Adam Powell (00:49.18)
Hello and welcome to Snyder's Return, a tabletop roleplay podcast. My guest today has survived the wild southwest, the rat -infested metropolis, and the true horror that is higher education, to deliver unto us a grimdark experience at our gaming tables. Crafted in a frozen settlement, once into this tome you'll be all guns blazing into new deaths unknown. Your weapons and wits in need of respite and creature comforts.

Here to discuss Black Powder and Brimstone is game designer, illustrator, animator, and comic book artist, Benjamin Tobitt. Benjamin, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.

Benjamin Tobitt (01:27.154)
It's a pleasure to be here.

Adam Powell (01:29.788)
As is seems to be tradition with the way I do interviews, before we get into the sort of the crux of the interview, Ben, how yourself did how did you yourself get into tabletop role playing games, please?

Benjamin Tobitt (01:42.738)
So it wasn't until after university, some friends invited me to play Pathfinder and it all kind of went downhill from there. But it was quite fun. That was my introduction. I don't know if fifth edition D &D had come out at that point. This is 2011, 2012.

Adam Powell (02:08.732)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (02:11.826)
And this was also kind of the start of, you started to get more kind of indie projects started to come out like Fate and getting introduced to some of the more like niche stuff as well. But a lot of the game of BPNB is me kind of...

Adam Powell (02:19.452)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (02:37.906)
finally doing the game I wanted to make with them. I kept on trying to twist Pathfinder around to accommodating this kind of world. And then after I saw Mercboy on Dave Thummo's YouTube channel, that was a real like, wow, oh, okay. Maybe I could just do it from scratch.

Adam Powell (03:00.22)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (03:04.316)
Yeah, absolutely. So having started with Parfinder and tried to twist it and go into that, how did you then go from wanting to do it? How did you get from that initial point through to where we are now with Black Powder and Brimstone, BPMB?

Benjamin Tobitt (03:20.274)
So it wasn't like a straight line. So I was kind of doing that for years. And then just completely just put like tabletop games down for a long time. And it was a bit of a, you know, getting the chocolate dropped in the peanut butter situation where I...

Adam Powell (03:37.628)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (03:49.138)
out of nowhere on the YouTube algorithm got recommended Thumor's video on Morgborg and that was a real like, wow, okay, so like graphic design can be fun, huh? And I was also listening to a podcast by the two of the guys from Chappo Trap House and they did a sub podcast called...

Adam Powell (03:58.94)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (04:20.786)
Hell on Earth, which is about the Thirty Years War, which I had some kind of knowledge about, you know, Landschnechts and the European wars of religion and, you know, guys in crazy outfits with guns and pole arms and swiganders. And then I kind of realised, wait a minute, I can mix these two together, of this kind of, you know...

Adam Powell (04:24.348)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (04:50.386)
period of history where you have the kind of... you have kind of the future and the past kind of smashing into each other, where you still have guys mounted in cavalry wearing full suits of armour, getting, you know, air -holed by guys with, you know, matchlock rifles.

Adam Powell (05:03.74)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (05:12.466)
So it's almost like there's kind of Star Trek episodes where you have this technologically advanced civilization coming up against a medieval one. And throwing onto that ideas of like, at this time there was a lot of superstitions, a lot of religious salutary, a lot of witch hysteria. It's all kind of going, it is literally hell on earth.

Adam Powell (05:21.692)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (05:34.684)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (05:40.242)
and what a fantastic setting for an adventure, for an adventure game.

Adam Powell (05:47.42)
Yeah, absolutely. So before I really dive into it a bit more and expand on things you've brought up there, where can we find your good self? Where can we find the game? Where can we find everything that's associated with it? Please, Ben.

Benjamin Tobitt (05:56.85)
So.

Benjamin Tobitt (06:03.09)
So I'm at Benjamin Tobit on Twitter, that's why I'm most active. If you want to back the project then it's Black Powder and Brimstone on Kickstarter. If you can't remember all that, if you type in OSR into Kickstarter I'm usually hovering around the top and it's the bright orange thumbnail.

And we just passed half a million crowns today.

Adam Powell (06:38.172)
Amazing. Congratulations. So when so from time of recording, how long is left on that Kickstarter?

Benjamin Tobitt (06:40.882)
Thank you.

Benjamin Tobitt (06:45.746)
I think it's something like, let me just check. I think it's like 19 days. Oh no, 17 days, 17 days left to go.

Adam Powell (06:53.916)
Well, I will ensure that there are links to the social as you mentioned and while it's live the Kickstarter and then in the future if it goes through back a kit and all that sort of good stuff.

Benjamin Tobitt (07:03.122)
Oh yes, it's gonna be on Bakkekit not quite as long as usual because I am hoping to get the book in people's hands by Christmas. This is not a promise. We still have on the Kickstarter that it is likely.

Adam Powell (07:09.436)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (07:24.338)
more like realistically that people will get the book in their hands by February of 2025. However, it is my, you know, my hope to pull off a bit of a Christmas miracle and get it get it on shelves by early or mid -December.

