Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #20 - Innistrad, Part Two

Episode Date: February 8, 2013

Mark Rosewater talks about Innistrad some more.

Previously on Drive to Work. Today we're going to talk about Innistrad. Hmm, this is interesting. I'm not done. I guess we're gonna have our first two-parter. Hello everybody and welcome to part two of Innistrad. I'm always pulling out of my driveway which means it's time for Drive to Work Okay guys, I did not finish my story last time so I'm going to finish it today or maybe I'll finish it today, I have no idea Like I said, these podcasts are not

carefully planned out It's just me talking while I drive to work Okay, so yesterday Not carefully planned out. It's just me talking while I drive to work. Okay, so, yesterday, oh, for you guys, I recorded this yesterday. I didn't want to forget part two, so I'm doing it the day after I recorded part one. You guys probably listened to this a week ago, so trade secret when you're doing part two, don't wait too long, because you'll forget what you said. Okay, so, the idea was,

we were talking about trying to figure out how to make the werewolves work, and I talked last time about how we explored the night day, and it was neat, but it was clunky, and anyway, it didn't end up working out. So, meanwhile, at the same time we were trying out Day Night, we were trying out double-faced cards, which at the time, by the way, we called double-sided cards. So, why don't we call them double-sided cards? Are they double-sided cards? And the answer is, all Magic cards are double-sided. What makes these unique are not that they have two sides, it's that they have two faces. That's why they're double-faced and not double-sided.

But all during design, we called them double-sided, and then Dell pointed out that all Magic Cards are double-sided, so we changed it to double-faced. Okay, so what happened was, I was trying to figure out the problem. I didn't want to just have one solution, because one of them might not work out, as was the case with us night and day. So, essentially, we did a bunch of things at the same time, or two ones, really. And that's the important part. A lot of times we're trying to solve a problem, is sometimes you want to try multiple things

at the same time, because you cover more space quickly. Okay, so, we were trying... Once again, to recap from last time, Dungeon Masters... not Dungeon Masters, Duel Masters, which was a game that we also make, Wizards makes, had tried doing double, not tried, they had done double-faced cards.

And so we knew that we could print them. We knew that we had the technology to be able to make them. And they were very popular in Japan, which is where the game comes out. And so Tom had brought up, Tom Lapilli, who was the development representative on the design team, brought up, because he had worked on a Duel Master team, and he had seen the double-faced cards and said, oh, well, that's a way we could do werewolves, you know, human on one side and werewolf on the other.

And so I liked the idea and well I should say I was skeptical that we would do it but I liked that it captured what werewolves were and I was willing to explore it and I should stress this a lot of times I'm always the one saying hey let's do this crazy thing

and everyone's like what are you talking about when Tom first presented it I said okay it does solve our problem now I don't know if we want to do the things that it's requiring, but the first step I always do is figure out whether or not something's fun. If something's fun enough, I will fight for it, but if it's not fun, then it's not worth it. I'm not going to have a big fight unless I really think it's worth it. And another thing, by the way, I want to stress that double-faced cards came about because I was trying to solve a problem. The problem wasn't, we need a crazy thing?

What's the crazy thing? I'm not a big fan of that. I'm not a big fan of finding something out of the box just to find something out of the box. Others are a little more fond of that than I am. I kind of believe that I'm willing to go out of the box when I need to solve my problem, but that's because I exhaust in the box and then

I need to turn it out of the box. So, double-faced cards were us trying to solve werewolves, not us trying to do something to cause controversy or, you know, draw attention to the set. It was never its intention. Anyway, Tom presented the idea. I said, okay, sounds good. So, originally the question was, how do these things function?

