Last year, animation house Studio Titmouse ( Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Midnight Gospel, a really, really long list of other projects) decided to join the TTRPG world with Drunkards, Druggies, And Delinquents. Blending Titmouse’s artistic sensibilities with the inherent insanity of old school D&D, the game was a big success on BackerKit where it raised over $100,000. We sat down with Alexei Shay, Titmouse Creative Director and co-lead on the project, to figure out first off why an animation studio is getting into TTRPGs and second, how did they make and adult TTRPG that’s actually…cool?
Why make a TTRPG as an animation studio, where did it come from?
Alexei Shay: It comes exactly from that because as an independent animation studio, we make a lot of cartoons. And companies do that thing where they, uh, where they send out like Christmas presents, they have their logo printed on something and they’ll send them out stuff like that. We wanted to do that, but we didn’t want to send out the same type of stuff that you might get from a normal company. So Titmouse started sending people branded flasks, or dug out weed pipes, or rolling trays; silly stuff like that. We got to the point where it was like hey, what if we made some sort of TTRPG module or mini game. And we could do it themed around drinking and smoking because we’ve already sent people those gifts in the past, the flask, the pipe, etc.
So we created single envelope that we could send and in that envelope was two DM’s screens. The reason why we have two originally was because Chris P, the founder of the company, couldn’t decide on which piece of art he wanted. He wanted a piece that kind of reflected the old school vibes, but he also wanted a black light poster. We commissioned these two pieces and then needed a game that was big enough to fill them up. Originally we thought we’d just make a list of monsters and then we’ll ship a die and so you can like roll the die and it’ll be like a drink menu. That was fun, but it’s not really a game, it’s just a little activity. So what if we like actually made a game so we built this game in which you choose a class, your class has attacks, you have essentially an armor class that we call tolerance. Then monsters appear and those monsters are ridiculous and threatening and you fight them. And it just grew from there.
I like the delinquencies, what stat do they represent?
AS: Delinquency is like how much damage you’ve taken, armor is tolerance. We give everything its own silly names. The cards are just also to help you quickly understand classes and characters if that’s not something you generally know as a player.
There’s a dozen classes and they do the typical rock, paper, scissors of game design. You might have high armor and low damage to do, or you’re a damage dealing character with low armor, or you have this X factor third ability, or you’re a healer or something like that. And, everything is just crammed full of ridiculous puns.
I appreciate that there’s a barbeerian and a beerbarian.
AS: So the barians are a great example because it was like well we need puns and we need to take this very seriously but also you can only take it so seriously. We couldn’t decide between barbarian and beer bar barian. So we just put them both in. And then we’re like “What’s the weed version of that?” Well, that’s a Blazebarian. What’s the booze version? A Bourbonbarian. So there’s a lot of barians. And then we gave those classes to artists that we liked and said: draw them. We just gave them the shape of the square, but there’s no other direction. People really drew what they wanted to draw.
Heather Mahler did some, she did the cover of the game itself and she’s awesome. She did a mural in our office. We just commissioned people because we like their stuff. And then we did the same thing with the monsters. We kind of riffed off of some famous and not so famous monsters and then gave them our own spin and wrote ridiculous flavor text for everything.
Monsters are generated by simply rolling a d12. And if it hits a 2, then you pull one of the two numbered monsters and they appear. And each number has multiple monsters except for 6. If you roll 11, you pull the 11 and a monster shows up. You all get to react with either an attack, an item, a skill — one action. And then if the monster’s dead, good for you. The next round a new monster appears. But if it has survived, a new monster still appears and the monsters start to stack up. And so you really need to work together as a team. The monsters never stop so essentially the game ends when you’re just too drunk, exhausted, or distracted by ordering food to play anymore.
How do the monsters work in the game?
AS: I think there’s 20 monsters in total. And they’re getting to read the silly flavor text. This is a game where the DM responsibility rotates. So once there’s monsters on the board, after the round you hand the DM screen to the person next to you and now their character sits it out, but they control the monsters. Everyone gets to inhabit the monster vibe once per go around. You get to get up to a little bit of mischief in terms of like messing with your friends, but they’re gonna get payback because that responsibility rotates. It encourages you to not be to be mischievous but not a dick. Once you feel really familiar with the monsters and with your powers, then I think people start to do the role playing of it all.
The “adult RPG” is something that’s been tried many times but this one seems to have really strong appreciation for that old school. I love the vibe of that. But it also captures the reality of like playing it at a party and having fun with it.
AS: You can really get into it and create a character and live with that character and grow that character over time…or you could just fuck around and have fun. We have a lot of make your own monster cards and it’s very “rule zero” oriented work. We want people to create house rules Yeah, such a big part of drinking games too is that they’re just handed down from teenager to teenager, college kid to college kid. If you ask two people about it, you get two different answers of what that game even is. So we wanted to have a little bit of that energy also. I think I wrote something like… If any of the following rules are confusing or dumb, simply change them to suit your own place or ignore them altogether. And I think that if something seems dumb, don’t do it. That’s a good life lesson in general, but also a good game lesson.