Adam Powell (07:44.252)
grim dark Christmas miracle. I'm happy with this. So to help facilitate this miracle as it was, we'll probably taper away from using that in a bit. But what can people expect when they go across to Kickstarter, onto Bakkekit in the future, if you're listening to this after the game has been closed down on Kickstarter, what could they receive on the Kickstarter at this moment in time?

Benjamin Tobitt (07:46.45)
Exactly.

Benjamin Tobitt (07:57.49)
Hehehehe

Benjamin Tobitt (08:12.178)
So we have the obviously kind of bog standard, 15 or 20 pounds, so PDF of the whole book.

but the main star of the show is going to be the actual physical book. So I'm partnered with Free League who are going to be publishing it. And obviously they're known for their quality. We'd be going with the same printers that they use. It's a fantastic company in Lithuania who do...

just the most beautiful hardback books and it's going to be stitch bound so no matter how many times you go through the pages will not fall out you'll be able to lay it flat. It's going to be hard backed. We've just passed our stretch goal of having two bookmark ribbons.

and I'm going to make sure it's on really nice thick glossy paper so that the artwork really shines. And then we have more elaborate...

Adam Powell (09:09.5)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (09:23.666)
rewards later down. So you can have one which has a pad of character sheets, ones which come with a art -only PDF, which is going to not just be a PDF sans all the text, because the book is 200 pages long. It's going to be by the time we finish with it, and pretty much every page has a full -colour illustration.

Adam Powell (09:25.916)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (09:44.028)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (09:50.834)
but obviously some aren't gonna work so much as just the illustrations, so there's gonna be some behind the scenes text and also some behind the scenes sketches in that one as well. And then as you get towards the more expensive tiers, there's ones which come with a book of spells, so magic in this game, in this world, is very powerful but also kind of forbidden, so...

Adam Powell (10:18.012)
Okay.

Benjamin Tobitt (10:19.154)
I wanted to have this little chap book, like a tiny little book, like a Tijuana Bible, where each page has one of the spells from the basebook, along with some artwork and a little bit of lore, a little bit of flavour text, and it's going to look like something a little bit like the Necronomicon, or if you know what they are, the Satanic Bibles from Iceland.

Adam Powell (10:26.044)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (10:45.532)
Hmm... No?

Benjamin Tobitt (10:46.834)
of all scrawled over with lots of little illustrations and like symbols and things like that. There's a preview of what the Book of Spells is going to look like on the Kickstarter page as well.

Adam Powell (11:01.82)
All right. Well, definitely scroll down and check that out for sure. That sounds incredible. And you mentioned the artwork there and it is by your fair hand. So I completely understand you wanting to make it pop on that glossy paper in a well constructed book. Yeah. So please go down, follow those links, support, support, free league support, small business, local business and all that sort of good stuff. And of course, the topic of this this interview, this conversation.

Benjamin Tobitt (11:10.418)
It is, yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (11:16.242)
Oh yes.

Adam Powell (11:31.708)
Black Powder and Brimstone. So the art is very evocative, but for someone that's like, I think I know what this is, in a bit of a synapsis, you mentioned magic being sort of, especially in that respect, what is the setting and what is going on in the world of Black Powder and Brimstone?

Benjamin Tobitt (11:54.994)
Sure, so it's a sort of alternate universe of real German history. So you had the Thirty Years War, which basically happened, the Cliff Snakes version is Martin Luther decides to break from the Catholic Church and do his own thing, sans all the corruption.

and then shenanigans ensue and what happens is you have the Protestants, the Calvinists,

wanting to do their own thing and then you have the traditional Roman Catholic Church going, no you don't get to split from the church and then it all becomes very quickly, it becomes very violent. Neither side has an army so they start bringing in foreign mercenaries and then they start causing their own chaos and everything gets worse and worse and worse. So essentially more or less the same thing happens in my world apart from

except Martin Luther is successfully assassinated and so his splinter group becomes much more militant, much more extreme and goes straight into the burning and all the kind of super puritan stuff.

Because this is not the real world, this is a fantasy world, there are demons and other otherworldly forces involved, and then that also means the Inquisition getting involved. And as with the witch hysteria that happened in the real world, there's that as well, but the witches are real, witches are actually a playable class. And...

Adam Powell (13:47.42)
Mmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (13:50.546)
to kind of balance the fact that like I never really liked the idea in like games like D &D which have you know a very well -known magic system or it's like okay but like how does this affect the rest of the world it feels very much that magic is one of those things that kind of is happening but kind of fizzles away before it can genuinely affect the world so in this in this game

Adam Powell (14:14.62)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (14:20.786)
Magic is very powerful, you don't need a roll to confirm any effect, as long as you succeed the dice roll, you do the thing. But, because this is a very religious, very zealot...

society, if you're seen doing magic in front of the wrong people, they will call the Inquisition or the Witch Hunters and then they will be after you. It's not quite as simple as, oh well, you know, this guy's being rude to me so I cast fireball on his ass. Like, okay, yeah, sure, you solved that problem, but then the next day you're gonna have some very scary people coming after you.

Adam Powell (14:43.772)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (15:01.468)
Yeah, absolutely. So what can we, as a party, a group of individuals come together within the world of Black Powder and Brimstone? What sort of things can we get up to? And you mentioned there were things we should probably avoid doing, but what are we doing as a group within this setting?

