At The Table with The Dice Tower - Play The Book!

0:00At the Table with the Dice Tower, Episode 72. Play the book.

0:24Welcome to At the Table with the Dice Tower, a podcast about games and the people who play them. This time, Tom is away, so Julie and I discuss books that have made the leap to board games and how to get the next multi-million dollar lit RPG game campaign to be one of my titles. Please? Plus, we wander into a new batch of roses, thorns, and hula hoops. I'm Eric Sommerer. And I'm Julie Ahern. Yes, hello, Julie! Oh, hi. How's it going? It's going great. So Tom fled the country and isn't able to record with us today. So it's just you and me. Yeah, tis the season. Tis the season for summer travel.

1:05I'm not sure what Tom's doing on his adventure. I'm sure he'll tell us when he gets back. Yes. Very secretive. I believe it's board game related. I think so. But it is absolutely the season because you've got, well, Robert is flying home from Tokyo Game Fair right now as we record. And so by the time this plays, he'll be home safe. Okay, good, good, good. Fingers crossed. And UK Games Expo is coming up soon. So, yeah, it's that season. It is. It's also the season for senior slacking. I think I've mentioned I have a high school senior this year. And we've reached the point where his AP exams are done.

1:49And our high school has a policy that if you have high enough grades, you don't have to take finals as a senior. And so he's basically in the coast mode. They've done their final choir concert. They've done all sorts of final things. But we still have classes until June, like, 18th is graduation. So another several weeks of going to school, except there's not anything to do. And it's a very weird, weird circumstance. He's already looking forward to college. And, you know, we're just in that mindset. And I can't blame him. What else is there for him to do in high school? Did you have that? Was your high school like that?

2:25I remember it being it having that coasting period like you've been accepted you know where you're going. But I remember having to take finals and having some aspect of I need to finish this whole process. He's like over the finish line already but still on the track. It's very it's very strange. We didn't have that. I remember it existed. but it turns out when you take advanced placement classes um they care they still care about the finals uh because they do also include them potentially as college credit so uh my over achieving self had was taking ap classes and yeah didn't get to slack off and was i remember being really, really jealous.

3:14But I also remember my final year, final semester of college, I only took, I saved all my really slacking courses for, instead of easing in freshman year, it was all my second semester senior year where I was taking like intro to pottery. Yeah. So, I did eventually get it, but it was not high school. And I remember lots of people having that and being super jealous. I think it also depends on where you live in the country because the AP exams need to be given at the same time for everyone at once. And some schools are already done here at the end of May. But in Connecticut, we go for several more weeks, but they had to take the AP exams several weeks ago.

3:59And so the thing that actually counts for college credit is done, but they still have academic days to get through. So they're doing extra projects. They actually started Calculus 3 just for fun. For fun. Yeah, just in case you wanted to do more calculus. Anyway. They could play board games. Yes, yes, and you could do that at several events. I have to put on my Tom hat now. So come play games with us. There's still time to sign up for Dice Tower East. It's in just a few weeks. You can come and play and have all sorts of fun with events and goings on. And there's a pool right there because it's at the Caribe Royale in Orlando.

4:38A lot of folks come and play board games for part of the day and then just relax or go to one of the theme parks. You can make it a whole thing. And that's at DicetowerEast.com. Also, the cruise. There are still rooms for the cruise available. The 10th anniversary Dicetower Cruise in 2027. That's at DicetowerCruise.com. All right. Did I do it? Did I do a good job? So good. You are so good. Okay. Woo! Now, here's the topic that I am excited to talk about, and I think Julie's excited to talk about. We're going to talk about books. Yeah. And the reason why I wanted to talk about this, you may have seen in the news, there is a book called Dungeon Crawler Carl.

