Every year for Gen Con, you enter a list of TTRPGs that you want to play at the con. Every year, you only win a limited number of your top picks. Then, you’ll need to fill out the rest of your schedule with lesser known, unanticipated games, many of which turn out to be amazing. Case in point, Tales from Elsewhere: Clockwork was not on my radar, but my author friend John McGuire got me a seat and, wow, that was an outstanding session! I got to game with the game’s creator, Peter Lange of the Tales from Elsewhere Youtube channel as well as Seth of All Trades who made the terrain for the adventure. This game’s ideas and mechanics grabbed me, and I was happy to discuss this project as it runs on Kickstarter.
EGG EMBRY (EGG): It was good getting to game with you at Gen Con, I enjoyed Tales from Elsewhere: Clockwork quite a bit. What’s the pitch for the game?
PETER LANGE (PETER): Tales from Elsewhere is a system designed around math-lite, but violence-heavy action-horror gameplay. It’s a system that emphasizes cooperative, tactical decision-making from the players to survive deadly scenarios presented by the GM. It eschews conventional Hit Points in favor of a visceral injury system that cuts straight to the gruesome details. The Clockworld setting is a post-apocalyptic weird west world, full of steampunk monstrosities, undead horrors, and eldritch abominations. 100 years after The Calamity, a mysterious apocalyptic event, the hardy survive of humanity band together to rebuild, and retake, the world that was stolen from them.
EGG: What inspired this game?
PETER: I’m a lifelong fan of action, horror, and western cinema, and my favorite films were hugely influential. Predator, Aliens, Tombstone, Unforgiven, The Thing – all of these were formative for me. Video games like the Red Dead series and Hunt: Showdown are in there, as well as TTRPGs like Deadlands.
EGG: You went weird west, an area that Deadlands has cornered. There’s not judgment in this question, but how is Tales from Elsewhere: Clockwork distinct and original compared to Deadlands?
PETER: I love Deadlands; not so much the systems it’s printed under, but the vibe of it. What separates Clockworld from Deadlands is the more grounded, gritty, and horror-focused experience that it offers. Rather than being exactly our world, it is “a world not so different from our own”, and one that was mostly reduced to ruin. The players are capable of surviving and even accomplishing wondrous things through technology or supernatural abilities, but they remain more grounded than the characters you’d see in a Deadlands story. In Deadlands, magical hucksters cast spells and weave magic through deals with evil spirits. That’s absolutely rad, but is also a bit more fantasy than my preferred version of weird west. I wanted something a bit more down-in-the-mud, a bit more intense. Weird West comes in many flavors, and I honestly love all of ‘em. Clockworld is for folks that want something a bit more brutal, and bit more visceral, than what particularly flavor that Deadlands offers.
EGG: Beyond going with the weird west, you decided on an original system. Why your ideas over, say, a d20-based option like Old-School Essentials, MÖRK BORG, or Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, for example?
PETER: Tales from Elsewhere actually started as a hack of Cyberpunk 2020 many, many years ago. Over time, I moved away from the ultra-crunchy approach I began with. The reason I built my own system, rather than leverage the usual d20, was the goals for the math and system of my game didn’t align with using such a high-variability die. The d10 ended up serving my math-lite goals more effectively, and the more I iterated on the health abstraction (wound system), the more I diverged from the norm and the more I needed to distance myself from existing structures.
EGG: Can you discuss the engine you’re using to power the game?
PETER: The core resolution is a d10 roll over structure that’d be familiar to anyone who has played a d20 roll over system, like D&D. The game is built on the foundation of the concept of the “Rank”; it’s how a player’s skill at something is measure, how challenging an enemy is, how tough it is to overcome an obstacle or lie to some guards. The Ranks determine the Bonus you’d add to a Skill test, the Difficulty (Target Number) you need to meet to succeed, and how deadly the injuries are that you inflict. This structure is linear, simple, and player-facing; everyone knows how hard the things are that they’re trying before they roll, and the odds of success and failure are easy to surmise. There are no other numerical operations for your rolls; no other bonuses or penalties. Such affects would change the Rank itself, scaling it up and down, rather than modify things on-the-fly. It results in a simple, smooth, and easy to adjudicate structure for play.
EGG: You mentioned that you don’t use hit points, what are you replacing them with?
PETER: The Injury System is the health abstraction the game uses. All characters, whether players or monsters, have a certain number of “slots” to receive injuries. Injuries are narrative and mechanical packets that are applied directly to the recipient, with no hit points in the way. These injuries have complications, like bleeding or agonizing, and the character is subject to those negative conditions until they can treat the injury. Once the injury is treated, it’s not removed from the sheet – that only happens if you have downtime to rest and recovery in a safe place. The Injury Roll replaces the usual “damage rolls” of other games. You roll a small pool of dice, the size determined by your weapon and the number determined by your Skill Rank, and look for the lowest single result. If it’s a 4 or higher, you inflict Strain, which is nothing more than a scratch or graze. If it’s a 2 or a 3, you inflict a Serious Injury, and the complications associated with that attack get applied. If you get a 1, then you inflict a Critical Injury, a more dire and deadly result! The reason these numbers were selected is so that no matter the size of the dice used, you’re always looking for the same results. It also means that smaller dice are more “precise” than an unwieldy large dice, which take on the aspect of feeling clumsy and inaccurate.
EGG: What’s one element of this game that you think is unique? Something small that you really treasure about this gaming experience?
PETER: Apart from the Injury System, I’d say it’s the Luck System. Luck is a metacurrency that the players have that they use to reroll dice after seeing the results or to make small narrative edits to the scene. They could “remember” to have brought that crowbar they’d need to pry open the door, or “luckily” have met the bouncer at this nightclub at a party last year. To get more of this resource, the players must lean into the horror. They have to roleplay their injuries or fears, gripping their spillin’ guts and cryin’ out for help, rather than do something productive. They can make small narrative edits to a scene to their own detriment, causing their guns to jam, a door to be locked, or an ally to turn on them. It places that control in the players’ hands, choosing how much they’d like to engage with that subsystem. It’s been an absolute blast at the table.
EGG: You flew a crew from California to Indianapolis just to run sessions of your game including a “celebrity” session. What was the reception for Tales from Elsewhere: Clockwork like at Gen Con?
PETER: That was our first time attending Gen Con ever, and it was wonderful! Exhausting, and wonderful. The reception was great; all the players at the tables we ran had so much fun, and it was a genuine pleasure to run so many games for so many people. We also got a chance to network with tons of content creators and industry veterans, which is incredibly valuable. Getting to talk face-to-face with people that I’d like to collaborate with was very meaningful, indeed.
EGG: I concur with the feedback on your game, it was a great time! Beyond Tales from Elsewhere: Clockwork, what else are you working on?
PETER: We have further setting books that are in the early concept/drafting stages. In particular, our medieval horror setting code named “Medieval Madness” has seen some work done, as well as the modern horror mystery setting code named “Satanic Panic”. But mostly, my time is spent at my day job, working on Clockworld, or recording videos for YouTube.
EGG: Thank you for talking with me. Where can fans follow your work?
PETER: The three main places to look are our website, our YouTube channel of the same name, and particularly the Kickstarter campaign we’re running during the month of September.
Tales from Elsewhere: Clockworld – Action Horror RPG
- End date: Thursday, October 2 2025
- “An action-horror, post-apocalyptic, weird west tabletop roleplaying game with a brutal injury system and dynamic, math-lite combat.
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