Benjamin Tobitt (15:16.85)
Hehehehe

Benjamin Tobitt (15:23.474)
So you're in, you know, I'm mostly focusing on just the one country for this, for the core book. There are other countries out there which are going to have their own expansions.

Adam Powell (15:38.652)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (15:39.122)
But you are essentially, you're in Vaterland, my version of Germany, there is a war on and it's chaos. So what are you going to do? You're going to try and make as much money as you can to either leave, get to safety or potentially build up your own mercenary company.

There are rules for making your own company and picking your own name, your crest, rules for hiring mercenaries and the fact that you need to keep them paid. If you don't pay them regularly, they will at best just bugger off. They will just leave and go work for someone else or maybe they'll hold you for their pay at gunpoint.

And in that you're kind of starting out as a group of ne 'er -do -wells, desperate people, not all sort of money at hand. But if you play for long enough, level up, earn more, you could find yourself at the head of a significant mercenary force. And then it almost kind of turns, if that's what you're interested in, it can turn from a...

Adam Powell (16:34.364)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (16:51.612)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (16:55.634)
like a simple, you know, one -to -one people fighting people tabletop game to more of a like a turn -based like battle RPG, where, you know, each player is command of, you know, several...

Adam Powell (17:09.18)
All right.

Benjamin Tobitt (17:15.634)
several mercenaries at one point and directing where the damage goes and stuff like that and there is quite simple rules for how to handle that. I didn't want it to turn into like, okay, right, well once you've reached a certain level then you need to suddenly start to learn the Warhammer rulebook of how to march an army and stuff like that. But there are also...

Adam Powell (17:18.492)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (17:26.812)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (17:37.436)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (17:45.618)
Within the book, within the GEM section, I have included an adventure generator. If you've played Cy-borg or... Let me just check the...

Benjamin Tobitt (18:03.858)
from a book by Christopher Kale where it's like a very simple D20 generator for an adventure. So you receive a task from a person who promises a reward of 1 to 20. If the PCs do a thing...

Adam Powell (18:14.236)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (18:31.922)
They have a goal and then complication and then enemies and then a location and then that locations aspect. So there's 20 for each one. So I think it's something like several million possible combinations. Is if it's 20 by 20 by 20 by 20 and you never know which one they're gonna get or if they repeat. So.

Adam Powell (18:48.732)
combinations. Wow. Beer.

Benjamin Tobitt (18:59.218)
I'll just quickly, like I won't roll or anything, but we can just quickly go through to how quickly you can sort out an adventure. So you receive a task from a hooded figure. Your reward is map to a treasure.

Adam Powell (19:03.836)
Yeah, please.

Benjamin Tobitt (19:17.554)
If the PCs smuggle a

Benjamin Tobitt (19:28.338)
a spy.

Benjamin Tobitt (19:36.722)
one needs to open the files. However, there's a complication. The complication is... The job is in fact a distraction for someone else. And the enemies involved are ghosts and spectres. And the location where you're going to be having your adventure is...

River Town, it is the site of a sacrificial altar. So just randomly, like it is all, and I've tried to keep everything within a theme, like everything is very much, you know, quite a concentrated theme. It's very much opposite to games like D &D or Pathfinder, which are very much like, it's Western fantasy.

Adam Powell (20:14.172)
Oh my god, now... Yeah, yeah...

Benjamin Tobitt (20:33.298)
with maybe a little bit of sci -fi. Like, it's got a little bit of everything for everyone. It's like, no, no, no. This is not everything for everyone. There are going to be some people who can be very much turned off by this game, but there are going to be people who absolutely, like, absolutely want this kind of environment, this kind of atmosphere. Sort of, you know, slightly more gritty, low fantasy. Kind of Warhammer fantasy classic.

Adam Powell (20:38.14)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (20:50.652)
Hmm.

Absolutely.

Adam Powell (21:03.1)
Yeah, definitely.

Benjamin Tobitt (21:03.282)
Like a lot of inspiration came from, you know, Mordheim. Like sort of much more kind of grim and nasty version of Warhammer fantasy and all that kind of, you know, the Empire of Man, yeah, having all that.

Adam Powell (21:08.988)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (21:23.378)
all of their stuff together or edge of sigma now where it's like i don't know so it was almost like a marvel comic book kind of environment of like gods and uh reality hopping

Adam Powell (21:36.924)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've staying with the Sigma stuff. I've just had the new book for Ulf and Khan Deliver, which brings it down to a grim dark setting. But that's not the game we're talking about this. We're here for Black Powder and Brimstone, which delivers on its own appeals and promises. And the artwork really brings it to life. So have you got a...

Benjamin Tobitt (21:46.29)
Oh yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (22:02.61)
Thank you.

Adam Powell (22:06.364)
a favorite piece of artwork and a favorite sort of mechanic or character slash NPC slash enemy within the book that is either evocative or mechanically fun or just inspired by something that really talks to you as a creator.

Benjamin Tobitt (22:26.77)
I'm currently working on a series of Nemesis enemies. A lot of the enemies in the Bestiary are one of many.

