Roll20's exclusive sci-fi RPG Burn Bryte asks you to jump in to a galaxy where an adorable teleporting mischief fox could just walk right into your ship. It's also a game where hope wins.

Learn more about Burn Bryte and get 3 monsters from My Dad's Monster Manual on the episode page here: https://scintilla.studio/monster-blipp-burn-bryte

Get stat blocks, bonus content, and other monstrous perks: www.patreon.com/scintillastudio

Join the conversation: www.twitter.com/SparkOtter

Meet my guest James Introcaso:

https://twitter.com/JamesIntrocaso

http://www.jamesintrocaso.com/

https://worldbuilderblog.me/

https://burnbryte.com/

Music by Jason Shaw at Audionautix.com

Through the wall of your ship walks this adorable

fox-sized creature with big blue fur all over its body, giant eyes with

red irises, a quivering little lip on its snout, big ears, and three

bushy tails that are all wagging.

They're wearing a collar that has a little dangly tag coming from it,

that jingles as they walk over to you.

You see one of your companions reach out to pet this thing.

And as your companion does, suddenly, the creature becomes translucent and

their hand passes right through it.

Hello and welcome to the season two finale of Making a Monster!

This is the 27th monster I've explored on the show, and I don't

think I could have chosen a better monster, game or guest with which to

park the show for its summer break.

James Introcaso is a titan of the RPG industry.

He's a tabletop roleplaying game designer who works with Wizards of

the Coast on Dungeons & Dragons, Roll20, Kobold Press, and other awesome

publishers; he also happens to be very generous with his time and his

good will toward projects like mine.

It's really cool.

I love the idea and the concept behind it and everything.

So I'm very glad that you started it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hey, my name is James Introcaso and I, have he him pronouns.

I was a freelance television producer.

So I was doing game design and television on either side of a scale,

if you can picture it that way.

And I very slowly managed to shift more and more of work into game design.

And now I do game design full-time and I'll work with MCDM, which is

Matt Colvilles production company.

Oh, great.

full-time starting in February.

So, so yeah, it's, we will thank you.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate that.

So yeah.

Yeah.

I am a full-time game designer now.

And it is it is great.

I really love it.

I'm always out there looking for like the weird stuff.

And that's one of the reasons I wanted to make sure that we had a

chance to chat, because of Burn Bryte

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

I appreciate the, the weird because that's what we're bringing

with Burn Bryte, for sure.

So thank you.

Uh huh.

I have to say, I really appreciate you giving me, access to the game

before this interview, because I don't think I would been really equipped to

handle all of the nuances without the couple of hours I spent going through

some of the setting and the character creation process before this interview.

We need to talk about what Burn Bryte is and what makes it unique.

Sure

First of all, what is the event that the game is named for?

Right.

So in Burn Bryte, which is a science fantasy role-playing game, right,

takes place in the Olaxis galaxy, a bryte, B R Y T E is an age.

So in the history of this galaxy, there was an exploration bryte

where people were exploring things.

There was a war bryte where a bunch of planets were at war with

each other and stuff like that.

The Burn Bryte is defined by the "burn", which is this phenomenon

that has showed up and surrounded the galaxy on all sides, top and bottom.

And it is slowly and eratically closing in and anything that touches

the burn that passes through it is never seen or heard from again-

planets, people, spaceships, whatever.

It goes beyond this sort of orange "Northern-Lightsey-looking"

phenomenon that no one can see past.

And this thing is constricting the galaxy and people are panicked

because they don't know where it came from, what it is or how to stop it.

You did write that the burn has partially swallowed Some planets.

So it's possible to be in contact with the burn and not dead.

What happens to a planet or a person in that situation?

That's a great question.

So you have to pass through the burn or the burn needs to pass over you

for you to be, what we call consumed, that never seen or heard from again.

When planets, right?

Cause the orbit of a planet could bring it by the burn, but

then have it not be swallowed.

So when that sort of thing happens we actually have a table

of random effects in the book.

so weird, but

is an RPG.

yes, of course, of course.

