The Glass Cannon Podcast - Glass Cannon Radio #30 – Special Guest John Harper/Game Design/Crime Fiction

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

John Harper, the designer behind Blades in the Dark, Agon, and several other RPGs, joins Joe and Jared to discuss the design process, the crafting of the Blades in the Dark setting, and the business of developing RPGs with other creators in the space. Plus, John Harper's list of the best crime fiction movies of all time! Watch the video here: ⁠https://youtu.be/dvCoy2CkpDk Access exclusive podcasts, ad-free episodes, and livestreams with a 30-day free trial with code "GCN30" at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠jointhenaish.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Join Troy Lavallee, Joe O'Brien, Skid Maher, Matthew Capodicasa, Sydney Amanuel, and Kate Stamas as they tour the country. Get your tickets today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://hubs.li/Q03cn8wr0⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For more podcasts and livestreams, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://hubs.li/Q03cmY380⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

D.C. high volume, Batman. The Dark Nights definitive DC comic stories adapted directly for audio for the very first time. Fear, I have to make them afraid. He's got a motorcycle. Get after him or have you shot? You mean blow up the building? From this moment on,

none of you are safe. New episodes every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. You are listening to the Glass Cannon Network. This is Glass Cannon Radio with your host, Jared Logan, in Joe O'Brien. God damn, that is some good coffee. Welcome to a very special presentation of Glass Cannon Radio. I'm Jared Logan coming to you live from my mother-in-law's guest room.

Still on the road. Still on the road, man. You're like a, yeah, you're a real artist now. You just spend all your time on the road. Yeah, a real artist spending a lot of time with his in-laws. Just walking downstairs to get a glass of water. Fox News blaring in the living room. By the time I walk back upstairs, I'm triggered.

I'm shaking from what I've seen. The horror that I've seen on the TV. That's Joe O'Brien. He usually hosts the show too. I do a lot of laughing at Jared. I'm a big Jared fan. I can't help it. Your style of humor is right up my alley.

You're my only fan, Joe. I'm your biggest fan. If you die, I'm all alone. Well, yeah, tell them what we got going on here today. We have a very special episode today. You might notice that this is not a live show right now. And that is because... Yeah, they might have thought it was live, but it's not.

This is actually pre-recorded. It's pre-recorded because right now, while you're watching this, Joe is getting a tummy tuck. He is having cosmetic surgery done on his torso. I told him I didn't think he needed it. Long overdue. Yeah, I told him, I didn't think he needed it, but, you know, he wants to feel pretty. So while Joe is getting his cosmetic surgery, we are, we're bringing you a pre-recorded episode, but we wanted to make it special, okay?

So the way we've made this special is we have a very special guest today. We're so excited to have this person on. Should I say who it is right now? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Okay, well, so there won't be any call in. today. But I just want to remind everybody, before we bring our guest out, join the nash.com, get, become one of our subscribers, call into the show next week. Let us know what you thought of this week's episode. But right now, I'm going to show you. Yeah, it would be awesome to do like a

little look back, wrap up, you know, next week of, of content from this week's show and we can have everybody call in. So yeah, if, if you are watching this, this pre-taped show live or or on YouTube after it's recorded. Yeah, no callers today. This is going to be a little bit different. No callers today. Finally, we can have an intelligent conversation now that the callers have been eliminated. We're not going to have anybody calling in going, hey, guys.

And we're like, what did you think about the topic? And they're like, you know, what you said? Yeah. Well, what you guys said, I don't know. I'm just hanging out. So this is why this is a very special episode. we were so happy that this person agreed to sit and talk with us. One of the creators, writers, writers of my favorite game of the last 20 years, Blades in the Dark, as well as many other things.

Please welcome Mr. John Harper, everybody, John Harper. John. Hello, hello. Hello, so good to be here. This is great. Happy to chat with you all. Thanks for coming in all the way from Seattle, right? Is that where you're at?

That's right. Yeah. Bean Town, they call it. Bean Town. Famous, famous Bean Town, Seattle, Washington. The windy city. The windy city. John, thanks so much for being here and taking the time.

How's your life going right now? What did you do today? Things are good. You know, I, as I said, before the show, I'm a night owl. So today I've so far gotten up and made a cup of coffee. and great, got my audio set up for this. So that's where I've accomplished. For everybody's reference, it is currently 6 p.m.

John is a vampire. It's true. It is true. It's well documented. What do you do, if you don't mind me asking? What do you do with your nights? What are you do in the middle of the night with no one else is around? I mean, do you go out?