5:20It's written by Matt Dinneman. The audiobook narrator is Jeff Hayes. And together they have produced a big old series of a book series that is in the genre of lit RPG, which is a sort of literary game-related adventure. So, right. As a genre, lit RPG for – and I feel like the Venn diagram of people listening to this podcast who understand what lit RPG is is very high, but still. Most get it, but yeah, just so we know. Just in case. so lit rpg are books that have been written um in the form of like a of a narrative somebody first the protagonist is typically first player is going through an a role-playing game experience but um in the like they have been put in it and so there's a bit of meta to that where they as a person, understand that they've put into a situation that is obviously not real, but in the book it is, where they are in a role-playing game and they are having to level up and do things, but they are doing it with the knowledge that they understand it is a role-playing game come to life.

6:39Yes. And there's all sorts of sub-genres and ways, reasons why there is a game layer over this character's experience and all sorts of stuff. And this is a sandbox I play in a lot in my professional world, so it's something that I've certainly been watching. And Renegade Games just did a GameFound campaign raising money for an RPG, an actual RPG for this lit RPG property, and a new version of the Unstoppable system that is based on Dungeon Crawler Carl. This project made over$13 million. And I think anytime something makes that big of a splash, people are going to notice. And so I kind of wanted to talk about books being turned into games, particularly newer books being turned into games, which I feel like is a newer sort of thing.

7:30But adaptations of books is nothing new in the board game world. There's all sorts of books that have been turned into games. It is. Often because it's cheap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. uh this was let's often because it's cheap that's we're gonna examine that okay we're gonna we're gonna unpack that but before we do i just because i want to and i don't want to spend too much time on it but i do want to talk about dungeon crawler call there was actually there's the rpg and there's a card game that were both available offered on yes the kickstarter and they also because it is such a now known ip and part of the reason that it suddenly blew up so they're on book eight of the series just really at least and you don't know how many books exactly are going to be but in the storyline, and this is the mildest of spoilers, folks, they talk about there being 18 levels to this dungeon.

8:35Okay. So they also give you that no one has ever gotten past level 13, which is very smart because the author has given himself an out.

8:48But has kind of set you up for their will. So they've set you up. There's going to be approximately between 13 to 18 books in the series. book eight just was released um this past week but only in the last year or so um has it become a much bigger uh cultural phenomenon but in it part of the reason i think if you've read any of them and i have read up the first five books so far and it's an ongoing i'll end up reading all of them but I'm doing it through the library. So I can tell you it's very popular because there's a lot of wait time where many, many people, the books are on hold for a long time in between books.

9:34But there's a lot of one-liners and tropes that are very fun and sticky, but also very easy to emulate in T-shirts and stickers. so that you have a lot of swag that went with the Kickstarter that allowed them to upsell, in my mind. So I think that was also a big piece of it, looking at that particular Kickstarter, that there were a lot of people, but there was also a lot of, but I could also get this super fun extra thing that costs more money. So that was also very interesting to me. and also something that as an IP, when it works into something like that very well, you absolutely should. Because there was also the fact that, like you said, the audio book is part of the reason that that particular series has done so well because the narrator has done a very, very good job of relaying not just Carl, but his sidekick, Princess Donut, who is a cat, and both voices are very distinct and fun if you listen to it and both of them have great one-liners throughout the whole the whole series so he did the he also did the narration for the video for the kickstarter and i believe you can play with them on some levels some tiers you can actually play the game with them, which I don't think is always necessarily a, sometimes it is, but a lot of times I don't think that that's as big a thing anymore.

11:26It used to be at the very beginnings of Kickstarter, but I think those levels were also very coveted in a way that isn't necessarily always seen. So, right. They are going to be at Gen Con. Both the author and narrator are doing events at Gen Con. So it's going to be much more dungeon crawler-y, dungeon crawler carly at Gen Con. Yes. Yes. Those sold out in seconds. Yeah, I'm sure. The tickets to those events. So anyway, that's, I just wanted, before we got into the other stuff, I wanted to examine a little bit of that so that we can see compared to the rest where those lie. Yeah. Yeah. They're not, yes, but this is not the first.

