You can play a TTRPG about…well..just about anything at this point. Ghosts, raccoons, people turning into horses. As designers work to change what the very idea of a TRRPG means, they increasingly are turning to brand new mediums for inspiration. Some turn to nature, others to personal themes. And some just turn on the telly. Designer Mol Joule aka Molomoot did just that when coming up with Serving Up Disaster, a new TTRPG themed entirely around Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares franchise. Combining the high drama of reality TV with the very real human connections that happen around the tabletop, it’s raised over six times its initial funding goal on Kickstarter. I went to the Chef’s table for a confessional to see how Mol came up with the idea, how they used Brindlewood Bay for kitchen drama, and the eternal tripartite nature of Gordon Ramsay.
I want to start to talk a little bit about the previous work that you’ve done in tabletop design. I believe second work with Brindlewood Bay, right?
Mol Joule: Yes, I’ve written a Brindlewood Bay adventure before, but this is my first like full hack of Brindlewood Bay, right? And honestly, my biggest project, yeah.
A lot of my previous work has been single pages, right? When The Walls Fall is a one page stacking world building tool. So you’re literally like building a stack of dice in the center, waiting for them to fall. And then when they fall, you can kind of like generate what’s left behind from the city. I did Weird Little Goblinz which just on a single A4 sheet of paper folded into a zine. Roll some dice, generate a goblin.
I then went even smaller and created possibly the tiniest little zine that ever existed. It is smaller than the palm of my hand. And that is A Dungeon For Ants, which is a systemless dungeon where you play as ants trying to escape this Sid from Toy Story-like horror ant maze, basically. And then a couple of other adventures that are from my own weird little mechanism of making dungeons with a crossword.
I’ve written a sort of small Brindlewood Bay Adventure based on Chris Bissett’s random adventure title generator for little adventure jam Chris did, but this year I decided to dive in the deep end with a game that got a little bit out of my own control.
What came first? Is it something where you wanted to make this out of interest in the subject or were you actively trying to make something a little bit more involved?
Mol: It was definitely from my interest in the subject. I have watched all the episodes of Kitchen Nightmares far too many times. Whenever I’m in a bit of a depressive episode, I whack that bad boy up on YouTube and I watch four episodes and by the end of it, I’m like, you know what? At least my business isn’t two million pounds in debt and got rats in it. You know, so I’m not doing that bad.
DA: Both versions?
Mol: I have a preference for the US version because of how ridiculous it is and he game itself is definitely inspired by the US version.
DA: This is curious because, I don’t know if maybe this is a cultural difference or the weird way Americans are about British culture, but I prefer the UK version.
Mol: The UK version is so much more somber. It is quite genuine. There’s no over the top music stings playing constantly. And also, no offense to the Americans, but the food hygiene culture over there is a bit more slack than we have over here here. You kind of can’t have rotten food in your fridges in the UK. You will be closed. So quite often when Ramsey goes into the UK places, they’re just doing things a bit lackluster. Maybe there’s a little bit of dirt or it hasn’t been cleaned recently, but he’s never reaching into the fridges and finding week old stuff and squeezing it. That’s what I’m here for.
Obviously it sounds like you like both because it’s fun either way, but you really liked the drama and the heightened insanity of the American version.
Mol: I think watching the UK ones, I mean, I have a history in hospitality. So watching the UK ones really hit too close to home sometimes. Whereas with the US ones, because it was so over the top, it is so dramatic. You can’t help but laugh, even though they’re dealing with sometimes quite sad situations.
How did you finally say “I want to make a game out of this”?
Mol: I was watching a couple of episodes and after I had watched like…three in a row I went, oh my God, the structure of every single episode is exactly the same. Reality TV shows in general love that, right? And you want to be able to not have watched any other episode, but jump in and the structure is kind of the same every time. And I wondered why no one had gameified that. In a lot of kind of like heist games, for example, there’s that kind of structure of play where you do this thing, and then that thing, and then the downtime. I just started jotting down ideas like, okay, what happens in the introduction? What happens here and here and here? What weird way does Ramsay arrive at the scene? Is it on a jet ski? Has he got a motorbike? Then he spends the entire time searching for all the different problems. And then at the conclusion, he has basically done his best with either repairing the restaurant or talking to the staff or getting them to change their ways. He’s solving all those problems and seeing if the restaurant can have a successful relaunch night. That sounded an awful lot like in Brindlewood Bay, when you get a lot of different clues that you then gather up and at the end come together and decide, okay, this clue means that and this is done this way.
DA: I remember peak problem solving reality TV over here when I was younger, when peak Kitchen Nightmares and Super Nanny and Cat Whisperer and stuff like that. A lot of them copied the Ramsey format. I think it’s a really interesting kind of cathartic thing, seeing the people get yelled at. We like seeing the drama, but we also like seeing the problems get solved too. That’s why they don’t tell you how many restaurants fail after the relaunch.