The pre-gens, which we call pre-rolls, and a custom DM screen, which has the same information as that skimming screen. Those plus a bunch of silly merch come in this, like, it’s really more of an expansion pack, come in what we call the deluxe edition. It includes those things plus a rolling tray and koozies and the accoutrement of a drinking game. And then the regular box comes with the actual, full playable game except for those pre-gens.
The box side art is killer too.
Taylor, our designer at Titmouse, he just like did such an amazing, I was so blown away by how good it was. It was as exciting as having the art from the commission artists coming. And he did some of the commission art as well, but just the way that he approached that70s kind of like photocopied, printed grime and that high quality/low quality thing. And the way he reused art to create like the one color prints that wraps all the inside of the box. I love it.
I’m sitting here. like, I could just give my tattoo artist, stack of these and say “Once a month, do one of these.”
There are artists who when you dig in, if you’re into the indie comics and indie animation scene, there are people who you’ll see Ian Jones-Quartey (creator of OK KO), Matt Furie (Boy’s Club), Ben Edlund (who created The Tick), Phil Barassa, lead character designer on Legend of Vox Machina, Cheese, Andy Seriano. Jody Schaeffer, created a show called Megas XLR.
DA: Hell yeah, dude.
That was Jody’s show. You can see Penn Ward, creator of Adventure Time.
DA: And there’s so much old school TTRPG stuff in Adventure Time and his work.
He and Chris P have played RPGs together for years. And again, it’s like, I think we’re an animation studio, but really, you know, we love to celebrate the interests of the people that work at the studio. There’s such a huge crossover between animation and gaming, animation and role playing gaming as well. (EN: You can find a more complete list of contributors here.)
So did you do lot of play testing in the office?
AS: Yeah we did. I subjected my family and friends to quite a bit of playtesting at home and then we play tested it in the office as well a number of times and distributed the game to some other early play testers who gave us their feedback. That was fun too to continue to hone the system and the rules to be just understandable enough that you can really use them but also a little bit like a classic RPG where you’re like where am I? What’s happening? Getting into RPGs for the first time can sometimes feel daunting but that just adds to the reward of mastering it.
It sounds like it was a kind of heavily vibes based design process to kick off, but as you were going through was there anything that you got stuck on? Or anything that you you were playtesting it you made a big change?
AS: I think that the hardest thing to balance was the mechanics that create those really big, exciting, dramatic moments but also understanding that the result of those dramatic moments is that somebody might have to drink a lot. You want to be respectful of people’s health and well-being. There are some like gleefully game breaking moments that, as a group, you have to decide how to deal with. So for instance, there is a monster that is reacts to how many players are at the table and does 1d12 damage per player. So if you play a big game with a lot of people around the table and you honor the rule…that makes that monster extremely dangerous because now he’s rolling a ton of d12s to get to his damage. You’re probably not gonna have a high enough tolerance to handle a 60+ point blow if that’s where it comes. There are items and equipment and special skills that characters have that they can nullify a moment like that if they want to and if they’re aware enough to do so. Or they can just watch you drink 40 sips and laugh at how that nug bear fucked you up real bad.
There’s a little bit of that old school vibe of “walking into a dungeon filled with monsters with nothing but a sharp object is a foolish thing to do” and you will die in there. So trying to out drink a never ending parade of monsters is similarly foolish and you will not survive. I think balancing out those big dramatic moments with a fun game that isn’t going to scare you away from replaying, that was probably the biggest challenge. Because it would have been easy to make something where you just slowly sit forever. But I want that moment where everybody gasps or everybody cheers or everybody screams “chug! chug! chug!” at you.
One thing that stands out from other, similar titles is that its more inclusive of other “intoxicants,” particularly stone culture. It’s all very King Gizzard, sludge metal. You can sip a beer, obviously, but how do you implement maybe, some of the most California ways to play this?
AS: We say sips, maybe they’re puffs, maybe they’re nibbles on an edible. That’s that delinquency versus tolerance. Maybe you’re totally sober and you want to have sour gummies or sip on some apple cider vinegar. I keep suggesting that you could do a push-up for every point of damage. Not that I would want to do a hundred push-ups while people got wasted around me, but it could be done. High fives, laps around the house, anything could really be done to fit into that delinquency. But it’s really up to you, I think, to be responsible for yourself and find out what’s going to be fun for you.
Drunkards, Druggies, And Delinquents is set for release this fall. You can learn more at the TitmouseStuff website, and pre-order your copy now. The Basic Set will run you $55 while the Deluxe Set with all those fun little accessories and pre-roll characters, will run you $95.
Images via Studio Titmouse
Have strong thoughts about this piece you need to share? Or maybe there’s something else on your mind you’re wanting to talk about with fellow Fandomentals? Head on over to our Community server to join in the conversation!