12:11This is by far not the first. No, there's all sorts of, at first I was thinking that there's like two categories of books here. You've got the public domain, older titles, and you've got newer titles where you would have to pay some sort of royalty fee for the IP. But there's actually sort of three categories. The public domain stuff where the author is no longer with us, but there's an estate and then new living active authors. But the public domain stuff, there's just tons of things like Lovecraft. You actually made a list. I did because I think it's fun because I feel like this is a – anybody listening can play along for a minute.

12:53Okay. Yep. Yep, yep. Like how many games can you think of based on this public domain property or character or book series? Whatever you want to call it. So the first one, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Sure. I know Where Am I was very popular. The year that it came out as a public domain where the art from the book was used extensively. so everybody knows i'm not a massive fan of social deduction games but this is one of the only ones that i truly really really enjoy playing uh it's a you it's where you place people at the table at the mad hatter's tea party um and versus and also where you place the the flatware the plates and spoons so and you have a little tea set and so you're placing them and they're worth a certain amount of points based on where you play place them and then as you place the characters uh as soon as the last character is seated at the table you score but you also score based on during the game you're secretly guessing who you think everybody is based on the placement of where they put all these plates and cups and saucers yeah that's it that's the whole like so it's a social judiciary game that is very quiet and dainty um and all based on the mad Hatter's Tea Party, so they only used public domain characters, the art and everything from.

14:20So that's one. You've jumped ahead to Wonderland, the Lewis Carroll universe. There's Wonderland's War, a pretty recent example of using that IP in a new and different way. Ah, yes. Oh, Wonderful Wizard of Oz. That's right. There is the... Well, so the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I was thinking about this because in the most surreal, ongoing, the book that created the musical or the play that created the movie that led to the book that led to the musical. Yes, which led to the movie of the musical. Right, which led to the movie of the musical, and there is definitely Wicked, the board game. Oh, yeah.

15:09That have been created. It's a tangled web. It is. And this often happens with these, you know, original or public domain IPs. You can go back to the original source material, but you can't necessarily use the adaptation, the film version, or the Disney animated version of that particular story, even though the original story is available. So I definitely know that, yes, there's the IP of Wicked that's being used currently, which obviously is still very much not public domain, but Wizard of Oz board game. I don't know any. Do you know any? There was a Ravensburger adventure book game that was the Wizard of Oz that I didn't, that was one I didn't play.

15:50I skipped that one. But I think that used the original, or it may have been film adaptation. I actually don't remember which one that was. Okay. Okay. So yes, I said it and then I skipped it because I was like, I actually don't have anything for that. Alice's Adventure Wonderland. So there's definitely not just the one that I talked about, but there's like, there's Play Me. There's, there's, I know several. Parade, the little card game. Yeah, all sorts of adaptations of Wonderland's universe. You listed Peter Pan. A lot of kids' games have adopted this as a flying around Neverland and searching for treasure or Captain Hook adaptations.

16:33Not as many. And I feel like I understand why some of the source content is kind of problematic. That's true. That's true. Which, you know, fair enough, it was based on somebody's hearing stories about somebody who's from the UK, from London, you know, the original other hearing stories about Christopher Newport, the captain of the expeditions to going to the New World at the time, Virginia, was the model for Captain Hook and hearing his stories. from that he wrote Peter Pan. There's a little bit of problematic there. So I feel like there's a reason people don't touch that one as much. Winnie the Pooh.

17:21That's a new one on the list. That just recently hit public domain. We're actually going to talk about one of those titles coming up later in the show. Because I played it recently. To be continued then. Yes. But there aren't a ton of Winnie the Pooh titles yet because I think that's still a new thing as far as its availability. The Count of Monte Cristo, I couldn't think of anything. No. I'm actually a little surprised about that. I feel like that's a... Yeah. So we certainly, I think, have seen The Three Musketeers more often as a topic. Treasure Island you have listed. The only version of Treasure Island I feel is legitimate is the Muppet version, and that is not public domain.