Now, in Duel Master, they existed in the extra-dimensional zone. Duel Master is a little more wonky than Magic. And so the idea was, cards brought them into play. And so we started there. We said, okay, well what if you had a card that was in your deck, a one-sided card, that you used to cast this card, and that the double-faced card would be

kind of like a token. I mean, it wouldn't exactly be a token, but it would be kind of like a token in the sense that I play the spell, I go get this other thing, it gets in play. And the idea was, well, okay, it's kind of like casting a token, except you have to have this thing,

like you can't use anything, you have to use this thing, and that the card that gets it doesn't explain everything about it. Because in a token card, the qualities of the token are spelled on the card that created. Where here, it's like, go get this card named blah blah blah, put it into play.

So we place it, for a good chunk of design, that's how we playtest it. Have this card, so I draw it, okay, go get this card named blah, blah, blah, put it into play. So we placed it for a good chunk of design. That's how we play tested. Have this card, so I draw it. Okay, go get blah, blah, blah. That means I go get, you know, the human werewolf, human side up. And then it works. Oh, okay, so that was how we did it. So the question then was, how do you go from human side to werewolf side?

That was a separate issue. So what happened was, we explored a couple different things. For example, we explored mana, like just spend mana, and now it goes from side A to side B. The problem was, the werewolves had a very distinctive flavor restriction, which is, in mythology, you know, werewolves become werewolves, go from human to werewolf at night. The full moon, in fact, under a full moon, very specifically.

So, it's like, oh, okay, the full moon comes out. So, it didn't make any sense that I had a werewolf, like, one of my werewolves was human and one of my werewolves was werewolf. Didn't make any sense. Like, if one of my werewolves is a werewolf, then the state that makes him a werewolf should make all werewolves werewolves was human and one of my werewolves was werewolf. It didn't make any sense. Like, if one of my werewolves is a werewolf, then the state that makes him a werewolf should make all werewolves werewolves. And it also made sense that if I had a guy on my side and you had a guy on your side,

either we're both werewolves or we're both humans. You know, either the full moon is out or the full moon is not out. The other thing that I cared a lot about was I wanted to make sure that the gameplay between the human and the werewolf state was something that each player had some control over. I mean, because we explored the idea that we could have made something where, like, put it out, you know, and track

something, and then after so many turns, slip it over. You know, it's humans for three turns, and then it's werewolves for three turns. But I kind of felt like that lacked some, it lacked a little dynamism, dynamism, Iism, dynamism, I'm not supposed to say this word, a dynamic quality.

So, I didn't like, like, we could just put it on auto, like, you're right, it's human for a certain amount of time, but I didn't like that.

Because I felt that what was fun was, so, let me tell you about a little different quality that'll come up, weave in something else we were doing. So, one of the things I believe when I'm designing a set is I want a tone. I want a feel for the set. So one of the things I always talk about is I'm very psychological in my design approach. I talked about how once upon a time, I already was very math-based, and then I brought this sort of psychology quality. So one of the things that I care about when I'm designing is,

what is the person feeling when they're playing? Because if we're trying to capture something, emotions are an important part of it. Now, let me separate. There's two different types of emotions. There's just the visceral thrill of playing, and there's excitement that comes from, oh, I got a big creature that's exciting,

and stuff like that. But also, there is the emotion that sort of you generate from the style of play, and what I wanted to do is, I wanted to make, I always do, I want to make the tone of the game, the kind of way you're feeling, match the tone that we want the set to have from a flavor standpoint. So we were doing horror. That meant I wanted to create a sense of suspense. Well, how do you do that? Well, there's a couple ways. One is you want to make sure that your threats, so sometimes you want your threats to be a surprise, but to create suspense, so there's a great, Hitchcock talks about the difference between surprise and suspense. So he says, surprise, I'm talking about Alfred Hitchcock, by the way.