Do you stay up late and read, watch stuff? Yeah. Work? My work often, I get inspired sometimes, you know, post midnight, the brain starts cooking sometimes. And I got to go back to the computer and put ideas down, um, catch up on YouTube stuff, you know, play video games, that kind of stuff. Nice. I've heard other. I've heard other. So we have our time blocked off. We're always together for dinner in the evening and we hang out together and watch our shows and stuff. So,

and usually I'm getting up later. So I don't have like a regular working day. So then after my time with Allison, I can come home and, and actually get stuff done. if I need to. It's a good rhythm for me, and she's more of a morning person, so that works out for both of us. You're not the only creator, writer I've talked to who does, like, most, a lot of their work, like, after 10 o'clock at night. You know, I think also just in game designers, I think I've heard Ken Height say that he, that he works, like, at midnight. So, interesting. Interesting.

I'm an early bird. I get the worm. I am a I'm a recovering force me awake yeah I'm a recovering night out John I love staying up super late and that would be the best time

like you said for video gaming and stuff like that I would love that and then these damn kids man their day starts so early and you have no choice like you can't just be like

you know get yourself to school just take the car we asked John to talk to us today about kids that's going to be our main topic I'm a real expert on that topic. Yeah, zero kids, really. Zero kids.

It's the way to go, John. You made the right decision. I did. I definitely did, yeah. Yeah, we are pumped to get into a whole, a deep dive in game design and gaming and also just, you know, what you do for fun and that kind of stuff. I'm really excited to get a chance to talk to you. You and I met a few years ago on a call and just talking business. It was mostly business and creative potential stuff, you know, around Haunted City.

You're developing that project and stuff. And we haven't had a chance to talk much since. And certainly in that meeting, I didn't get to talk to you about, you know, your passions and what you're super into and how you go about this work that I just, that I love so much and that I rave about all the time. Blades of the Dark is, as Jared said. When we first played it, he described it as the best role playing game rule book written in the last 30 years. I think is the way he originally described it. And as I began to read it and dig into it, I truly agreed. And so it's an honor to speak with you just about your process.

I don't even know why I'm qualifying it with the number of years. What am I comparing it to the 1975 Dungeons and Dragons initial basic set? I have no idea. You just, you just kept saying that. Whenever you say that, I'm like, I wonder what it is. What am I competing with? It was mine. It was something in 94.

Takumel. That ranks a little higher in my estimation. The pedal throne. Marker, right? Yeah, exactly. So let's get into what's been up recently. You just released a deep cuts for Blades in the Dark. We're going to be talking a lot about Blades because we're big Blades fanboys.

So you just released deep cuts for Blades in the Dark. It's an entire book full of extra stuff or different ways to play the game. what inspired you or what made you decide to do a whole new book where the fans all like give us more or was there stuff in the original book that you didn't get to put in there or what what spawned this project? It was kind of an accumulation of stuff over the years, you know, in running blades for so long after it was published. It's just sort of a natural consequence. I know you've done this too, Jared, where you start to kind of cut. customize the game. You start to shave it the way you want it to be and sort of tweak and change. And I put a chapter in the book about changing the game and how to hack it and how to modify systems. And over the years watching AP, I've seen some shows that really shy away from that. And kind of they're always like, ah, we don't really like healing, but it's annoying us. But we're just going to keep doing it anyway. And or, you know, frustrations or or areas they want to explore that the game doesn't support out of the box. maybe. Right. Can I just say real quick with no judgment on the mechanics at all, because I

really don't know, and I certainly don't have enough of a sample size. Healing is brutal in Blades in the Dark. And it, but as written in the original core book. Yes. And it creates really interesting narratives where people are like, when you get hurt, it's like, well, you can't go on a score for like a while. You got to make another character. And that, to me, that was, that element was fun. It didn't feel like a like a bug right like it leads to ross bryant playing nine characters yeah exactly but yeah that's kind of the point of yeah yeah yeah but you know i i i when i would see a show like that i would kind of be yelling at the screen a little like come on you can it's okay you can change it you can tweak it it's it's okay um and in setting up for my my next blades campaign i got