18:05So I don't know. That's 100 % fair. But Frankenstein and Dracula are both everywhere. So many. There's so many. The Fury of Dracula. Any monster creation game is going to borrow somewhere from Frankenstein. What is it? My Father's Work? Yeah. That's very Frankenstein related. There's just a lot of places, a lot of things you can draw from those titles. Yep. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, I can't think of anything. Is there something that has borrowed from that? No. I think I'm just – some of them were – these are just the most popular public in the book sphere. So I also wanted to see if there were any, but also maybe some untapped potential.

18:56Maybe. Maybe. be. You listed Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, the Bronte sisters. And Pride and Prejudice. And Pride and Prejudice. Well, Pride and Prejudice has definitely been borrowed. There's been all sorts of games. And even borrowing from that same style, the Regency era dramas. But there have certainly been Pride and Prejudice direct related games. But I can't think of a Wuthering heights game. No, but I was thinking more just instead of the Regency era genre that are not specific to any property, but there's definitely games that have leaned into just in general. Sure. Obsession being one of them.

19:39Oh, there's all sorts of like matchmaking balls, just borrowing from all of that. And I can't think of many at the time. um boy there was a there was a one about marrying Mr. Darcy that's a correct that's a direct related Pride and Prejudice one that I remember but you said that it wasn't so simple to uh to grab these as as IPs or basis for your basis for your games are there are there pitfalls that that you will run into even if you're grabbing a public domain book to base your game off of uh well yes because well yes and no there's the fact that you might have so some of the reasons looking at it like some of them like uh alice's adventure in wonderland you have art that goes along with it that you may or may not want to use and so like wonderlands ward absolutely did their own art yeah the challenges for a lot of these is one there is an original art so it's original concept except um sherlock holmes is another one uh so sherlock holmes has been done many many many many times but also has been adapted many many many times where you have to be very careful to not borrow from a tv series or a movie because those have a new ip so you have to make sure you're firmly in the narrative or trope or art all of it being specifically from the original so there is a bit of a pitfall because a lot of us in our brains mashed all together into one big thing so you start doing a thing and if it was based on a movie adaptation instead of the original narrative and and somebody can prove that, that can be a problem.

21:43If your game gets really popular, and that means that Sony or MGM decides that's a problem. It looks a little too much like our actor. Right. So, you know, not terribly for these, but there can be. And I think we have enough. So people love monster games and I feel like Frankenstein and Dracula have been done so many times in so many different ways. And so it's easy enough to just, it has become almost ubiquitous. And that's the other thing. Also, when something becomes so prevalent in culture, you also can hit a level where you could say, nope, it's just, it's part of our culture. Yep. It's in the air.

22:32Right. So there's an odd in-between part as well where if something hasn't been done a lot, there can be. Speaking of that odd in-between part, we have the category of authors who are no longer with us. And many people think that they're probably public domain at this point. Like the Lord of the Rings is super old. If you're just going with the books, you can make a game about that, right? Mm-mm. No, there's a reason why any project that has Lord of the Rings has a little Middle Earth Enterprises copyright on it because there are still folks, the estates of these authors, that still handle these IPs until that copyright expires.

23:15I'm thinking in addition to Lord of the Rings, you've got Dune. The Herbert estate still runs those. In fact, for a while, the Herbert estate was not allowing new game properties. There was this sort of drought where you couldn't reprint the original Dune game because the Herbert estate was like, no, we're not interested. Something changed and they decided, OK, let's do it. And so then we get the new movie adaptation and we get a whole bunch of new games about Dune. Discworld is one, the Terry Pratchett. There were lots of Terry Pratchett related games, but I don't know if the estate is interested in doing any of those right now.