Adam Powell (22:36.636)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (22:49.458)
They're more kind of an archetype rather than like a boss. Apart from like, I dunno, maybe one of them is just a sort of demon, which is, you know, it comes with its own countdown clock from, um...

Blades in the Dark, where it's like, you have a clock with six sections, after each one of those sections is filled in, then the sky turns red and the end of the world's happening. The end of the world won't happen right there and then, but it's more like, okay, the tone of the game is going to shift now.

Adam Powell (23:05.628)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (23:25.884)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (23:28.53)
But there are going to be some more particular characters in there, and one of them is me basically just ripping off The Judge from Blood Meridian, which is one of the greatest novels ever written, which has this amazing character called The Judge, who's kind of a Satan aliquory. And there are some other Blood Meridian references throughout the book.

It's so evocative and extremely atmospheric. I mean, a lot of the mechanics and stuff like that, I more or less either took wholesale or just kind of tweaked and improved, I don't want to say improved, like tweaked and changed from Mork Borg.

to fit the setting better, to be more specific to this world.

Adam Powell (24:23.996)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (24:31.474)
I don't know, some of the...

Some of the potions are quite fun, a whole page of potions and poisons. And there's one called Vermin's Delight, which basically if you throw this at someone, all sorts of insects and rats and pigeons and stuff like that will start attacking them from all angles.

So it's a bit of dark comedy as well.

Adam Powell (25:05.02)
Hmm. Yeah, definitely. You mentioned the book for the inspiration for the judge you're inspired by, ripping off.

Benjamin Tobitt (25:15.826)
Yeah. He's the judge. You know, he says he'll never die. He's a great favourite.

Adam Powell (25:22.332)
So that is an inspiration. What other inspirations? As you mentioned, this is taken sort of mechanically from sort of Mürburgring and brought into Black Powder and Brimstone. But what other inspirations have you drawn in to sort of build out your ideas?

Benjamin Tobitt (25:25.234)
Oh yes.

Benjamin Tobitt (25:36.37)
Okay.

Benjamin Tobitt (25:41.81)
a good heavy dose of the Souls games and Elton Ring, but also The Witcher 3, like quite a lot of video games.

Benjamin Tobitt (25:57.906)
But also, a big influence is also the game Plague Tale, which follows these two kids going through the Hundred Years War, which is also being played by Tidal Waves of Rats, who actually feature in the game. I have a kind of bespoke...

bespoke rules for having to fend off the enormous numbers of rats, which were also a real thing historically. Rats, but also like hogs apparently kind of grew out of proportion during the war, would basically just tear across the countryside, devouring everything in their path. I think also,

I mean it's almost impossible if you're English and of a certain age not to be influenced by Blackadder. So there's no direct references, although actually no, I think there is going to be a direct reference when they sort out the Nemesis enemies.

Adam Powell (26:53.038)
Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (27:04.69)
But certainly the tone of Blackadder, which is very quintessentially English, of like, yes, everything's terrible. Am I going to stop being sarcastic about it? Absolutely not.

Adam Powell (27:10.972)
you

Adam Powell (27:18.844)
have it any other way. So it.

Benjamin Tobitt (27:20.05)
That kind of dark, that kind of dark humor, uh, kind of goes throughout it. My intention with this game or any of my other future games is not to have something which is supposed to be depressing in the same way that Marker Boy is a comedy game, really at its heart. Like by the time it gets to the table, it's so over the top and so dark.

Adam Powell (27:40.668)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (27:46.61)
that the only real, the only reasonable reaction is to make jokes, is just to take it just that little bit further and make it a bit silly.

Adam Powell (27:54.812)
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So if someone is inspired by this, so they love the sound of the game, the setting, the themes, the characters you've mentioned and some of the mechanics, but have never played an OSR game before, could you just break down the basic mechanics of how to play this game, please?

Benjamin Tobitt (28:18.226)
Sure, sure. I mean, it's super easy. Like, I'd actually argue that it's quite an easy game to get into. So I am myself dyslexic. So I've made the kind of construction of the book as like, as simple and readable as possible. But...

Adam Powell (28:39.612)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (28:41.778)
the kind of the super basic way to think about it is that like, you have your four stats. So you have strength, agility, presence and toughness. Your presence is, I mean, strength, agility and toughness are all pretty self -explanatory, but presence is kind of a catchall.

like using your head. So it's, you know, aiming, perceiving, persuading someone or using magic. So you have those in your stats, you know, you may have minus three or, you know, zero or plus one or plus two once you roll your character, you know, whatever.

and then you're going to be going up, and basically every time you make a roll, you're going to be going up against a difficulty rating. So it starts off with a difficult rating of six, so that's simple, but fairly it will be interesting. Something weird will happen. If you have to roll a d20 against something which is like,

an eight or a 10, it's like, if your character is skilled at this, it'll be a cakewalk. But most of the time you're gonna be hitting, you're gonna be going against number 12. So you have to roll D20 plus or minus your stats against 12. So it's slightly worse than a coin flip if you're rolling a D20. And...

So like for my example, you want to strike an enemy creature with your sword, you would roll D20 at your strength modifier, gets a DR of 12. If you manage to roll at or higher than 12, you successfully hit the creature and you roll damage. Simple as really. And for when the...