So weird, almost magical things happen.

And I, I mean magic in sort of the dark and sinister way, right.

All of a sudden your planet can become crystalline.

A weather phenomenon can happen on your planet that turns everybody

who lives in your planet into a zombie that can fly through space

basically and infect other people.

Uh, it can turn an entire planet into gas or an entire gas planet

into solid, that kind of thing.

So there are these weird and and strange effects that happen in there.

And I should mention the other thing about the burn is that it's because

it's slow, we still have time left.

There's still going to be some generations of people before the

burn consumes the entire galaxy.

So it's not a galaxy without hope.

I think when we think about apocalyptic stories and post-apocalyptic stories,

it's all about like, what are the lengths you'll go to, to survive?

You'll lose your humanity.

And this is more about you play characters who say no.

Just because things are bad just because the world is ending is no reason for

me to give up being kind and give up standing up for what is right.

And so it really is a hopeful game from that perspective.

Yeah, and I think you've dipped into science fantasy with that.

And I would also like to say that, early science fiction was far more

hopeful than the science fiction listeners might be familiar with now.

So I really appreciate that you've brought that back to the genre.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

That was a big thing.

The design team we, we talked about from the very beginning.

This idea of like preserving hope and it's something that Kat and Darcy were

really vocal about and it was like, yeah, that's a great idea because it's

such a, for this time, a fresh take.

That's Kat Kuhl and Darcy Ross, designers of Burn Bryte.

Burn Bryte

And, and don't get me wrong, I'll get it down with some

post-apocalyptic, you need to eat your best friend kind of role-playing

game, uh, but, for Burn Bryte it was definitely the right decision.

And I'm so glad that I was working on and promoting a game

about hope in the past year.

So, you know, given all of the world events that are going on and the pandemic

and everything else, it was great to be able to say, here is something that I hope

will distract you and fill you with hope.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great.

And because we're in that space of conversation, I'll, I'll go

ahead and date the interview.

This is January 9th, 2021.

And uh, some stuff happened this weekend

yeah, can you believe we're only a week into 2021.

Uh, It's not the calendar's fault.

But when I, when I started Making a Monster, I had no idea that the, term or

the word monster would be so difficult to define and so difficult to use.

I've noticed over the past six months of doing the show

and putting it together that.

"monster" is usually the word that we put on maps when we don't know what's there.

It's the word that we assign to the unknown or the other, or the stranger

or the thing that we fear, which if my podcast can bring anything

to the world right now, it's a better attitude toward the other.

All of which is to ask a monster in the terms of tabletop role-playing

games can be a lot of things.

D&D has a very broad definition of what a monster makes.

It's anything with a stat block, anything you can interact with.

In Burn Bryte, how do you use the word monster, or do you?

Or what would you consider a monster in your game?

It's funny cause we don't, mechanically , I believe

we never use the word monster.

We call our, our bestiary "the NPCs section", because I'm kind of, of the

opinion that like anything that isn't a player character that is alive and is,

not a plant or an amoeba or whatever an animal, a creature is an NPC.

And so we use creature a lot because I do think creature is more neutral

and also evokes a science fantasy sort of Jim Henson type feel.

Right.

And again, that was an intentional design team decision.

That being said, I do think that monster can be fun.

I grew up on Sesame Street so the word monster to me can also

mean Grover who, I mean, who doesn't love a super Grover, right?

That man's a hero.

So I don't necessarily think that monster needs to be a bad term, but I understand

it, it comes with a lot of baggage.

I think because typically monster means evil thing we need to kill or very

othered thing that we need to kill.

So yeah, we don't necessarily have monsters in that sense, but in the

RPG sense, if you wanted to call the Burn Bryte creatures monsters, I think

that's okay too, because they can be lovable and cute and furry like Grover.

That being said, is there anything I need to understand about Burn Bryte

before we can talk about the NPCs section?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think the first thing to understand about Burn Bryte is by

some definitions of the word monster, everything in Burn Bryte as a monster.