23:52So we haven't seen any new Terry Pratchett properties to the point where Discworld Ankh-Morpork was a celebrated Terry Pratchett-related game, but they had to re-release it as a non-IP-related game with similar mechanisms. Do you know I have a copy of Discworld Ankh-Morpork that was a gift that somebody got me from finding it at a yard sale? Wow. It was brand new and like two bucks at a yard sale. Oh no. Yep. And my friend, this is years ago, but my, one of my gaming, the gaming group at the time, friends, still my friend, still plays games. We're just don't live near each other anymore. He already had his own copy, but he bought it and my birthday was coming up.

24:48And so he, that was my birthday present that year. and it was the best because it was brand new somebody had bought it because somebody i'm sure somebody bought it because they like the books and gave it to as a gift brand new and that other person was like i don't play games huh and just re-turned around and sold it at a yard sale and it was magic and it's one of the only times i know there's plenty of people in the world who that's the thrill of the hunt for bargains is what they live for that's probably my very very best story. That's an epic story right there. Have you ever worked with an estate like this where the author is no longer directly involved but there's some sort of official guidelines for using the IP?

25:33Yes. It's a mixed bag. I'm not going to say name, direct names. I'm heading into dangerous territory. Yes. I do know like you said, If it's an estate, because it can also be somebody taking over. Because when we say that it's past a certain age, it doesn't, you know, a certain date. But that's not entirely true. If you've paid for the rights to maintain the ownership of something, it can last beyond the 70 years. thing so there are properties that have kept going but mostly not from from seven years because nobody had the where most people didn't have the wherewithal to do that for books uh more so for like specific pieces of art or um architecture not not as much for books that people were like no no no we would like to still own the intellectual property for this and pay the fees and everything but that's that's what happens you can still have things that last longer than the 70 years uh so the people who own them are still human beings who have emotions attached so it could be the difference from i'm remembering my grandfather a specific way and so So I feel like any of anything that does anything as an iteration of their original work is diluting their genius.

27:17So there's the people who feel that way in some way, shape or form, some variation of that. There are the people who are like, nope, spread the love. Honor his memory by honoring the fans. there's a lot of like so there's also there's some that is human emotion there are it's all being managed by you know some sort of management who will also have certain feelings of what they think is best for handling the property um in a monetarily advantageous way so there's there's lots of things that will lead to some things being very easy to get as an ip or very difficult i feel like like disc world i think the board game was brilliant but also i feel like there was a lot of hands-on making sure that it aligned with the books that terry cannot sign off on anymore so there's a nervousness that it won't be able to be done properly um so i get that because there's plenty of a lot of movies or made for tv movie adaptations of a lot of the books that were done in his lifetime as well so i feel like maybe because he was so hands-on when there was an adaptation that they're nervous now that because he was so particular yeah again that i don't know for sure uh but i do know having talked to a lot of different ip uh board game just like people who have made board games based on ips sure uh and sometimes working on them personally that it just depends because you're once you sign something you're agreeing to pay a percentage of your royalty fees and royalties to that property on top of what you usually pay to make a board game.

29:23So as a publisher, you're banking on the fact that you will sell enough copies to still make a profit, but at a lesser percentage than you would have of something that's not an IP. Right. Hoping that having the actual IP associated is going to increase that sales. Right, right, right. And you are also having a certain level of them getting to sign off on what the game is, what the design is, what the art is, what the storyline is, how thematically it fits. So what level and degree of involvement is also varies. so I know some properties where you have to send them I would like one of these five pieces of art for this card and they say yes this one or none of them do it again and that's for every card to some people who are like oh my gosh this is amazing yes sign it off go for it let the publisher cook uh no there uh there's so so there's a lot of variety in this there's a lot of variety in this not just how easy it is to sign initially but how easy it is to work with the property owners there's there's some there's some challenges uh i feel like most people will know which ones are the easier ones because there's a lot more games of that particular property without me having to say what they are.

