A Couple of Bios
Navi Drake
Navi grew up an only child in the Bay Area of California. A strange and feral changeling, she was writing and doodling from the time that she could hold a pencil. Obsessed with the fantastical, the historical, and the horrific, she completed Robert McCammon’s Swan Song from cover to cover at the age of 7, then quickly moved on to other horror giants like King, and Koontz, while devouring documentaries on the History Channel (when her mother, Alicia, wasn’t watching her soaps, which Navi firmly despised).
Her fondest childhood memories are times spent with her grandfather, Vernon, an avid and meticulous hobby collector. He was a large and gruff man, a retired Marine, who had a way of scaring everyone off with his peevish nature and booming voice. She discovered early on that if your nerve held out you could just wait a few minutes and he would always give in. He taught her how to tend a rose garden, keep an aquarium, play multiple sports, and the joy of curating collections. And he always let her borrow his books. She cultivated many other hobbies in her youth, during those days that stretch on forever. Web and graphic design, Play by Post and video gaming, not least among them.
Navi spent her early adult life as a nomad, traveling the country. It was during this time she was introduced to tabletop RPGs, in the form of D&D 3rd Edition. She became an avid TTRPG player, and met Shawn. The rest, as they say, is history.
Favorite Things
Movie: Event Horizon
Book: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Food: Cake
Song: Gin Blossoms, “Hey Jealousy”
Video Game: Legend of Mana
Color: Pink
Random Facts
My favorite character types are the well-intentioned extremists (Judge Dredd), the loyal unto death (Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones), and my fellow Mad Hatters (Princess from The Walking Dead).
My childhood hero was Ripley from the Alien franchise. Not much has changed.
I enjoy refinishing furniture and general restoration projects requiring research and attention to detail.
I have a supermassive sweet tooth.
I despise shoes.
Q&A
Q: What would you say you do here?
My role in a Couple of Drakes runs the gamut of development, world-building, technical writing, developmental editing, graphic design, layout, project and crowdfunding management. I have a spreadsheet and a stack of notes for everything, and enjoy the cerebral sport of balancing thirty-three spinning plates at once. Occasionally Shawn hands me a sonnet with some dice notation, and it is my job to make it a game.
Q: What are your favorite tabletop games that you didn’t create?
John Harper’s Blades in the Dark is a no-brainer for me. It’s a game that is respectful of everyone’s time, energy and sheer giddy joy of playing a game of pretend as a group of adults. It’s a masterpiece.
I also love the card game Gloom, wherein you’re trying to make the members of your card-family as absolutely miserable as possible (scoring points) before killing them (locking in those points), while also visiting your rival’s family with good fortune and happy turns of events to lower their scores before they die.
Q: Okay, what are your favorite games that you DID create?
I’m fond of all of our games for different reasons. Often my favorite game is the one I am working on at the moment, but Court of Blades, our love letter to Blades in the Dark, gets +1 effect for sheer audacity. I also have a deep love for DISASTER/PEACE. I grew up with Sailor Moon, and wanted to capture that feeling without having to play the canon Sailor Scouts, or being limited to fighting familiar enemies, as you would in an officially licensed game.
Q: What is your productivity ritual?
Copious amounts of LSD coffee. And music. If I am feeling stuck or uninspired I will bounce to another project, or spin up a video game for a bit. Typically, I have three-to-four different projects that need my immediate attention going on at one time, by design. This is not advice, but if you happen to score high in organization and time management, but low in ‘muddle through when you’re not in the zone’, it may work for you, too.
Q: What is your personal brand?
Eldritch whimsy. I lean into whatever I am working on wholly, but nothing I touch seems to make it out without at least a trace of horror and light-hearted strangeness.
Q: Where do you get your ideas?
Books, television, video games, tabletop games, documentaries, the news, interviews, things I happen across in my day-to-day. Whenever an idea tickles me, I scribble down a note for later. Becoming an avid collector of ideas has been the single best hobby I’ve cultivated to support my work.
Q: What advice would you give to someone considering game design?
Oh, boy. I will attempt to distill this down to just what I think are the most important aspects not covered by Shawn’s response.
- Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and start now.
- If you’re hoping to make anything that resembles money doing this, start networking right this second, even if you have nothing to show yet. Indie TTRPG Twitter is a great place to start, with the best active community of game designers I’ve seen anywhere, and if you put yourself out there, genuinely, you’ll have no trouble fitting in. I won’t say it’s impossible to make a successful game from start to finish alone, but I will say you’re far more likely to succeed with your tribe behind you.