So you have the system, you have all this stuff and you said it grew as you worked at it. How did that growth happen and how did you adapt to figuring out that you needed to do a lot more with this than you expected?
Mol: It’s a slow and steady process, right? It started with a structure of the game every session and then connecting to the Brindlewood stories. Then it was a question of how can I gamify certain parts of Kitchen Nightmares? Well, people love a random table. Stick in a random table of restaurant generation!
Were there a lot of learning and challenges just in making something bigger compared to the smaller stuff that you’ve done?
Mol: Yeah, 100%. I’ve also not written much mechanical stuff before apart from my little dice stacking game, which realistically, it’s just rolling on a bunch of tables. I’m not really a mechanics person. I love writing adventures. I like writing vibes heavy stuff or generation tools. So this was the first time I had to sit down and go, OK, I’ve got ideas for all of these staff moves, the abilities that the players can utilize. But how do I actually write them? I’m really thankful that I have a really lovely community around me of game designers that I could say, hey, this is what I want the move to do. How do I write that in a way that a person will be able to actually use?
DA: It’s always fascinating because one of the things that I like about your work and I like a lot of work on the indie side is that formal experimentation. Using the dice, the way they move to generate something, or having the form be a part of things.
How did you want to manifest the relationships and the drama of people working in a kitchen um in this game? Get that question?
Mol: A big part of the way that character creation in this game works is that you turn to the person to your left, you roll a couple of dice, and you generate a connection. So you might be the parent of that person or just a friend or you’re ex partners, right? And then you generate a feeling towards them. So you might be jealous, or spiteful, or or affectionate. Eventually everyone will have a connection to two other people at the table (because the person to your right will be generating one towards you). You can kind go around and generate more if you wish, if you want a little bit more connection or like I say to people, just see what happens during the session. This is just a jumping off point, right? Don’t be afraid to let characters develop and grow over the course of the session.
You also generate the personal problem of your character, the thing that that makes them annoying to work with, or frustrating to be around, because that’s where the drama comes in. If everyone was perfect at their role and really liked everyone around them and was doing super well, they wouldn’t be on an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, right? They wouldn’t be a character in Serving Up Disaster.
When you’re thinking about how people are playing this, when you’re thinking about these relationship dynamics. How do you handle being able to be more dramatic and hit those emotional moments but then be able to pull back.
Mol: When I think about kind issues of mechanics and emotional moments not always meshing, I think it can be a problem but I also think it’s a shame because I think that we can give mechanics to these moments and encourage people.
I know it’s a bit of a hot topic, whether should you incentivize certain things. Hot take, I think yes. I think it’s okay for when you are playing a roleplaying game for you to incentivize certain things. So the not-so-cozy moments encourage people to have moments in character and get bonuses from that. They might have arguments with each other and that gives certain bonuses, or they might come together and finally reconcile their differences and that also can give them bonuses. So it’s okay to like give mechanics to things like that that you want players to interact with.
Switching over to the other side of the screen, so to speak, the role of the of “Gordon” in this, of the chef. The players can fill a lot of different roles, but obviously the chef is very important because, you know, they’re Gordon. How did you go about setting guidelines for playing a character as complicated as Gordon while running the game?
Mol: At the start, I wrote a bit of GM advice, a “chef’s briefing” at the back of the book. And I broke down Gordon into three key words: a chef, a therapist, and a father. The “chef” looks at things as “is this good in a cooking way? Is it clean? Is it safe? Does it taste good? The “therapist” looks at how people are interacting with each other? I’m going to listen to their problems. I’m going to see what’s going on beneath the surface. And then the father role is kind of two-toned in that fathers can be loving and they can want you to succeed, but they can also look you in the face and go, you know, what you’re doing, I disagree with it. “You’ve stayed out way past your curfew, you’re grounded, I’m going to yell at you for a bit.” And so I think that those three basic things that you can come back to as chef will always allow you to deal with the situation.
You want players to show you problems get caught in loop of denial around Chef. Always building and building and building.
The last thing I want to ask is what happens when everyone’s gone through the whole cycle. They’ve inhabited these characters, they’ve developed these character, They’ve relaunched the web thing and they put everything down. What kind of feeling or real takeaway from this. What do you want them to feel as they’re finishing up with it and either thinking about the next time?
Mol: Once the game is being played by you, I am happy. I want you to experience it and have a good time. And if you finish the game and go, oh, we’ve got to do that again, I want to make an even more ridiculous character and let’s play for like whole “season” and at some point return to these characters — that’s fantastic. But I also think it’s a really great for groups that are missing a player and can’t play their usual session. And just playing a game for a session because I think this game does something really well in that it is both a little bit silly but these characters have quite intimate problems. It can be a reflection on somebody you know, or yourself, but at the end of the day, we have to grow and change if we want to get better. Right? So if we were going to be emotional and profound, it would be that if you want to do better, you have to change.
You can back Serving Up Disaster on Kickstarter, with full release coming soon.
Images via Molomoot
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