my documents out and was combing through stuff from pre-publication from playtesting the original version of the game to the last campaign I ran and just looked at this set of stuff. And I was like, I have a bunch of stuff here. I've got new factions. I've got new lore stuff, new technology things, system tweaks, all this stuff. And some of these things would help these people in their home games, either just as a simple fix for what they're doing or as yet another kind of reminder to say, it's okay. This game is supposed to be changed. It's supposed to be hacked as supposed to be customized for your for your table um and so yeah that's once i that clicked in my head and and i looked at the material i was like this is actually like a a book's worth of stuff

um and i i put it together as a as a digital product that i was that was it was intended just to be that and evil hat um of course immediately knocked on my door and like hey don't you want to make this into a book. So we moved ahead with that and did the backer kit funding for it. And now the files are getting finalized for the printer and all that. And through backer kit, we got to add fun things. I'm designing a whole deck of cards that are like themed blades in the dark playing cards. Cool. As an hat on, which I've always wanted to do to design like card suits and things like that. Yeah. My favorite thing in the new book is the whole kind of, it's like I guess I'd call it a campaign frame where there are people invading from another reality.

And you even say you can play as those people, like you could play people from our world that have landed in duskfall. Where did that whole idea come from? Have you run a game like that? Yeah, that's where it came from. I had a group of players that wanted to, instead of starting out as people from the setting of Blaze in the Dark, and kind of needing to ramp up or feel like they,

They were a little nervous about, like, well, I don't, we don't know about the world yet. Like, I don't know if we're going to get it right. And I'm like, it's fine. It's basically just like Victorian, you know, Europe. Don't worry about it. But they were worried about it. So they said, can't we be like, I don't know, occultists that have found a portal or something? And we can just be from our world and we'll discover all this stuff in the setting as our characters are discovering it.

So we played a short series like that. And that was fun. And then I did another thing that kind of. had to do the demonic part of the blade setting. You know, where do demons come from? What's their deal? What are they trying to do in the world? And of course, that ultimately led to, like, a portal to a demon realm.

And the group was like, of course, we're going in there. What's on the other side of that? Right. So, yeah. It's a very Abu Salim decision to immediately march into the demon realm. Yes, very much so. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a mix of things.

It's things that have come out of my own game. things I've seen people experiment with in their live shows and AP shows and stuff. And then just kind of my own, like, once I got into writing the thing, you know, that spawned new ideas too and even more stuff. Yeah, I'm ready to run it again. I got to be honest because there's all this new material and I'm like, oh, I could do something completely different that is still blazing the dark. Yeah, you were on my mind for sure. You know, Hunters, you guys know, I'm a big haunted city fan. And I'm actually watching it again all the way through as one of my night out things I'll have Haunted City on while I'm working.

It's fun. It's fun to go revisit some of those things and see those moments that turn into something down the line that is so big and important. And it's just this little side comment at the beginning. Someone makes a very innocuous decision that you know is going to pay off. And that's something I love about games like Blades that take the storytelling, the group process of storytelling pretty seriously. And everyone is kind of in it together and no one's in charge of the campaign, so to speak. Right. So, well, it's because all of Bray Blades is completely improvised. So. Yeah. Yeah. And it is by mechanics completely improvised, right? So that means that if Abu or Josephine,

says some small comment, it really can snowball into the whole campaign at a certain point. Yeah, yeah. And that can be intimidating for some GMs and groups. You know, I have to improvise all this stuff. But for people who are comfortable with that, obviously, you guys are improvisers. So you're skilled in that way. But I think it's a good sort of model to show people, too. Like, you can kind of let it roll and go with the flow.

And you can pick up that thing and play with it later down the road if you want to and try to make arcs and all this stuff. But also if you just kind of play scenes, you're going to naturally build towards these sort of dramatic things and character moments and reversals and betrayals and discoveries and stuff are just kind of naturally come out of it without anyone forcing it. You mentioned how you love this aspect of these kind of games in general, that some small innocuble. decision that a character makes can develop into a major change in the story far down the road that you wouldn't have seen coming. And I think, yeah, of course, that's one of the beauties of RPGs in general. When I think about game design, I mean, you said you play video games. I love video games. I love board games. I don't know if you're a board game player at all. But I'm just curious as to, you know, how you would define the difference in starting

or approaching RPG game design, like what elements do you feel like are so important to RPG game design that differentiate it from the kind of mechanics you would see in a video game or a board game? Yeah, there's a lot of overlap, I would say, in terms of that design framework. But with RPGs, the one thing that distinguishes them in my mind,

you can get into definition wars about this stuff, you know. But to me, it's about how the state of the fiction changes to the fictional thing that we're all imagining together has an impact that it's felt in the mechanical layer of the game. And then the mechanical layer of the game has an impact that's felt in the fictional part. So if we're playing a pure Euro game, like the gloss on it, the theming of it doesn't matter in that way. It doesn't matter that we're colonists on Mars. What matters is I need my engine set up so I can have my atmosphere processor running. That could be a completely different machine. It could be, it could be anything. I could be growing plants. Right. Right. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Over the years I've seen, as I've gotten to know some more designers or publishers, I would say, you'd be, I was shocked to find out how many games were themed one entire way. And then they just washed that off and tied it to like a big movie property. Space base. Wasn't space base about the New York City?