Um, uh, So, there's no humans in it, right.

You play in Burn Bryte, as a player, as one of eight species of

what we, as humans, would consider aliens that have super powers based

on their anatomy and physiology.

Those things are weird and wonderful.

So everything from you can play a sapient mech suit, to a swarm of telepathic bugs.

You play the swarm that thinks with a hive mind and moves around and stuff

to, and this is probably the most quote unquote monstrous of the species that

we have, a giant slug that can enter and puppet corpses called the Zivoy.

And those are the player characters that we're talking about Right yeah.

So,

you haven't, if you can't tell by now, this game is buck wild.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And people have a lot of fun usually going into this and the reason we didn't

have any humans is because one it's mechanically, it's kind of hard to design

if it's like a system for super-powered species , and super power, meaning

powered compared to humans, well, then you probably don't want humans in there.

Yeah, there's a lot of bit, there's a bit of Ben 10 in the DNA here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's very true.

That's very true.

Thank you.

I never really thought about that, but I'm going to use that from now on.

Um

But then the other thing is that it's very easy in games where there are

humans, and not all games that have humans do this, but it's very easy

for species, ancestries, whatever you want to call it, become very

monolithic when you have humans.

Because humans are the adaptable ones who are, have a range of

different personalities and interests and are quick learners.

Right.

And when you remove humans, everything has the possibility of being human, then.

Everything has humanity.

Everything has that diversity among its different people within the species.

And so that is why we chose that decision.

It was like, yeah, we can create this lore and talk about like, this is what

their home world and home culture is like, but by the way, part of character

creation is you build your own culture and, people have been traveling all

over the galaxy for hundreds of years.

You might come from like a, essentially a place that's like New York City and

be in this very diverse place, full of all different kinds of culture and

your own that you are a part of that isn't part of your home world culture.

Right?

And so we wanted to have that feel to it.

So, that's kind of like one good thing to understand about all of

the different species in Burn Bryte.

And then that there are a lot of wild, other what we would

call sapient species, right?

A humanoid-esque kind of people that you cannot play at the current time.

There are also then other sort of constructs and animal-like creatures,

right, things that are more mystical.

We just released a new creature pack called the Galactic Grimoire that has

more creatures that get even weirder like those spaces zombies I was talking

about that you can add to your game.

So yeah, so there's a lot of things, I would say, when

it comes to creature variety.

We aim to let you believe we don't have as many creatures as D and D does

yet, but we want you to think like the sky is the limit when it comes to

creatures because alien worlds, magic?

Yeah.

And we, one thing we do is we provide a few stat blocks

that can be easily modified.

So like we have like a generic animal stat block that you can pull abilities

onto, to make your own animals for.

Because there's so many worlds in Burn Bryte, there's gotta be

billions of animal species, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And we're a half hour in and we're about to get to the main thrust of

Sorry.

I'm talking way too much.

No, no, honestly, this is about par for the course, especially for a

game that isn't Dungeons and Dragons where we have to lay a lot of groundwork.

Is there a single one that stands out as your favorite?

Yes there is.

And it is the blip.

The blip is I guess , what we would call like a cute creature or a cute monster.

They are they sort of look like a almost like a Pokemon, they're like a

fennec fox that have these three bushy tails and they can be bright blue or

green or red or that sort of thing.

And they're about the size of a small fox too.

So picture this adorable dog with these three fluffy tails.

And what I really love about them is that they can phase through solid objects.

And so they can they can be hard to get, right?

They're found all over the universe and people desire having a blip as a pet

because when you hold the blip, you also gain the ability to phase through things.

And so, having a blip gives you a superpower and a super cute best friend.

the problem is uh, blips are not easy animals to raise.

They look like these cuddly dogs and stuff, but I don't know if you've ever

seen people, like try to keep foxes?

My wife follows a ton of foxes on Instagram, rescued

foxes - they are a nightmare.

They like never want to do what's, what they're told.

They bite you.

