Based on the rules from the RPG Trophy: Gold, the upcoming Vac Suits and Duct Tape plunges player characters into a dark and cold universe filled with opportunity and deadly danger. EDIT: Vac Suits and Duct Tape is now live at drivethrurpg and VS&DT itch.io!
“This game tells the story of the blue-collar crew of a scavenger ship as they explore alien wrecks in search of priceless salvage. As they penetrate the structure they may face not only pirates, alien beasts, and technical hazards, but also the corruption that comes from being too close to tears in the fabric of reality.”
Charlie Dunwoody (CD): Thanks for talking with me again. What inspired you to write Vac Suits and Duct Tape and what type of universe did you want to bring to life?
Fenris-77 (F7): It was a couple of things really. I started the game several years ago and had just gotten into Trophy and was (and still am) enchanted by the rules. Trophy: Gold specifically is a rules light deconstruction of traditional OSR style play and it really inspired me to play and write. While playing and running a lot of Trophy I started to tinker with the notion of hacking the rules for something else. I didn’t want to tread to close to the fantasy milieu of the base game and started thinking about various science fiction possibilities. Exploring wrecked alien ships seemed like a solid sci-fi equivalent of dungeon crawling (as many other designers have already realized, I’m looking at you Space Hulk. Once I had that basic idea the move into space truckers as characters led me to various movies and shows like Alien and Firefly. Awesome games like Mothership inhabit this same general design space. The basic setting conceit is that the characters live in a system cut off from the rest of humanity by the collapse of its void gate, an event that also spewed millennia of accumulated space junk into the system. This worked for the basic idea I wanted of scavenging wrecks, but the space junk also added the possibility to use pretty much any kind of alien or wreck in a specific game and have it ‘make sense’ from a narrative standpoint. So a small game with a sketch-level setting can handle lots of different kinds of sci-fi stories. I wanted to GMs to have as much freedom as possible inside the basic setting.
CD: How did Vac Suits and Duct Tape evolve and change from your initial idea into its final form?
F7: I initially wrote VSaDT based on Trophy: Dark rather than Trophy: Gold, which is a much more horror-indexed game aimed at short-form fantasy wilderness exploration (one or two sessions). Trophy: Dark would do a wonderful job specifically of handling a story like the first Alien movie where you have a lot of player vs player and most of the characters die. I realized pretty quickly that I wanted something with more of a campaign feel and so shifted over to the Trophy: Gold rules.
CD: You mentioned the stunning art by BrotherFel. How did you and Brother Fel meet and what was the process the two of you used to turn your written and/or spoken ideas into final art?
F7: Amazingly, BrotherFel was the first or second person to respond to a post I made on Discord looking for artists to help with the game. We hit it off right away and I loved some of his first concept work. He played in some playtest sessions and got excited and the rest is history. I’m just sorry the game languished in development limbo for a while and it’s taken me this long to get his art close to publication. A lot of the art in the book is linked quite closely the short fiction it contains and I couldn’t be more pleased with the result.
CD: What was the most challenging part of designing Vac Suits and Duct Tape and why?
F7: I think the most difficult part was trying to create a world that seemed rational and lived in inside the small page count. Trophy does this well, which helped, but I had to pack a lot of evocative detail into other parts of the game, like equipment for example. I also decided to add some short fiction bits to “illustrate” various aspects of the rules as well as serving as an example of what play might look like. To tie everything together the fiction bits in the rules, plus almost all the art, tie directly to one of the Salvage Runs, called Black Obelisk that comes with the main rules.
CD: How do you intend Vac Suits and Duct Tape to be run and what tools do you provide GMs to bring adventures to life?
F7: Vac Suits and Duct Tape is a very light game in almost every respect, but it still provides all the moving parts GMs need to run great games. Like its parent game Trophy, VSaDT is often run with just a flowchart and no actual map (although it works with maps just fine). A given adventure, called a Salvage Run, is broken up into thematic and geographical chunks called sets. Each set is a large area, or series of connected smaller areas, and each set has details for foes, hazards, and salvage the group might find, as well as evocative moments for play and a basic question or goal that drives exploration. So, for example, the set goal might be navigate the wrecked hanger bay and locate the northern transit tunnels. The set provides everything you need to run that bit of the adventure and move on to the next set. Vac Suits and Duct Tape also has a rest and recovery play loop (the equivalent of the OSR camp phase) and a larger structural loop that covers going back to Bastion Space station, selling stuff, paying the bills, and finding your next job. I’ve had people use Vac Suits to run Mothership adventures, which are much more specifically structured with maps and rooms, and they said they ran the adventure and converted on the fly and it went very well. The base Trophy: Gold rules are similarly easy to use to run a wide range of OSR modules from many systems with minimal conversion.
CD: Was Trophy your first choice for game system and how does the system help bring the universe of Vac Suits and Duct Tape to life?
F7: Vac Suits and Duct Tape was never supposed to be anything but rooted in Trophy. One bit of OSR DNA that Trophy retains is that characters are fragile and death lurks around every corner, and that seemed to fit what I was doing to a tee. This is very much a game about creative play and problem solving and not character sheet widgets. The Trophy die pool mechanic specifically allows for and perhaps even demands that players get creative with helping each other, using equipment, and using the environment to solve the problems they encounter.
CD: Anything else you’d like to share with the readers of EN World?
F7: I’m already hard at work on a Bastion Station supplement for VSaDT so this won’t be a one and done release. I hope that everyone who buys Vac Suits and Duct Tape really enjoys it, but even if they don’t, I would encourage them to take a look at Trophy by Jesse Ross. It’s marvelous.
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