Surprise is two guys are sitting at a table, bam, a bomb blows up, they die. That's surprise, we respect that. Suspense is two men are sitting at a table. You show the bomb and watch it slowly ticking down. Now, that is suspense because you now know the bomb is going to go off, but you don't know when. You know, are the men going to still be there when the bomb goes off? You know, so that creates suspense. And so what I wanted to do was I wanted to create suspense in the game. Well, one of the things that meant is the threats had to be more public. For example,

with the werewolf, I like the idea that there's a human. You know the werewolf side is the scary side, not the human side. So if your opponent has a werewolf side, sorry, a human in play, a human werewolf, then you're like, uh-oh, I'm

scared because I know one day that bomb is going to go off. I don't want to be around when that happens. I want the game to be over or something. And so one of the things was to, I wanted to be able to make the humans becoming a werewolf something scary. I wanted to have a suspenseful quality. The other thing we did a lot of is we ratcheted up a little bit more the uncertainty of things.

Like, notice whenever you get a card back from the graveyard, it was random. Part of that was to keep repetition of play. But another was I wanted to create suspenseful moments. And part of suspense is not knowing the outcome of things. So we had more cards in the set on purpose that kind of, you didn't quite know was going to happen. The other thing, and I'll get to Morbid in a second, but Morbid also played into this,

where I wanted Death to take on a different feeling. And one of the things I wanted was, oh, well, things dying meant bad things could happen. So it was kind of scary when things died. But I'll get to Mor morbid in a second. Okay, so we're trying to figure out how to make the werewolves work. And day and night we had goofed around

with the idea of spells. And I liked the idea of marking spells as time because it was something people had control over. And so what we figured out was, well, I wanted some number of spells to turn, and so I had to go different directions. I figured out, okay, well, one of them should be if nothing happens, and one should be if something happens. And so originally, the idea, I think, the reason the werewolf turned was zero was the idea that I wanted you to get to the point to where you...

I wanted you to be able to turn the werewolves with some... It had to have some cost to it. It wasn't easy. And so the idea was, well, early game I want to keep casting things, so if I want to turn my werewolves, I have to actually have a cost to do it. But later game, I might just run out of cards. I might naturally have to do it. And so that also meant my opponent, like, it created suspenseful moments for my opponent

because my opponent wanted to make sure to cast something every turn because if he didn't, you know, and then the flip back being two spells made this dynamic, which is interesting, is, well, if they're spending all this energy to keep it from flipping over in the first place, they're going to deplete their hand, making it harder to turn them back.

Also, it made this nice dynamic where there was this interesting catch-up feature where once I had a werewolf in play, my werewolf is dominant and good. I now am restricted from casting two spells a turn because I don't want to turn off my werewolf. So, it's kind of neat that the guy who has the advantage

has a little bit of a disability built in to keep his werewolf around. But anyway, I mean, it's funny that I had a hunch where I wanted to go, and then we playtested, and as we playtested, I realized it had a nice feel. And so we sort of locked down the werewolf mechanic. And what I realized, by the way, was when we were playing with the double-faced cards, you know, they felt right, they felt good. And remember, at this point, they still were something

that was outside the deck. Um, that you had a card and you would cast it. So I'm like, okay, they're neat. They're outside the deck, but you know, it's kind of, we're, we're shaking up a little how tokens work. I mean, I know they wouldn't technically be tokens, but it would have a token feel. Okay. So now, uh, it is, my set is due. due, it's about, I don't know, four or five months before my set is due to development. So I finally go to Aaron and I say, I need to talk with Caps. I think we want to do double-faced cards. Okay, I'm convinced. We want to do them.

And I knew there was a big enough, like Caps, by the way, is the people who actually, inside of Wizards, prep the cards and print the cards, and we ship them to a printing plant, but they're the ones that do all the preparation. And so double-faced cards, even though I knew they were possible, Duel Masters had done them, I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know the ramifications on magic. Plus, the other thing was, in order to work, what I wanted to have happen is every pack had one double faced card and the parallel single sided card that brought

that double faced card into play and I mean that was crucial because I needed to make sure you had both pieces to it so it went off to a people and the way caps works is you know they talk with the printer they figure out pricing they figure out what's capable,

what can be done. And so we went to them. And I know I went very early because it can take a lot of time to figure things out. Sometimes we have to do tests, print tests. But anyway, so they came back

a couple months later and they said to us, oh, well, okay, we can get two cards together. You know, they can do the double-faced cards. They'd have to be on their own sheet. I won't get into printing too much, but double-faced cards were doable.