Benjamin Tobitt (30:43.602)
When the enemy NPC wants to attack your character, the GM doesn't roll to hit. So you are always having to roll Agility difficulty rating 12 to dodge out the way.

Adam Powell (30:58.396)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (30:58.898)
and it's always 12 unless some of the creatures have special abilities and stuff like that. But then that means that when it comes around to combat, it's much faster because when it's your turn to dodge, you always know you're going to have to hit 12. You don't have the constant, what's your AC again? And then, yeah, if you get 12 or better, you dodge out of the way. If you don't, you get hit, you get damaged.

Adam Powell (31:18.492)
Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (31:28.562)
damage is going to be quite significant because you're usually dealing with about 10 hit points or less. So it's not going to get to the point where you've got like 35, 40 hit points and it becomes a lot less easy to quantify that in your mind. At least I find that when you start getting to large numbers.

then it's difficult to know like oh wait am I at half health already? Like what's what am I looking like? What am I feeling? And then the armor you can buy which is in three tiers. The armor doesn't...

Adam Powell (31:58.62)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (32:12.946)
help you getting hit. If anything the heavy armor gives you a penalty to dodging out the way, but what it does do is each armor has its own armor class which is contingent to a dice and so once you get hit you roll your armor dice and then whatever number you get that's how much damage is negated by the armor.

So say if you have like medium armor, which is D6, you fail your dodge roll, enemy hits you for like D10 damage, they deal six damage to you, you roll your D6, you get lucky, you get a five, therefore, six minus five, one, that one damage carries over to you. Super simple.

Adam Powell (32:47.324)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (32:59.644)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great system that's found popularity with, I'm sure, Black Proud and Brimstone will continue it, but with Moaborg and Cyborg and Death in Space, another one by published through Three League. There are others, Bastionland, Into the Odd, these very different takes which use a similar system.

Benjamin Tobitt (33:16.242)
Absolutely. Oh yeah. Free League Workshop. Mmm.

Adam Powell (33:30.012)
So you can always mix and match, but this is very much a game in its own right and just uses that common system. So if someone wants to, someone's like, I like the way this sounds, I like the way this plays, but can I try it now? What's available to me right now?

Benjamin Tobitt (33:45.074)
Absolutely. So right now on the Kickstarter there's a link to a quick start guide on Dry Thru RPG and that has all the quick rules, rules for combat, my kind of special brand new advanced combat rules. So rules for stealth, fire,

attacks for opportunity, grappling and stunning, and mounted combat, and also how to manage a chase between characters. Along with...

Adam Powell (34:23.004)
Thank you.

Benjamin Tobitt (34:26.386)
sort of damage, and how to create a character. All the character classes, the 15 character classes are kind of not available for free, you know, because they look really cool and I'm not giving that away for free. But there is enough in the Quickstart in order for you to make a character and run the game.

Adam Powell (34:40.444)
sense.

Adam Powell (34:45.052)
Ha ha.

Adam Powell (34:53.756)
Absolutely, yes there is. So it's 28 pages. I managed to get a download of it before this interview to check through. It's 28 pages of beautiful artwork, fantastic mechanics, and sort of just, yeah, there's nice touches that the City of Deliverance dredged in, I thought was a lovely touch.

Benjamin Tobitt (35:05.81)
Thank you.

Benjamin Tobitt (35:17.458)
Yes.

Adam Powell (35:20.54)
So what is it like flushing out those parts of the world? You mentioned it's in a fictional version of Germany around the Thirty Years War and that sort of thing. So what's it been like to put your spin within the setting on that side of things?

Benjamin Tobitt (35:26.098)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (35:33.234)
It's been really fun. I mean, I knew that like, so I started off with a map when I knew I was going to make this place. And, oh, a note about the pages. There's 28 pages, but each one is a double page spread. So that's how I planned the whole book. So as I say, like the final book is going to be like 200 pages or so. So that's...

Adam Powell (35:47.932)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (35:57.618)
what, like 36 pages in just a quick start? Something like that. No, maybe more than that. Maybe like 50, 55, almost 60. Ah, whatever. But yeah, I kind of started off with a map which is going to be included in the book and realized like the real 30 years war, what dragged out for so long is that...

Adam Powell (36:02.236)
Yeah. Mm.

Benjamin Tobitt (36:27.122)
you know, the country at the time was more sort of hundreds of little principalities, so the lines were always changing. I can't deal with that, so I just made a very simple north and south. So you got the Puritans in the north, you got the Orthodox in the south, and then in the middle there's a sort of no -man's land. And then, you know, from that you think, okay, so each faction is going to need its own capital city.

