A Brief History of Kratophagia

When I attended big conventions in the US, my usual procedure was to offer two games. In May 2013, I was pondering what to offer for Gamex. I had already decided on running Simon Carryer’s brand new game, Tonight We Slay A Dragon Or Die In The Attempt (2013) and for some reason lost to the mists of time, I didn’t want to run The Sprawl at this convention. (I had run it as the previous few conventions, so I suspect I just wanted a break). I posted a message on Facebook:

“Crowdsourcing a Dungeon World game for Strategicon. Tell me about my game, friends!”

What emerged was a mish-mash of science-fantasy ideas that I shaped into the core concept of Kratophagia, a few tweaks for character building that I mashed onto the basic moves of Dungeon World with some teasers to expand into Dungeon Planet depending on how far the game went. It didn’t get that far.

At the time, fellow Los Angeles game theorist and designer Colin Jessup was working on a sci-fi mutant game called Geiger World (unpublished). Geiger World was inspired by TSR’s Gamma World (1978) and a host of schlocky 1980s Cold War post-apocalyptic cult movies and pulp fiction. It was also one of the first (if not the first) PbtA game to make use of the split playbook schtick that has since become reasonably common. The various conversations and playtests around that game were definitely part of the mutagenic stew from which this Larva version of Kratophagia emerged.

The other major influence was a medieval history class I co-taught as an adjunct lecturer in 2014. One of the weekly topics included reading selections of Anglo-Saxon law codes. What did these law codes tell us about society in the British Isles of the sixth and seventh century? If laws like this reflect the social values of a particular historical moment, what gets the society to that point? Kratophagia is certainly not a historical game and it is certainly not based on early medieval society, but these questions informed my thinking on the kind of game I imagined Kratophagia to be.

At this point, the core of the stats and moves were there, but the hunger system didn’t work and there was nothing to help the MC run anything but a gonzo splatter movie. And then, after a few playtests in Los Angeles, it lay dormant.

The reason for that dormancy was of course a certain cyberpunk game. I released the Alpha playtest version of The Sprawl in August 2012 and then launched the Kickstarter in September 2014. Between then and the game’s release in Feb 2016, all of my game design energies were tied up in rounds of feedback, editing, and layout and the pressure of fulfilling the promised game. Even after release, there were supplements to write, edit and organise: November Metric (2017), Mission Files (2018), Touched: A Darkening Alley (2019), Touched Prime (2019). But as the main game was released and I got into the hang of supplement publication, a sliver of design space began to open up in my head.

In 2016 or 2017, I happened to hear the creator of the stitchpunk RPG Threadbare, Stephanie Bryant, mention Kratophagia on a podcast and hope for its future publication. I now no longer remember the context or the podcast [but if Stephanie can, I will definitely add both here!], but it inspired me to pick up the rules again. I was quickly reminded of the two issues: framing the narrative and the hunger loop. As is so often the case, the time away from the project meant that I now looked at both with fresh eyes, and between 2016 and 2019–incidentally the first time that I had a sense of job stability since finishing grad school 2014–I developed Kratophagia in parallel with Dinosaur Princesses (2019). This was also a time where the naked individualism at the centre of American ideology was laid bare; not in the sense that it was revealed--it was known--but in the sense there was more of a willingness to put it all on display without any attempt to mask it and make it palatable. Anger at that political environment fuelled this aspect of my creative work at this time. It wouldn't be too off the mark to say that my desire for a better world went into Dinosaur Princesses and my frustration at the short-sighted greed of this one went into Kratophagia. During this phase, I developed the current hunger loop, finalised the basic moves, began to seriously develop the next stage, and constructed the format for the Landmark Moves. I playtested these at several conventions on the East Coast and Midwest, including at Metatopia in 2019 at which the framework for the larger, “Staged” project came together. Then, as 2020 began, I was starting to organise playtests for that Stage structure when Covid hit.

The third stage of Kratophagia’s development was born year amidst the creative energy of #KiwiRPG. That community formed out of the conversations around making a couple of panels for late night slots at Big Bad Online 2021. I knew many of the people involved in #KiwiRPG previously and had been regularly discussing games, design, and publication as part of the local Wellington group GameHive, but Liam bringing that all together in a Discord and Morgue energy for #KiwiRPG Week gave me the final impetus. With a few weeks to go, I asked Dana if she was available to lay out the text and started writing the explanatory text that makes a playable game into a rulebook.