The tricky part was not the double-faced cards. It was getting the two cards paired together. Because normally in Magic, we never say card A and card B have to be together in the same booster. You know, we'll put things together on sheets, and obviously if A and B things together on sheets and obviously if A and B are together on a sheet

they increase the possibility of being in a bootstrap bag together but now double faced cards so the idea I thought was we'd make a sheet in which it'd be double faced card and right next to it was single faced card of the same one okay so the first problem we had was

that the ink we use in the back of the card and the ink we use in the front of the card aren't the same one. Okay, so the first problem we had was that the ink we use in the back of the card and the ink we use in the front of the card aren't the same. So that what you do for the face and what you do for the back are slightly different. Well, on the back of this sheet, because it's double-faced, all the double-faced cards would have a face on the back, but all the single-faced would have the back.

So red on the back, okay, that was a little problematic. The second thing we learned is that we can't have a, the one-for-one relationship requires some extra maneuvering on the printing, the printing people would have to do some more stuff to make sure they were together. And it was a 90% success rate, which meant one out of ten packages, they wouldn't match. And we decided that it wasn't good enough.

That, you know, if we're going to do it, we wanted to have a one-for-one correlation, you know, 99.9% of the time. You know, it wasn't okay that one out of every 10 packs wouldn't match up. And that would cause all sorts of problems for Limited. It would suck to say, oh, here's your double-faced card. Here's a single-faced card that's not that double-faced card. Here's a single-faced card. It's not that double-faced card. And so we were stymied. We're like, how do you do that? So finally, I think the solution, we talked about all sorts of different things. I mean, it was a problem we worked on for months.

And finally, Mike Turian, what I call the Gordian Knot Answer, he said, just make them double-face. Just put them in the decks. And I'm like, but there don't have backs on them. And he's like, look, I've done the research, because at the time, Mike Turian was now, he used to be a developer in R&D for Magic.

Now he works in organized play. And so he had a lot more data from organized play. And he's like, look, I've seen the data. Something like 95% of people play constructed magic with sleeves on. In limited, it's less. Even in limited, it was over 50%. And so he said, well, what if

we just put them in? And a lot of people have sleeves. But the answer was, well, but what if they don't have sleeves? And so we're like, okay, we need something you can put in that we're representative of, and then somebody, I don't remember who, was it Aaron maybe, came up with the idea of the checklist card.

Well, what if we had a face-down card that just represents every Magic card? And at one point we're talking about you write on it, and they're like, well, no, we know the card so we decided to make the checklist card and the idea was, look, just put it in your deck if you have sleeves if not, well here's a backup that'll allow you to be able to do it the checklist wasn't ideal

it's nowhere near as good as having the one point correlation and my biggest issue with the checklist card, by the way is that art is such a big part of the game, and like in the previous version, the idea was going to be the single-sided version had the same art as the A-side version of the card. So it's like, oh, here's the human, I cast

him, now there's the, it matches up, and there's the human. And like, not having art on the card is a blow. The confusion of what card is exactly, it was not the perfect answer. But, because we decided that so many people played with sleeves, we're like, okay, it's not going to be a problem for most people,

and if people really want, they can swap in this card. And so the interesting thing that happened was, okay, so we had the double-faced cards. We were figuring out how to do them. Meanwhile, in R&D, and this didn't happen until, even though design said we were doing them, it wasn't until development got their hands on the file that people started coming out of the board work.