- Stay open minded and open to learning, there are just a ton of skills you’ll need to develop along your game design journey. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Shawn Drake
Shawn grew up rootless, bouncing from Air Force base to Air Force base with his mother and father. Crossing oceans every two years or so, stories were the only friends he had that didn’t have an expiration date. A voracious reader from an early age, he consumed novels, comics, and folklore with reckless abandon until eventually they bubbled over and he began to create his own. Somewhere around the age of eight his dream job inexplicably changed from “Vampire Hunter” to “Writer”. Since then, he’s been a small-time rockstar, a bartender, fencing instructor, linguist, and military aviator. But eventually, it all comes back to stories.
He met Navi in a forum RP about vampires in Victorian-era London, and things sort of escalated from there.
Now, Shawn is a strange dynamo comprised of equal parts grizzly-bear noises, romantic if somewhat creepy poetry, joints that ache in cold weather, pillaged mechanics, resting scowl, caffeine, low cunning, and spite. Leather, whiskey, old books, and old guitars are second only to Navi and his Drakelings in their nearness to his heart. He has such stories to tell you.
Favorite Things
Movie: Stardust
Book: “Night Watch”, Terry Pratchett
Food: Literally any kind of pasta.
Song: Yeesh. Uh. “Hollywood” Zeromancer
Color: Red like an open artery.
Video Game: Freelancer
Random Facts
My favorite character types are romantic swashbucklers (natch), world weary veterans (natch), doddering wizards with unspeakable power, and complete aliens wearing an unconvincing human suit.
I speak six languages, but am now mostly only fluent in Simpsons references.
I spent a long time trying to think of a way to save enough money to afford a hybrid airship, steampunk it out, and then go to cons as ziplining airship pirates.
I still occasionally turn to Navi and speak a sentence in Russian just to see if she’s a REALLY committed deep cover agent.
I have a lot of personal ghost stories for a guy who doesn’t believe in ghosts.
Q&A
Q: What would you say you do here?
I punch words.
More? Oh. Okay. I have the manic fever dreams that contain the nugget that will eventually become the game. Then I punch words and hang fiction on the idea until it looks like something gameable. That being done, I sit down and have a good hard think about what kinds of mechanical levers the GM/Players/Celebrants/otherwise participants will need to have the experience that I’ve envisioned. Finally I head to the weird liminal grove where the best heartwood grows to carve the levers and interlocking gears that will drive the game. But mostly? I punch words.
Q: What are your favorite tabletop games that you didn’t create?
Blades in the Dark is the one that really sort of opened my brain, so that’s an easy one. Position and Effect completely revolutionized the way I look at games. But if you’re reading this, you already know that. I love The Black Hack and most of the games that have followed that particular genealogy (Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells, The Mecha Hack, etc). Legacy: Life Among the Ruins and Masks: A New Generation made me fall in love with PbtA again, so I owe a huge debt of gratitude there. I like a lot of games, and I risk this becoming a huge list, so I’ll say that I’m usually loud on Twitter about the things I love. Oh, and D&D 4e. Fight me.
Q: Okay, what are your favorite games that you DID create?
Court of Blades is probably the proudest I’ve ever been of any project I’ve ever completed. I’d gladly play it today, even though it’s consumed my life for the past two years. Something about the flash of blades and the flutter of romance against a backdrop of intrigue and double-dealing. That’s drama, and that’s why I’m here.
That being said, HEDGE is my baby.
Q: What is your productivity ritual?
I make coffee, drink it while I scroll through Twitter for an hour or so. Then I recall that this is my job, panic, dive onto the couch, open one of the projects that we’re working on, realize that it’s the wrong one, open the right one, glare at it for about fifteen minutes and get hung up on a minor detail. I work through it aloud at Navi, she makes an insightful comment, and then I hammer out 1000-4000 words. Works like a charm.
Q: What is your personal brand?
Poetic and intensely creepy. If it sounds like it could’ve been said by an ageless fey being or a world-weary warrior poet, then I probably wrote it.
Q: Where do you get your ideas?
Everything I’ve ever read, watched, played, or experienced is just simmering away in the back of my brain. I have a pretty good memory, especially for things that have nothing to do with where I put my car keys. So from this fermenting mash, I dredge in to come up with something gameable, usually when Navi looks at me with a pointed “what are we doing next?” Typically it’s an elevator pitch that I then have to justify: “Captain Planet versus the Fairies” or “Misery Capitalism and your air is running out.”
Q: What advice would you give to someone considering game design?
Become indiscriminate about the kind of art you consume. Play games that you’d never pick up, read books that aren’t your genre, watch TV or movies that don’t cater to your interest. File away the things that spurred a reaction because those are the things that you can make gameable. Then learn how to fail fast. Iterate, test, improve. Don’t fiddle in a vacuum. Build something that you can get to a table and test. Finish things.