Adam Powell (36:33.372)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (36:46.684)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (36:55.058)
And then everything in between is, you know, whatever I want. So, you know, we've got the kind of... You've got Dreadstone in the middle of No Man's Land. That's a complete blasted, demon -haunted hellhole. You've got the forests, which have become extremely dangerous with monsters and demons and stuff like that. And then, you know, you've got to have a big horrible swamp area.

the Lost Man's Mire and just kind of knowing what I set up, what I wanted, you know, a very opulent, orthodox, Roman Catholic style church and then a very puritanical version, a Protestant version of the church. Like what...

what that would do to an environment. So the city of Purity is the Orthodox city, so it's very opulent, it's massive cathedrals, but it's also a place where the wealthy kind of prey upon the poor. And then to kind of counteract that, in the north you have Deliverance, which is where the Puritans have the...

have their strongholds, so you know they're really big on their prisons, really big on the you know imposing churches, you know burning people they don't like, but also because to give, to make sure that it doesn't become a kind of monotone setting, it's a port town, so you can have sailors, you can have trade, you're going to have...

brothels and stuff like that, which the church is not a fan of, but they know if we make this place inhospitable to sailors and traders, they're not going to come in, we're going to run out of money, so we're just going to have to buy our tons on that sort of thing. But that also means that there are districts within the city where it's like, okay, this place is near the docks, it's relatively safe, but...

Adam Powell (39:03.356)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (39:12.434)
When you get towards the big churches and the fortress and stuff like that, then you're gonna get a lot more kind of dangerous zealots there. And also, because it's a grimdark horror fantasy setting, at night stuff comes out of the sea. Like when the mists rolls in.

Adam Powell (39:22.588)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (39:33.724)
Of course it does. So now that all sounds like a lot of fun to sort of revel and get tangled up in and sort of unravel in certain aspects. So speaking on unraveling a little bit, maybe more on the unwinding, you've clearly put a lot of work into this with the Kickstarter ongoing and all these, you mentioned things that you want to sort of bring on.

Benjamin Tobitt (39:56.946)
Thank you.

Adam Powell (40:02.332)
into the game down the line expanding out into other cities and things. Do you get a time chance to relax and things like that? Or are you gaming or are you sort of working on the next project? Do you get downtime from your creative endeavors?

Benjamin Tobitt (40:02.738)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (40:18.194)
Well, I just moved house, just moved into a new apartment, so we're kind of exhausted at the moment. I was doing this game in amongst other commissions and work, and also helping my wife with her bakery. But...

Seeing as the Kickstarter's doing pretty well and I want to continue to make expansions for it, I am thinking of making this my full -time gig. But I do have scripts, I do have writing and research and stuff for several other games. This is going to be my only fantasy one. I very much...

Adam Powell (41:07.388)
Okay.

Benjamin Tobitt (41:11.122)
want to go in like each each game is going to be completely different and that is going to be mean that like you know not all of the audiences are going to it's going to cross over and you know what that's fine I'd rather make games for

Adam Powell (41:16.124)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (41:27.218)
100 people than, you know, try to hit all four corners like, oh we need to get everyone, everyone's gonna want this one. Like, no, no. I want this, like, just for me and like a small group of people to be passionate about.

Adam Powell (41:44.444)
So I'm intrigued and clearly you might want to keep your cards a little bit closer to your chest and that's fine. Without sort of delving into what the games are if you don't want to too much but will they continue to use OSR or are you exploring other systems?

Benjamin Tobitt (41:48.594)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Benjamin Tobitt (41:59.73)
Oh, well, yeah, I'm going to be using more of a kind of slightly looser ones for certain ones. So the one I have going down the pipeline, the one which is most done, is going to be a horror action game. And that one is going to borrow quite a bit from the Alien RPG.

Especially like I love the idea of stress. I love the idea of that like you can push a role at any time to make it go your way maybe but the consequences that your character becomes slightly more fragile and having that like much more bespoke so in that case you know it's going to be much more it's going to be action horror.

Adam Powell (42:40.06)
maybe.

Benjamin Tobitt (42:59.186)
I don't want to give away too much, but my big influence on that is the 2000 Resident Evil film. The very first one that came out. I absolutely love that film because it was a zombie action horror film, but it wasn't set after the apocalypse. It was all very much like a...

Adam Powell (43:23.132)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (43:26.898)
a dirty dozen men on the missions, World War Two style, like, you know, structure of a story. And I really liked that. And I thought, oh, there's lots here that you can transfer to a tabletop game, you know, getting really granular if need be. And so I'm kind of...

Adam Powell (43:33.98)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (43:50.162)
branching out a bit more this one. I'm not going to say this is my practice book because it took me a year and change to make. It was not easy. But, you know, I was, you know, I'm very grateful to Pelle Nelson and the guys at Stockhammer Cartel for being...

Adam Powell (43:52.252)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (43:58.844)
Oh no, of course.

Benjamin Tobitt (44:11.186)
so kind of cool, the idea of an open license of, you know, not gatekeeping, you know, putting all this work into a quite streamlined game system and then, you know, not just keeping that to themselves, just being kind of like, okay, well, we made it now and it's got our...

Adam Powell (44:14.172)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (44:31.538)
It's got our particular style on it. But if anybody else wants to take this, make it their own, chop it up, change it, publish your own thing, that's cool. Just, you know, don't copy and paste the whole thing wholesale. It's one of the things which also like really drew me in quite quickly to the RPG scene is that you don't, because it's still mostly relatively small publishing.