I won't name names, but there were a couple people who went to Eric Lauer, who was the head developer of Innistrad, and said to him, you cannot do these cards. 100%. This is, these are wrong. I mean, when the cards first came out, a lot of people voiced this, of, you're breaking a fundamental rule of magic, these are wrong. When the cards first came out, a lot of people voiced it.

You're breaking a fundamental rule of magic. You're just doing something that can't be done. It's going to destroy a draft. All the excuses for why it was a horrible idea. And Eric was very confused. And what happened was, usually when we do something that's a little more out there,

as the head designer, as lead designer of the set, I feel it's my obligation to sort of fight for the thing. If I believe it's right, I don't want to stick something that doesn't make sense in the set. But once I believe it's correct, and I believe the audience will like it, I have 100% faith. I believe the double-faced cards were going to be popular. And it's funny because what we did in playtesting is we would print out both sides and we would tape them together. And once I, like, literally I had the first playtest where I had the taped version of the playtest card.

Like, I'm just like, I could tell from then. I could tell from that. I didn't even see it with art on it. That it was something that I think people were really going to embrace. And I knew. I knew that, you know, there were going to be people that didn't like it. I mean, that's the nature of the beast. One of the things about my job is my job as a head designer

is to keep pushing magic in new directions. And you know what? Change is scary. People, humans, fundamentally fear change. My job was to keep making the game change. Why? Because that is what magic is. I've talked about the crispy hash brown theory.

The idea, real quickly, if you've never heard it, although that means you're not reading my articles, the idea is when you eat hash browns, the best part of the hash brown is the outside, the crispy part of the hash brown. And then once you eat the outside, you'll eat the inside. It's okay, but it's not the outside. And games to me have that same quality, which is

it's the learning of the game that's the most fun. And then once you learn the game, at that point, you start taking rote stuff into mind. Like, if you want to get real good at Scrabble, you're memorizing two- and three-letter words. If you want to get really good at chess, you're memorizing opening moves. That you're starting to sort of have to memorize things.

And that, to me, a lot of the fun is the exploration and discovery process. And so what Richard did when he made Magic was that a trading card game has this endless quality in that it keeps reinventing itself. Because as new cards get made, new rules get added, and new concepts work,

and things that once were automatic aren't automatic anymore. And so, you definitely have this quality of... I mean, people play Magic for a long time. You know, the average player plays eight, nine years now. And that's crazy.

I don't know if you look stats at any other game, but barring something like chess or bridge or something where there's a long-standing history, it's very hard to get people to play games this long. And I think what Magic does is it keeps reinventing itself. Well, my job as a designer is to keep reinventing itself. And so I had faith in double-faced cards. I felt they were being done for the right reason.

We were trying to capture something. Oh, something else, by the way. So all the double-faced cards, I decided, needed to be horror tropes. You know, it's a vampire turns into a bad. It's a scientist turns into an abomination. By the way, which is hilarious, I should note that when I made the card, I just, because it was a fly ripoff, the card was like wizard on one side and insect wizard on the other side. And I didn't necessarily think that the creative team was going to keep it in sort of a, as an insect thing,

because to me it was a fly joke, but they did, and I was very happy. You know, I mean, that... Sometimes, like, I did a lot of jokes and I didn't know how much they would carry over, but the creative team was really good about finding things that would fit in the world. So, by the way, there's only one card that got changed, double-faced card, which was the white common creature. What it was supposed to be was on one side

you had an unruly mob, and then when a creature died, it turned into an angry mob. It was the citizens of the town, but when one of your creatures died, it turned into an angry mob. And the problem was, we had too many mobs, and so they decided they needed to cut a mob, so they cut that mob

rather than another mob. But that was the trope, and so it always annoyed me than another mob. That was the trope. It always annoyed me a little bit. It's the only double-faced card that isn't a set horror trope. All the rest I set up to be specifically exact horror tropes. Anyway. There was a lot of people,

not a lot, but there were a few very vocal people speaking out against the double-faced cards. I had to go full-court press. Eric just didn't know. Eric didn't know how the people would feel. And kind of my job is, I mean, one of the reasons that I have such a connection with the public is I want to know what you guys think. And so that's why I'm constantly interacting and fielding questions.