They don't like to be held, that kind of thing.

And so that's sort of the fun of a blip is like, I mean, you can hold on to a blip

if you want to and try to run through a solid object, but if you treat that blip

poorly even by accident, hug them a little too tight as you're running through

that wall, they'll jump out of your grasp and leave you stranded in a wall.

And so, uh, so that's sort of the fun behind blips.

And there've been a couple live-streamed games that I've seen

and every game practically puts a blip into the story some point

because uh, it's a lot of fun to have.

They're a cute creature, the players, like as soon as they see the art, they're

like, oh yeah, I wanted this baby.

And then, you know, you also have the chance to, to let a

player get stuck in a wall.

What a gift you've given.

That is aggressively cute.

Oh good.

uniqueness.

Yes.

Yeah.

There's a lot of things in Burn Bryte that can kill you too.

So I don't want, you know, we, we've got plenty of, plenty of monsters.

In the Galactic Grimoire, there's space spiders that like to suck the

magic juice out of your spaceship.

And there are a giant lizard people that have been chased by the burn

from another galaxy into a Olaxis.

So, you know, we got lots of fun going on as well as, as far as that goes,

but the blip just has a place really, really close to my heart and it turned

out to be adorable the art was perfect.

And the stories people tell with it are so fun.

So now we get into some of the hard works and the

heavy lifting of the podcast.

When you were putting this together from a visual perspective or from a

mechanics perspective, what were some of the influences that you can point to?

I have one of my own in mind.

I want to see what you say.

Ah, gotcha.

Yeah.

So for me I think a big thing that influenced me that I really like

creatures that can phase through walls.

I think they make very interesting encounters.

So from a mechanics perspective, things like the D&D wraith and spectre and other

incorporeal creatures was really cool.

And I wanted a way to give that to characters, but it also

felt like a power that was too powerful to have all the time.

And so it was like, well, maybe an item, well, you know, an item like they can just

use all the time then that's kind of like, and so, this is where this came up with.

Obviously like Kitty Pryde from the X-Men is a big influence

as far as the power set goes.

Then as far as the as far as the look goes in Burn Bryte, I was sort

of, we don't have a lot of like conventionally cute creatures, or

we didn't, when we were making this.

We did end up with a lot of conventionally for cute creatures.

But we didn't when we were making this the blip and and so I was

like, well, what is sort of cute?

And so, the look is a little, I would say, like, Vulpix-based a little

Eevee-based from from Pokemon is sort of, where that, that netted out.

Did I hit on any of your influences?

A couple, indirectly.

The Vulpix is of course based on the Japanese legend of the kitsune.

Yeah.

Which is like, you know, fan favorite.

If we're talking about Pokemon, those are also aggressively, aggressively cute.

They've almost weaponized.

Every Pokemon has giant eyes, a chubby face, unless it's supposed to be

mean, all these things that like we're programmed to respond to as cuteness.

But the other thing that that is a big flashing neon sign is

in my head is the blink dog.

Ah, yes.

So actually good, good point.

Yeah, there is definitely some blink dog DNA in the blip.

And.

Ah, I love blink dogs.

I actually, there's a D and D book that I wrote a a three legged blink

dog into and and it got cut the book.

There's the whole section got cut.

And I'm so sad.

Cause I was oh, I just want you to hang out with this blink dog.

and uh, but yeah, yeah, so that's a, yes, the blink dog very much kind of runs

through everything I do because they're one of my favorite creatures of all time.

Got it.

So in terms of game mechanics, and I guess this might be relative, what are

some of the mechanics that you've given to the blip from within Burn Bryte's system

that that might hard-code some of what it does into the way the mechanics function?

Yeah.

So the big thing is that group phase ability, right?

So the blip can phase through solid objects and any creature touching

it can also phase through objects, but they have to stay in contact

with the blip while they do so.

And if you are inside a solid object and you lose contact with

the blip, you become shunted out of that object and you take damage.

And the place you go, right?

So let's say you're moving through a, a wall in a spaceship

to go from one room to the next.

