon glowing bearded weirdo on ttrpg TikTok.
I love the name “Kaleidoscopic Whispers” because of the visual/audio juxtaposition. Is there a story behind it?
Yeah idk how much of this’ll get published but Kaleidoscopic Whispers was heavily influenced by psychedelics lol. All kinds of wild stuff falls out of the sky when you’re howling at the moon and singing songs to the aliens lol.
In the “starting town” of KW, there’s the ruins of a giant multicolored glass building. Imagine a bombed out sky scraper made out of stained glass and you’re right there with me. The town uses these massive glass shards like a combination sundial & kaleidoscope, but a much deeper magic infuses the whole thing. Being near them causes people to get the sensation of soft whispers behind them.
The current challenge with KW is that every tiny element has swelled to that level of detail depth and the scale has exploded. Now I’m trying to pare back to the good bits.
Okay… exploding psychedelics!
Now we’re safely on the territory of interesting and quirky; let’s step south by southwest on the board and talk about systems and what makes an RPG ‘Good’. I know. I like to ask these questions and maybe one day we’ll see a trend!
What makes a good RPG?
Any RPG that makes it hard to sleep because you’re feverishly thinking of cool things to do in it or make for it. For me, that’s a rules light system that heavily leans on situational improvisation, out of the box problem solving and player agency. Now after that word salad of buzz words lol, I really really really love Cairn & the other Into the Odd inspired games. In 10 minutes I can take a person who’s never played an RPG and get them to make a character & start playing with us. And they are just begging for you to make stuff. The rules are so light and understandable that “getting the math to work” isnt the focus and you can just make wild, weird stuff.
I do play a TON of different systems too. I think I’ve averaged 12+ different systems a year since 2020. Shout out to the private Discords, where I play 5 games a week lol.
Which rule systems have your favour right now? I noticed that “What Lies Sweeping” leans toward system-agnostic.
Related to above, but my system of choice to run is Cairn. If I’m thinking “let’s play DND”, it’s Cairn or OSE/BX every single time.
I’ve been having a blast with Pirate Borg (it’s by far my favorite of the Borgs) this year and the Limithron team are great.
I was in a 6 month campaign of Age of Sigmar: Soulbound that was so much fun. I’m usually not a fan of trad games, but Soulbound is a d6 dice pool game that leans hard into the Warhammer weirdness. Def surprised me.
And What Lies Sweeping is what happens when you start to make a BX one page adventure that quickly turned into a strongly scifi thing lol. The cowriter & I didn’t have a favorite rules light scifi system (Mothership, Death in Sspace, WEG Star Wars etc didn’t really set our heads ablaze but are obvious choices for this).
You might be picking up a theme of riding the ADHD lightning in general lol.
Sketchy Van Cartography
Right at the start, Andrew reminded us that Sketchy Van RPG is known for maps before even mentioning adventures. I’ve always got time to plot a bit of cartography into an interview.
What makes a good RPG map?
One that has the little “Andy Duvall” signature at the bottom right lol .
- it has to help the GM understand the space. If you look at a map and are even more confused at how things are supposed to go, the map maker dropped the ball.
- it should tell it’s own story. The map alone should give a GM inspiration or cause players to start filling in blanks in their imagination.
- it has to be an interesting space for players to explore. Non-linearity, odd architectural design, story-ful rooms, that sort of thing.
- everything is better with the florescent colors.
Is there an environmental setting you think is under-utilised for adventures and maps? I think tropical archipelagos’ heat and water challenges make for a great setting, for example, but I rarely see them.
Yeah I think the deeply weird nature of tropical jungles haven’t really been explored. Yes there are lots of large predators, but it’s the tiny things that actually kill in the rainforest. I’m picturing something like the animated series Scavengers Reign depiction of an alien ecosystem
And everything could be weirder. Push the limits of what you think you can even explain at the table. In Kaleidoscopic Whispers, I have an item that’s essentially a time lapse video camera, point it at something and it’ll play a 60 second time lapse “video” at the time scale of the players choice. Like look at a temple and see everything that happened there today or for the past year or since the beginning of time. Give me more of that.
TTRPG trends and the Sketchy Van future
Andy shares their views on RPGs to TikTok and so I wanted to ask about a few trends directly. One of the trends that sprang at me straight away was the use of ‘RPG’ in the brand name rather than, say, the more modern ‘TTRPG’.
Since I brought up nautical adventures, congratulations on getting a Copper DriveThruRPG badge for “Galleon of the Jackalmaster“. Why do you think “one page encounters” seem to be gaining popularity?
Oh man, I didn’t even know that got any views lol!
I think, and maybe this is because I’m 40 with a family, lots of folks are looking to minimize the prep to play ratio. Getting 3 solid hours of free time is hard enough, asking for 6+ more hours to prep for that 3 is just not possible for lots of folks.
A one-page-dungeon directly addresses that problem. Grab a one-page that looks cool, skim over it for 2 minutes before the session and BOOM game prep done! Also, because of the extremely limited space they usually are just bullet points and you have no other choice than to make it up as you go!
What do you think about the rise of the acronym TTRPG or a tabletop RPG?
There isn’t a hobby or speciality on the Internet that doesn’t develop deep systems of abbreviation. I’m pretty sure I dropped 1-2 so far that folks probably won’t know (if not it’s because I edited them out). One more interesting thing is how “in-person tabletop” and “online ttrpgs” are developing unique play cultures. I might be skewered by the traditionalists, but I’m excited for the possibilities of ttrpg + video game cross overs. Imagine the experience of multiplayer Baldurs Gate 3, but more GM driven. I think that might be the longer term future of the hobby
Has the rise of AI-generated content changed your business or gaming?
(I’m not going to touch on the ethical & economic & environmental concerns with this tech, lots of better & smarter folks have done that)
My business? No. I’ve messed around a little bit with locally hosting open source LLMs, basically running tiny, less problematically sourced “chatgpts” on my home graphics card. But even asking it to make a generic product description for any of my stuff needed so much tweaking it was easier to write myself. The reason for LLMs is doing intense multi axis statistical analysis (ie solving “2 pendulums” problems) and it’s very very exciting for that use… That’s just not how 99.99% of people are using it
All that said, using generative AI to replace creativity seems absolutely stupid. Why get a robot to have fun for you? Make them do your chores! I won’t support any product that uses it in a commercial release in anyway at all and I’m turned off by it’s use in non-commercial releases too.
Don’t ever pay a mega corporation money to use their “creativity robots”. Give that money to a damn human.
Editor’s note: I left Andy’s humble comment about ‘smarter people’ in just because of the juxtaposition of the following up comments wherein Andy talks about multi-axis statistical analysis and running locally hosted large language models on his own hardware!
What can we expect next from Sketchy Van RPG?
Hopefully finishing Kaleidoscopic Whispers. I just picked up a used business class laser printer this week, so hopefully I’ll be adding short run homemade print zines to the roster after Christmas too
I’ve been dripping out content on patreon (need to get better over there), there will probably be pieces of KW that’ll appear over there during development.
Let’s make 2025 the first year I can pay rent with maps: HIRE ME TO DRAW MAPS!!
More Sketchy Van RPG
There are quite a few places where you can keep up with Andy and find Sketchy Van RPG goodies.
- Sketchy Van RPG website.
- Sketchy Van RPG on BlueSky.
- Sketchy Van RPG on TikTok.
- Sketchy Van RPG on Facebook.
- Sketchy Van RPG on Instagram.
- Where to buy: DriveThruRPG | Itch.
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