And, you know, my job is to understand what you guys are going to think and feel because I have to do something you've never experienced and kind of gauge what I think you'll think of it. And I was convinced double-faced cards would be popular. Luckily, what happened was I convinced Aaron that it was the right thing, and Aaron just said to Eric, look, we're doing them.

This is going to be good. It's going to go over well. We believe in it. We're doing it. And Eric said, okay. I've been told from up on high this is going to happen. I'm going to make these the best I can make them. And he delivered. And I mean, I think that the fact that they all played well and the balance of them was very neat because they could be very hard to balance. And I thought Eric did a very good job. And by the way, I've talked about the wearable thing before. There's a lot of little things that

like Eric's team did. One of the things was, in my original version, any two spells slipped it over, and then Eric changed it to two spells by the same person. Meaning, it wasn't like, oh, you cast one spell, and then your opponent casts a spell, and all of a sudden they turned over, so that you were afraid to cast even one spell. And also, he made sure that it counted the turn before, so there wasn't end-of-turn shenanigans. But one of the things development does, by the way, and one of the things, maybe I'll just do a development podcast,

is, you know, development's all about figuring out what you want to do, but making sure the little nooks and crannies all work, so it's doing what you mean in spirit. Because technically, there's a lot of ways for people to fiddle with things. You've got to be careful. Okay, let me talk about Morbid. So I was trying to create this sense of being afraid of things. And I knew that I was going to have graveyard be a component.

But I also wanted death to be a component. I wanted death to matter. And so what happened was I started with the idea of, uh, well, we were messing around with Delve was actually where we started was when I had done Future Sight, I believed that Delve, I knew we were going to go to Gothic Horror World. I knew it was going to have a strong graveyard component. And so when I made Delve in my head, I was actually thinking, ooh, this is a neat idea. We might use this for, you know, for the horror set. Like, I actually made the mechanic thinking

this is where it was going to go. So when the set started up, hey, the very first thing I did was say, okay, let's go try Delve. And I learned an interesting thing about Delve, which is Delve actually doesn't work well in a graveyard set. Now, that sounds kind of counterintuitive since it's a mechanic that works in the graveyard. But the problem is well in a graveyard set. Now, that sounds kind of counterintuitive, since it's a mechanic that works in the graveyard. But the problem is, in a graveyard set, you want to have multiple things dealing with the graveyard. And the problem is, Delve just chews it all up. And so, since Delve uses your graveyard as a resource, nothing else gets to use your graveyard as a resource. And one of the things that works well in a graveyard set is you want cards that care about the graveyard.

And one of the things that works well in the graveyard set, if you want cards that care about the graveyard. You know, for example, one of the big themes in green was we had a bunch of creatures that like, the flavor of green, green's all about its ancestry, green cares about history, and so its big shtick was, oh, well, I care who came before me, so I care about what creatures are in the graveyard.

And so that was a thing in green, you know, and we paired it with blue blue because blue had milling, so blue could self-mill, and that was all planned. So Delve kind of fought against that. Like, I could either do Delve or I could do a whole bunch of other things I wanted to do. And in the end, it was like, oh, well, Delve is not worth losing everything else.

So we kept Delve. well, delve is not worth losing everything else. So we kept delve. Okay, so... I then was saying, well, I need to deal with something about the graveyard. I wanted a mechanic that was a new mechanic. Oh, let's get just a flashback. Okay, so...

I'll get the flashback in a sec. Okay, so... I knew I wanted something that cared about the graveyard, and I tested a bunch of different graveyard mechanics out. None of them were really doing what I wanted. I mean, obviously, I have a few other things I did, but none of them were the mechanic I wanted. And finally, I said, you know what? It's not that I care about the graveyard as much in Horror World.