31:08All right. So now we're heading into the more modern group. This is where you find the dungeon crawler Carls of the world or Game of Thrones, whose author is still with us and quote unquote active in writing. Or a project that you've worked on recently, Van Ryder came out with a direct jumping off point from a celebrated book series. Can you tell us about the experience of Enemies and Lovers, Julie? Oh, it was so good. It was the very bestest. So for all my caveats of sometimes people are difficult to work with, Holly Black is the most amazing human being. The author of the Crown Prince series, Crown Prince of Elthame series.

31:54She's a delight and a treasure. She also designed the game, which is pretty Pretty unique. So she is a board game person. She attends conventions and plays games. It's not just... So there's that too. There's another layer of understanding games, which isn't always the case. She designed it, but had zero hubris being a first-time designer of us giving her feedback of some of the things to tweak in the game. Nice. You know, gave her, well, this is my thought process. This is why I did it. And so when we made tweaks and mostly to the card layout, things like that, to make it more gamer friendly, she had made it very artist forward, which is so the art is beautiful.

32:50we made some suggestions to make it more gamer friendly of what are some things that a lot of card layouts have that signal what type of thing you're looking for and where and all of that every single thing was oh I wish I had thought of that that is so smart yes please make those changes like like it was it was delightful um every every piece of the experience um was this lovely communication and not waiting for weeks and weeks for a response and then being like no give me another suggestion it was here's what i was thinking i see what you're thinking i think that what you did is great or i i really want to keep this piece of it and here's my thought process can you give some other suggestions because of so that even when it wasn't an automatic approve we got we got a lot more than just no give me another suggestion yeah um she's delightful and taking up a lot and i understand she is spending her time writing books for a very rabid fan base so her and then going on tour for them and everything her time is precious so to give a lot of her time is probably challenging for her and still was very good about it and just delightful came to spiel and signed copies of the game and also watching her with her fans delightful with like every single fan she had whoever was in front of her was the most important person in the world you know didn't want to be interrupted so that she could make sure that every fan that came through had a great experience when they got to meet her.

34:36So as a person, she's amazing and delightful. So working with her in a publishing capacity, that was an extension of that. And so you can have an amazing experience. Yeah, I think it's sort of an economy of scale too. When you've got the one game adaptation of your property, you're going to be able to spend a lot of time, give feedback, be attentive. Whereas like the Game of Thrones series, there's lots of adaptations and some related to the HBO series, some directly from the books. And so there's all sorts of avenues of adapting that material. And, you know, the author is busy writing. And so he can't spend a lot of time approving every single game adaptation.

35:24So busy writing. He needs to, you know, he has to pass that off to other people. I know that this is sort of the gray area between the estate concept and like a holding company. You know, some authors, especially ones that have sold the rights to a movie adaptation or something, end up giving the game rights to the film company so that they can coordinate the – they get their royalty. But they don't have direct interaction anymore because it's another larger entity that's dealing with the licensing and the game properties and the video games and stuff like that. Although it is interesting because I think that's on the rise.

36:02I see a lot more people now. I've had several people and I think this is what has led to our Dungeon Crawler Carl say, I've written this book series, online comic series. series, like lots of different, I've done this and I'm trying to make it a bigger thing. And on the road to world domination, I think that a board game would help. So some people want to do it because they think a board game will make themselves more attractive to a movie, signing a movie or a TV series. Yes, because it worked for Battleship and that's how you get a movie. I mean, it can. You're being a little facetious, but I don't know if you scrolled through Netflix recently.

36:55There are a lot more based on the board game properties coming out shows. That's true. That is becoming a thing. And the Dungeons and Dragons movie came out. I think that there's a lot of people who are, I don't know how successful it is, but it's absolutely some, the thinking of your creative endeavor as a brand has changed the way people think about their entertainment in general. So people are just writing, I have written this book and here is my offering. It's, well, I've done that and then I made, turned it into the comic book series, the graphic novel series, and now I have a board game.