You have a few of the publishers, obviously, the big two, like Paizo or Wizards of the Coast, but most of it is either people doing it themselves or through quite small publishing.

and there's much more a sense of camaraderie and of a sharing of ideas. I think that also means that like, because you see the industry culture around video games where the stakes are so high, but then that also means there's a lot of drama, there's a lot of corporate interfering. There's lots of negativity, frankly, especially these days. Whereas I feel like...

Adam Powell (45:40.316)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (45:48.978)
bar some people upset that the game that they wanted to win, the NEs, didn't. There's not as much kind of negativity or drama. There's much more of this kind of like DIY kind of like counterculture community in the tabletop games scene, especially amongst creators. And, you know, I think that's really cool. I think that's really nice.

Adam Powell (46:12.476)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (46:19.442)
And I think also seeing as, you know, when wizards with D &D kind of crap the bed with the whole, oh yeah, when we're rescinding our open license, that I think...

brought in more eyes and it was great seeing this almost like kind of Cambrian explosion of lots and lots and lots of more ideas and systems and people really breaking down what a what's an archipelago can be and it not just being a simple right well

Adam Powell (46:55.004)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (46:57.874)
It's 5e D &D but with this skin on it. And like that's perfectly fine. Some people do, you know, they have their system, they invest a lot of time into learning it. It's their comfort zone. But also seeing, you know, lots of people seeing how they can further abstract reality or fiction into dice rolling and stuff like that.

Adam Powell (47:13.788)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (47:27.57)
and putting their own spin and flair onto it is really cool. It's really interesting. And I'm hoping to be at least one voice amongst many, many, many doing all sorts of crazy and interesting things. And I'm really hoping that this kind of momentum, this kind of explosion of creativity just continues, especially as...

Adam Powell (47:36.604)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (47:55.954)
kind of self -publishing is becoming cheaper and cheaper to the point where, you know, if you do it completely digitally, release just on itch or drive through RPG, you know, the only thing it really costs you is your time and labor, obviously. But the kind of barrier to entry is never been lower. And I think that's brilliant, because then that means more and more people will be able to get involved.

Adam Powell (48:07.836)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (48:12.284)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (48:18.844)
No.

Adam Powell (48:24.796)
Yeah, 100%, 100%. So long may we sort of twist and learn and change and create. So that's something I definitely agree with. So.

Benjamin Tobitt (48:31.698)
Hehehehe

Benjamin Tobitt (48:37.906)
Hell yeah.

Adam Powell (48:42.044)
Knocking back across into Black Powder and Brimstone then as we sort of move towards the tail end of this interview. Do you have any advice? You know, you created this, you generated this amazing setting, these mechanics, the evocative artwork and things. So we got any advice for GMs or players that want to sort of... mainly GMs, because it's them that seem to have the largest of the hurdles initially to go through.

Benjamin Tobitt (48:52.946)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (49:05.586)
Heheheheh

Adam Powell (49:10.716)
for running a fun and fantastic game of Black Powder and Brimstone.

Benjamin Tobitt (49:17.81)
So I've tried to keep things as kind of with the book. Every time I designed a page and designed like the layout and stuff like that, I try to keep in mind like what is the worst possible situation for someone reading this? Because you know, game books like these are kind of technically like technical manuals.

Adam Powell (49:38.556)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (49:39.506)
So I'm always thinking like, okay, what's the worst case scenario? You've forgotten a rule in the middle of a fight and you need to quickly find it. So every rule and section fits onto a double page spread. So no rule kind of runs over a page turn.

As I said, I have trouble reading, especially seeing the big walls of text, especially ones which aren't, you know, nice and confined to a box, it can become very stressful. Whereas, you know, everything I've got in here is, you know, about a tweet's length worth of text.

And as long as you've read through it or you've clicked through it, you'll be able to recognize, like, oh, okay, combat, that's the big orange page with all the fire. So I just need to click through to get to that. It's definitely worth having readers, maybe not read, but definitely click through the first section, which is gonna be the player's guide.

There's very little reading, and that's why I put so much into making everything as short and sweet as possible writing -wise, and then a lot of it is conveyed with the illustrations, so hopefully get across the mood and the tone. Something I was very worried about was when I playtested this with my friends.

Adam Powell (51:11.868)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (51:17.362)
I playtested with some friends who prefer to keep things a lot more light and comical, very PG -13 in terms of playing D &D and stuff like that, but when I play with them they're already making jokes, very dark jokes at the expense of the world.

Adam Powell (51:23.772)
Okay.

Adam Powell (51:43.516)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (51:45.394)
So I was very happy that like, everyone, everybody got the tone. Everybody got like, well, I was trying to, trying to go for this. Especially with like, I've tried to make character creation very, very simple. So you should technically be able to roll up a character within minutes.

Adam Powell (52:06.332)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (52:06.77)
It's not a case of looking through several books to find all the spells and all of the different attributes and stuff like that. It's very quick and simple. But also because it is a rules -like system, I very much lean into the kind of the rule of cool of, you know.

That's why at the beginning of the GM section I have in black and white so as not to be misconstrued by anyone, like THE rules. Any of the rules of the game may be broken or ignored at any time for the sake of the fun of the game. So Black, Pound and Brim are supposed to be fast and scary characters live and die very quickly.