The GM decides where you end up next to the object you're shunted out.

So that could mean you could end up in space depending on where

you are and where the object is.

Right.

And so that's probably the, the biggest thing that the blip really gets that is

built into the mechanics of Burn Bryte.

Burn Bryte is meant to be played on a map because we use Roll20, right?

It's built optimized for Roll20.

You can play it at the table, like physically, if you want to, you still

need Roll20 to access just the rules.

And so, so we use a lot of maps because of that.

Because Roll20 has a big strength with maps.

So that's the big thing that they get and then otherwise their statistics

are that of kind of like a small fox.

You know, they have a bite ability.

They're pretty agile but you know, they're not any more sort

of intelligent or aware than an animal like a dog or a fox would be.

Right.

And this is where we would I don't know if we have time to

get into this but maybe in brief.

do it.

Let's do it.

I can be late.

It's fine.

okay.

So you know, D and D has it's couple of signature stats, alignment three mental,

three physical stats, and then hit points.

Are there corollaries to those in Roll20, or would it be closer to

like a, a Monster of the Week where you have sort of a harm track?

Oh, sure.

So you have three health levels to start with your character and you can get more.

So the way health levels work are I would say it's more like the

Monster of the Week harm track.

Most attacks deal one damage.

And so when you get hit, you take one damage and when you are reduced

to zero, you gain a condition, a negative condition, right?

And we didn't name conditions because there's so many

things that can affect you.

So we just said, this is what they do if you're affected by a condition.

It affects one of your skills.

It's a skill based game like Fate.

And so it makes your, your skill roles harder when you are suffering

from a negative condition.

And when you have a positive condition, your skill roles are easier.

And then once you have three conditions and you drop to zero

you can die as a player character.

For enemies.

It's generally like once you're reduced to zero, you're you're dead.

This is the way we say it is you're taken out by the attackers choice, right?

The attacker gets to decide how you're taken out.

So maybe you cower, maybe run away, maybe you're knocked out.

Your health levels are not just your physical sort of toughness, but also

your emotional and mental wellbeing.

So you can.

your narrative function in the story.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And during combat, you can make attacks with any skill so you can like berate

your enemies into surrendering or feeling bad about what they're doing.

You can very much play a non-violent character and still resolve

things in combat in Burn Bryte

yeah, that's excellent.

So we're gonna move here into kind of, the broad, general philosophizing

portion of the interview.

and it's much easier to do this I found with like titanic monsters that

shake the very core of your being and your relationship with the world.

But I love what you set up with the blip here because you've

offered a really excellent ability, but it comes with a lot of risk.

When you put a blip in the game as a designer, as a storyteller,

what is it blip meant to do?

A blip is meant for mischief and that mischief could

be, the players can work with the blip to get into mischief, right?

If, if they can endear themselves to that blip they can use that to cause mischief.

They can use that to be more sneaky, do the things we think of as being tricksy.

But it's also meant to make your players feel like the robbers

in a Home Alone movie, right?

Because they're going to want to interact with this blip, they're going

to want to become friends with it.

Players want to become friends with any creature they meet be it a brutal

owlbear or an adorable blink dog, right?

And so the same is true with the blip.

And watching them sort of.

You know, try to chase down the blip, give it food, interact with

it, is also going to be a lot of fun as the blip causes mischief.

So I think that's really their, their role in the story is to

you know, cause some mischief.

Mischief and trickster gods have a long heritage in

storytelling for good reasons.

So every time we get to this point in the interview, there's

a master's thesis waiting to be written in culture and anthropology.

But from your perspective what issues or questions do you want

your players to grapple with when there's a blip in their ship?

Yeah.

So I think the thing about the blip is it's the, it's a monster, quote unquote,

that, because it causes a lot of mischief is going to cause some hopefully fun

moments, but maybe some frustrating moments for your players and certainly

frustrating for their characters.

Right.

And I think the questions that you can grapple with would be, one

like what do we do with this thing?

