We live in a complex time to be an artist. Limited time and money compete with increasingly prevalent AI creations while entire industries work to replace skilled artistic labor with cheap contract work. It’s enough to drive you to some very dark places. And those dark places are where Banana Chan (Van Richten’s Guide To Ravenloft, Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall) thrives. Her newest book is Knockoff, a solo TTRPG about a fashion designer named Marcos and his struggles with creativity in the world of fast fashion.
It is the second part of Banana Chan’s “Mephistopheles Trilogy” that kicked off with Forgery and conclude in the musical title Sample. With Knockoff still funding on Backerkit, I reconnected with the writer to learn more about the trilogy and her approach to artistic horror.
Just from the get go, can you tell me a little bit about the Mephistopheles trilogy that you are working on and how that sort of started out as an idea?
The Mephistopheles trilogy is three different games, with similar “choose your own adventure” mechanics. They also have this element of creating your own artifact to them: in Forgery, its colors, in Knockoff, its fabrics, in the upcoming third book, Sample, musical notes. So they’re all about art, about professional jealousy, about not feeling like you’re enough, not getting the recognition that you want. The constant is that they all talk about this demon. So how this demon manifests is through the art that gets created. It’s a manifestation of the creator’s own anxieties about themselves, how they fit in with the art world that they’ve chosen and how they fit in with the larger world and also anxieties about their careers.
That’s very much in line with Marlowe’s concept of Mephistopheles in Dr. Faustus, how he appears and is a manifestation of the main characters intellectual anxieties. I think what’s interesting is you talk about that artistic element, and the frustration of it, but it’s interesting that all three of the characters are in some ways copyists. They’re not generating. What are you thinking about with having that extra bit of sort of creative frustration with these characters?
Creating anything original takes a lot of time and energy. I think that when I was first writing Tempest and Forgery, I was writing a lot of stuff for other people. And so when I was thinking about that, it was sort of like, “Am I doing anything original at all?” That was the first layer of it, the sort of initial imposter syndrome that was settling in for me. And then the other part of it, I would say, is the idea of, you know, Tempest, Marcos, and then the final character —who’s still unnamed I’m trying to figure out a name for him — they are all extremely talented in their own right. They have the experience, they have the practice, they were trained. For Tempest, they were trained under another painter. For Marcos, he was trained in school. He went to FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology. So they do have skills in their belts, but they’re in this world of not feeling like they can do much more than that because of the worlds that they live in.
For Tempest, she has had a hard time trying to find a gallery space, has had a hard time trying to make something out of her own work, but is doing really well forging art. Same with Marcos. Marcos is working in fast fashion, very successful in getting in basically, not exactly ripping people off off the internet, but doing the work with a fast fashion company and maybe not doing as much for himself. What does it mean to work for someone else versus for yourself? And so that’s sort of what I was trying to get at with the piece about like, you know, doing forgeries or doing…
It’s a it’s a fascinating discussion because right now the within artistic communities. We see it in within tabletop, but also within other communities. about the power of originality and artists making the thing on their own as opposed to computer AI. So it’s interesting seeing that kind of dovetailing.
When I first started working on Forgery, AI was just a fun thing. No one was really thinking about it. They were like all making the filters and stuff with AI. And it didn’t pick up at that time, NFTs were like the the bane of the art world’s existence, right? And so I talked a little bit about NFTs in that, but then it wasn’t until Carlos and I started writing the screenplay for Forgery, that’s when we were like, oh, AI art is a thing right now. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that. Not to give anything away, but that was a part of our thinking when we were doing stuff for the screenplay. And then with Knock Off, it is similar. I was thinking a little bit about fast fashion and how fast it is to just make something or steal something. What is the difference between humans doing this to other humans versus AI doing this? That was something that I was thinking about, but I didn’t really add it into. I didn’t really put it into Forgery as much until we got to the screenplay part of it.
I was thinking as I read Forgery about the horror of creativity. But how how do you make artistic expression scary?
So the horror comes in through the story, and it is a guided story. At a thematic level, it is very much about you being the horror, you being the scary thing and things around you become scarier and scarier, but no one else really realizes that it’s happening. You’re noticing the changes within yourself and the changes in your environment, but it is a very lonely experience, right? So you’re the only person that’s noticing all this stuff. You’re losing your friends. You’re losing the people that are closest to you. They don’t experience what you’re experiencing, but you ultimately are. And so I think it’s creating a lonely environment, a lonely space.
I think that, you know, loneliness ultimately is very terrifying. We as humans really want to connect with others or at least that’s what I like to believe. But what happens when you cut off that connection? So I think that all three games play around with that idea of loss: losing yourself, losing the relationships that you have, feeling alone. The artifact is just there as a reminder of the game itself. And there’s also lot of body horror. The story is just all body horror.
Was Forgery your first time doing solo or have you you done before that?
Yes, so technically it’s my second. My first very very official solo journaling game was a game from years and years ago, I think it was 2016-2017. And that was called They’re On To Me and it was a vlog. And every day you would basically record yourself on your phone you would answer a prompt and the prompt would be like, I don’t know, my neighbor is acting weird. What’s going on? And progressing through the, I think it was like seven days, you would basically tell this video journal that you believe that your neighbor is an alien and they’re coming after you, so on and so forth.
Forgery is the first official one, a first official standalone one that I wrote. And then it’s Darkness at the Brink of Ohio, and then Knock Off, and then finally Sample. Unless I go on any other tangents. I’m hoping that I don’t go on any other tangents.
How was the transition in fact into or back into writing solo versus the work that you’ve done, whether it was some of the contract work you’ve done or obviously Jiangshi?
I think it was both freeing and scary at the same time. It was very freeing because I had control over everything, right? I don’t have to schedule meetings to get someone to align with me. I saw Shanna Germain (Monte Cook Games) earlier this week and I was joking to her saying the reason why I’m doing solo journaling games now is because I am so sick of scheduling times for playtesting. Because it’s so much time to schedule, it’s so much work to schedule time to play a game, right? If you have a six year long campaign, I am impressed. I don’t know how people find the time to schedule those.
But it was also scary because this is something that was both very personal to me. The writing of it felt like extremely personal and that was something that was like a little scary to put out there. And it’s very different from doing something with dice, right? It’s just you and the player, you’re just writing for this player and seeing what happens.
Stay tuned on Monday for Part 2, where we get deeper into Marcos’s tale in Knockoff and discuss the logistics of scanning meat.
Images via Read/Write Memory
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