the skyline and then the publisher was like spaces more popular. Right. And so like the, yeah, like you said, the engine can be used in a lot of different ways. And in that sense, the, the theming does matter. It can inspire people to play the game who otherwise wouldn't. I'm not into gardening, but ooh, Mars terraforming, that sounds really

interesting. I'm going to play that. Yeah. And not to be mean to board games. Like sometimes the teaming does have a big impact on the mechanics, but it's kind of optional, I would say. You can pick and choose how much you want that to be play a part. And in RP, design. I feel like it's less

optional. I anyway feel like it's a good goal to have that back and forth fiction mechanic, mechanic fiction impact thing happening pretty much all the time. So we need to care about imaginary stuff and the mechanics care about it. And then when the mechanics happen, it's not just you take eight points of damage. It's that your arm

is nearly severed and you're bleeding to death. And we, now we, it's, that's back into that fictional thing that's on screen. And it doesn't have to be every single part of the game. Sometimes it's good to abstract like hit points or something and not always describe some grisly wound or something. But in general, I think that's a good place to start thinking about how you're designing your game, how the fiction and mechanics work together. And then the key part to me, the starting point is a,

situation, which can be very specific and small, or the setting itself or the campaign frame or whatever, calling that the situation that naturally leads to interesting stories by its nature, and then a character creation process that produces characters that are fit to be in that situation. And so you can't make a character that falls out of the catalyst that's going to drive our play. You can't end character creation with someone who's just like, well, I might as well just stay at the tavern. I don't really care about whatever's going on.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I've personally run into some situations. I don't mention any games. But I've run into some situations where finishing character creation and playing for some time have been like, I was able to create a character here that is pretty useless mechanically.

And that's not just a campaign choice. It's like the way the game is being played, there's, obvious imbalance toward certain skills or abilities or whatever. And yeah, Blades, of course, I've never felt that that 12 action system seems to keep

everybody can kind of try everything. And so you're always involved as a character, which is really interesting. Right. And a lot of it is also, I mean, you know, guiding that character creation process is that excellent character sheet, you know, which I know that, John, you did design the sheet, right? That's all your work.

So can you talk a little bit about what makes a great character sheet and kind of your process on that? Like, how long does it take you to perfect that sheet? Because it kind of is perfect. You know, the whole game is right there. Yeah, it takes a long time. But I tend to design visually first when I'm embarking on a project because I naturally tend. to think that way. I was a graphic designer and art director in my career before game stuff for a long time. And I always tend to think of things visually first. But with RPGs, I feel like

that's our tangible interface with what we're doing. The rest is in our imagination. And what we're going to be looking at most of the time and the way we're going to talk to each other about our characters and stuff is that sheet or the whatsoever on your phone or whatever it is. That's like the UI layer. So if I design a different way, if I design more abstractly or just in a word doc or something, ultimately I'm going to have to somehow translate all those ideas into a usable sheet or set of papers or something that have to be used at the table. So I tend to just start there in the first place.

place. When the ideas start coming, I open that in design file and start laying out a sheet. And some of those choices get informed by, well, I have room for nine things. I only have ideas for six right now. But there could be nine. There could be three sets of three. Or we could do two sets of three. Or, well, there could be 12. There could be, you know. Based on how it fits in the sheet. Based on how it fits. And just like the natural, like, is this too much information at once? Should it be lighter? Just at a glance, does it look like it's too much?

Yeah. That's interesting. Definitely a thought that the Pathfinder character sheet people did not have. Is this too much? Well, the blade. I love Pathfinder, but it is, it looks like you're filing. Well, you need so much. There you do.