Adam Powell (52:55.836)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (52:56.37)
but it should never feel unfair or grinding. It should never feel that, like, it should feel like the world is against you, but you should be able to push back against it. It shouldn't be, if anything feels like it's slowing down, and the rule is not helping you, just ignore it. Just go with your gut. It's much more a case of this is not a...

Adam Powell (53:11.452)
See ya.

Benjamin Tobitt (53:25.746)
you know, a crunchy kind of game with lots of rules and parameters to essentially protect the players from the GM. It's much more kind of guided improv session, really. The most important thing is that everyone at the table knows the tone and knows what it's going for, you know, it's supposed to be...

Adam Powell (53:30.78)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (53:49.756)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (53:53.522)
1999's The Mummy, but in 15th century Germany.

Adam Powell (53:58.46)
An interesting clash there of, not clash, combination. Well, we'll say it's a combination. Ben, we've covered so much during the course of this interview, how you got into table and roll playing games, Black Powder and Brimstone, so many of the mechanics and the creation of the game and all its sort of the.

Benjamin Tobitt (54:02.77)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Powell (54:27.132)
sort of fantastic bits around that. Is there anything we haven't touched on at this point that you want to bring up now?

Benjamin Tobitt (54:38.962)
I feel I should quickly go over what's in the bestiary because that's not included in the quick start. So the bestiary, like everything else in the book, is fully illustrated. And each character is unique and the way I kind of laid it out is it starts with the...

Adam Powell (54:47.996)
Please, please do.

Benjamin Tobitt (55:05.266)
the lowest of the low in terms of enemies, which are these like mutants, which are these poor souls who have been twisted and mutated by extraterrestrial forces, let's say.

Adam Powell (55:21.692)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (55:22.29)
and then you know your typical bandits and bandit leaders but then you go on to like the mercenaries which are roving around and causing mayhem and the difficulty very much like it ramps up quite quickly with these guys like um i i try to do it so that like um there are you know some enemies which are very easily combated but others which you kind of

forgive the pun, we'll put the fear of God in the players. But then you get into, but it's not just, you know, human forces of mercenaries and bandits and the Inquisition. There are also like ghosts and ghouls and stuff that lives in the forest and demons who have their own kind of

lore I've kind of hinted at but didn't want to go into too much as a kind of like oh here is the definite thing this is definitely what's going on try to employ the kind of games workshop style half open box method of lore where it's like you know what the thing is called you know what it does you know a little bit of what's going on but the doors are only half open there's a lot of mysteries still in there like obviously I know what's going on.

Adam Powell (56:33.628)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (56:45.906)
But, um, excuse me. Excuse me. But I've tried to leave some of that, in terms of the deep lore, open for the players. And then further along you get more powerful demons and monsters and stuff like that. And then there are a few, then, as I said, there's the swans of rats.

Adam Powell (56:51.996)
time.

Adam Powell (56:57.724)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (57:16.37)
But then you get to some very strange stuff which I actually don't even want to spoil. Because it starts to go into quite a different territory in terms of what's with the rest of the game. There's some stuff which is like very powerful but should be used quite sparingly, let's say.

Adam Powell (57:20.988)
Okay.

Adam Powell (57:32.764)
Well, let's definitely leave that there, leave it at that. So, well, on such an ominous cliffhanger with respect to the V -steering and things like that, why don't we remind people where they can go and support you and support Black Powder and Brimstone and all the things and all the places where we can find both, as it were, placement.

Benjamin Tobitt (57:37.394)
Yeah.

Benjamin Tobitt (57:44.146)
Oh yes.

Benjamin Tobitt (57:57.554)
Absolutely. Well, all the links are actually kind of handily contained on the Kickstarter, which includes links to my Twitter and also my sub stack where I've been running a behind the scenes blog. So if you want to follow my progress from, you know, not quite the beginning, but near where I go over my process and also some behind the scenes stuff of how I've how I put together the pages.

as well as my inspirations and thoughts on RPGs and stuff like that, you can check that out. That's all linked through the Kickstarter though, which is Kickstarter projects Black Powder and Brimstone. So if you search for that, or just as I said, look up OSR, it's the bright orange thumbnail there. You can find out all the information.

Adam Powell (58:32.956)
Hmm.

Benjamin Tobitt (58:55.858)
and I've got some more updates on there as well going into a little bit more of the minutiae of the book and the campaign.

Adam Powell (59:06.78)
All right. I will make sure those links are down in the description below. So please go down, follow those links, support Ben support Black Powder and Brimstone and the wonderful projects that are out there. Ben, thank you so much for your time. It's been really good fun learning more about Black Powder and Brimstone. I'd love to. No, not at all. I'd love to get you back on the show in the future for future releases, future projects. Well, really, I will definitely take you up on that offer.

Benjamin Tobitt (59:25.81)
Thank you, thank you for having me.

Benjamin Tobitt (59:30.93)
anytime.

Adam Powell (59:36.668)
It's been a real pleasure to talk to you today, Ben. Thank you so much.

Benjamin Tobitt (59:39.794)
You too, Adam. Alright, bye.

Snyder’s Return

Interview - Benjamin Tobitt - Black Powder and Brimstone TTRPG

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