Right?

Like it's, it's adorable.

And therefore we don't want to go to our normal, "time to murder!"

Uh right?

Which is a good thing.

It's It's good for players to grapple with that question.

But then the other thing is when the blip is part of the team, I think one of the

questions that they have to grapple with is like, when is it ethically okay to move

through walls and break privacy, right?

Walls exist for reasons.

Walls exist for our comfort, for our safety, for our privacy.

And so, when is it right now that I can do this whenever I want, walls are no longer

a barrier, when is it okay for me to do it and how do I get this creature who is

an animal to know that like, yeah, just cause you smell some delicious food in

that room doesn't mean you can just walk right into my bedroom whenever you Right?

So I think there's, there's fun to be had that way.

Burn Bryte asks you to take the leap into an expanding original

universe where humanity is diverse and hope wins, and I'm so glad I got

to share it with you as the final episode of Making a Monster season 2.

Burn Bryte is genuinely worth your time; here’s how to find out more about it.

There's a lot of wonderful and weird

creatures in Burn Bryte.

The blip is the very tip of the iceberg.

And like I said, if killer monsters are more your thing,

we've got a lot of them too.

So, you know, that's been really, really fun making these giant missions, which

are like space slug, dragons that used to control the galaxy and stuff like that.

So there's a lot of really, really cool stuff in Burn Bryte

that people should check out.

People can go to burn bryte.com.

bryte is spelled B R Y T E a, and they can learn more there.

And that's the, probably the best place to find it out, get links to

the game and that sort of thing.

There's already, also several starter adventures.

So if you want a lower cost to entry checkout trapped at the edge on the

roll 20 marketplace comes with pre-gens.

Everything you need to play like a two to three hour game of Burn Bryte that will

teach you the system is in there as well.

So that's a good place to check out.

And if you like D and D monsters check out My Dad's Monster Manual.

It's a monster book that I wrote with my dad.

It's on the DMS Guild.

So took all of the arts in the monster annual and I showed it

to my dad and I said to him what do you think this creature does?

What do you think, where do you think it came from?

What do you think its name is?

And a bunch of other followup questions based on those.

And then I took that and I rewrote the lower end stat block for

about 80 monsters in the Monster Manual based on his responses.

And it's really great.

Seems like it would be a walking dad joke, but they are play tested

creatures that you can use at your table and have a lot of fun with.

Thanks for listening to Making a Monster for the past 30 episodes,

it's been an incredible pleasure walking through the kaleidoscopic

meaning of monsters in games with you.

I'm taking a summer break, a planned one this time, to work on season 3.

If you want to know more about when that season is going to launch and

who's going to be involved, you can join the Making a Monster email list

at scintilla dot studio slash monster.

When you do, you’ll get a free preview of three monsters

from My Dad’s Monster Manual.

I picked the three most reminiscent of monsters from the show - the marona, the

roabley, and the Ellow - and James pulled them out into a PDF copy you can access

by trusting me with your email address.

I send out far fewer emails than I should, so I promise I won't waste your

time, and you will get access to guest incentives from the show including

monster stat blocks, discount codes on adventures and supplements, even short

stories and artwork from past guests.

so check it out at the link in the show notes or on the show’s website at

scintilla dot studio slash monster, that’s SCI NTI LLA dot studio slash monster.

If you want to continue learning about how even the cutest monsters can ask

questions about privacy and ethics, consider supporting the show on Patreon.

When you do, you'll get access to even more content from the show, like a bonus

bit I just released from this episode on whether Burn Bryte has a hidden call

back to the Eberron campaign setting.

You'll also get music I recorded for the show and, as always, there's stickers!

Last episode, I had to go big.

If supporting the show monetarily isn't an option for you, please share with

the people who play games with you.

With 30 episodes in the books there's a monster for everyone, and your

recommendation lets people know they can trust me with their time and attention.

It's a real gift to me and the creators I feature.

Thank you again for listening to Making a Monster.

I will look forward to seeing you in season 3!