I want death to mean something. I really want death to be relevant. You know, like I like the idea that when something died, you're like, uh-oh, something died. And I wanted that to have an emotional impact. And so we played around with the idea of, you know, I said, okay, what if we just had a mechanic that's like death matters? And we tried a couple different things. We would look at what had died or how many things had died.

And finally, I got to the point of I kind of looked at landfall for this, and I said, okay, what if I just, it just says, or actually, I don't know if landfall is the right comparison. I said, I just want a spell that goes, hey, did something die or not? I guess it's more threshold-y, but a short-term threshold rather than a long-term. And I like the idea of just saying, okay,

the question is, did something die? Yes? Okay, I get a bonus. Now, the hard part about doing morbid was because death tends to happen at certain times, certain effects didn't make a lot of sense. You know, like, for example, let's take giant growth. Well, giant

growth is an effect that you can make bigger, but the problem is it is tricky to use. I'm not saying we can't use giant growth. I'm just trying to explain that you can't use it necessarily the way you think you want to use it. I can't have something die and then have my guy grow

if the thing dies while it's in combat. That doesn't work. And so we had to be careful that we didn't do effects that kind of wanted to be combat effects. In general, that steered us away from doing instants, that we mostly wanted to do sorceries, because we wanted to kind of do effects that were relevant when you played them. And Morbid also had this, like,

Morbid ended up being something that development had to work with, because I liked a lot the idea, and I liked the impact it had on the game. I liked the idea that something dying was something you had to be relevant of and at times afraid of. But anyway, and one of the things about, I should say this in general about mechanics is I'm not a vacuum person, which is I like to pick a mechanic that makes sense where it is.

Once upon a time, magic, literally when I first started working on magic, it's like, what's your two mechanics? Make your set. The two mechanics could have nothing to do with each other. You know, I mean, look at some of the early days. Like Mirage had flanking and phasing. Those had nothing to do with each other. You know, I mean, Tempest had shadow and buyback. Now, I, we're tired of making them relevant to each other and that they contrasted each other, but they weren't really connected, you know.

And what was it, it was cycling and echo, and those have no inherent connection. In the early days, but now it's like mechanics serve, the way I like to think of it is I'm a painter and mechanics are my paint. I have a canvas, the sets are my canvas, and mechanics are my paint. And I'm trying to use them as means to sort of convey

what I want to convey. Like I said earlier, I wanted to get a sense of suspense, right? I wanted to have a sense of when you were playing, that you had sort of this feeling that you were kind of worried that something was going to happen, and a lot of times, you knew what was going to happen, and you wanted it not to happen, and you know, if that something was going to happen. And a lot of times, you knew what was going to happen, and you wanted it not to happen.

And, you know, if this human was going to turn into a werewolf, well, you wanted to get a kill spell. You wanted to kill the human before he turned into a werewolf, because you knew bad things were coming. And Morbid played, in my mind, directly into that, which very much allowed you to have the sense I wanted of, you know, this is a dangerous world and in a world where horror reigns supreme,

you know, death matters. And that was a big part of Morbid. Okay. Now, now we get to the part of talking about Flashback and how Flashback ended up in the set. One small problem, which is, I see the set. One small problem, which is I see the building.

Yes! This isn't a two-parter. It's a three-parter! I guess when I talk about newer sets, I have a lot more to say. Maybe it's because I remember more. Maybe that's what's going on. But anyway,

I'm trying to let these podcasts naturally be what they want to be, and I'm at work. I'm not talking let these podcasts naturally be what they want to be and I'm at work I'm not talking about flashback yet I'm not talking about any of the tribal I mean I talked about how we chose the tribes but I didn't talk about how we made them into what they were so that means we're not done yet

so next time we will have part three where I talk about hopefully the rest of Industron uh but until then I guess it's time to go make the magic