So much. Yeah. You do. In what bloodshed went through iterations and a lot of iterations after the crowdfunding ended when it was getting seriously, seriously playtested. lots and lots of people. And we did a bunch of kind of A, B stuff. Like, here's the sheet, kind of the one we have now,

where it has all the stuff you need. You don't need to look up stuff in the book. All your special abilities are written out for you. All your options in teamwork are all there. And it's kind of, it's full. The sheet is full. And some people were like, oh, my God, this is way too much. I just, my eyes glaze over.

So I made another one that was different. It was less stuff, more empty, spaces to be filled in by the players and ultimately the community said no no no no it's way better much easier for us to use the one that's already filled in and right before we finish the project and put all the final files out it just occurred to me like well I might as well have blank ones too there's no reason not to have those for people you want the blank ones uh so I will say the first time I looked at a blade sheet I was like what fuck am I looking at because I was like they already filled it in.

Yeah. That was also, to be completely honest, the first time I read the book, I was like, what? Like, because it's just a very different approach to cause and effect, you know, the way it normally goes in a game. Can I ask about play testing? Because this is, I think that this is a really interesting aspect that is, you know, if you have, if somebody has, you know, passions or hopes to create their own game. They want to create their own game at home. I, you know, having a relationship with Paiso over the years, I know how extensive their playtesting process is. And they spent a whole year with this stuff out, you know, for people

to opt into playtesting. And then they want, they want thousands and thousands and thousands of results because only with that many iterations, they feel like, will they find the problems, you know, in the system. What was that process like for you with Blades? You mentioned way back when in the early playtesting days like how did you find playtesters how did you consume their feedback and how did that impact the game the initial play testing grew out of my home groups there was a period where i was running three games a week roughly with different players each different players yeah one of those was a apocalypse world campaign two two of them uh in a shared world where the They were distant from each other geographically, but they were feeling the effects of the same cult and stuff happening.

Oh, cool. That was really fun. That was 50 sessions each. It was 100 sessions total. And they kept getting closer to each other at certain parts. And then they'd veer away at the last second, not knowing that that was the other group. And I knew it was going to happen. So we went to the bar and hung out one night, all the both groups together.

And by the end of that, they had jumped ship. Someone's like, I'm going to go join their group. Oh, wow. going over there and they like switched up who was on what teams and stuff. That's so cool. But those people were really enthusiastic. They're mentioned in the Blades book. They're really important to it, to its development.

They're just really engaged cool people with a lot of gaming experience and some that had very little gaming experience, which was nice too. And who are these people not like names, but are they friends of yours? Are they people who are you from work? Yeah, people I knew from work. Some people at the office that wanted to play RPGs and kind of were like, hey, don't you do that? Will you run D&D for us? And I was like, sure, as far as you know, this is D&D. We don't need to get into it.

That's what I'm going to do. Can I play D&D? You guys ready for some D&D? Just sit down with this. Amazing. But yeah, they were really excited to do it and try new things. And so for about, it was close to three years, two and a half-ish. We had two groups going, but one was always weekly.

We never missed a week, playing, playtesting, what became that Blades in the Dark. And it started from a very different place. I have a video on my YouTube channel where I talked to Andrew Gillis, the author of Girl by Moonlight, right there behind me. Um, we go through the, all of the Blades character sheets starting from the very first one. And the first one, you know, you look at that and go, how is this the same thing at all? Like, it's completely different. And, um, we would, we would play, uh, at least once a week. And then I would go home and iterate and change based on what we did, come back with the new sheet.

And everyone would sigh and write, fill out the, uh, copy stuff over and I had, if we got a new sheet this time. and we played at our office in this conference room. One of the whiteboards had our playtest notes on it for like years because people assumed it was something to do with the business and they didn't want to erase it. Ghost bottle. Okay. So yeah, it was just this like very fast iterative process of play and redesign, play redesign,

until it got to a point that felt like it was solidifying. and that led to the crowdfunding and then after that Gplus was really popular at the time and there were thousands of people gaming people using it and I put out that kind of beta kind of thing feeling like okay cool we're going to do another few months of testing hardcore like nitty gritty stuff with all these game groups and we'll tighten every screw and will be done and that took another almost two years after that of like even more iteration, even more changes and rewriting and tweaking. So I would never do that again. It was very indulgent to have that group of people for three years that just showed up every week to test

something. That's not going to happen again. But I always do like that. The playtesting shows in the final product though, I think. Yeah, it does. It, it. It went through the ringer. You know, that game really got tested hard. And the things that are in there are very intentional because we made those decisions, you know, through the process, someone would go like, you know, I don't think everyone's going to love this part of it. And we were like, yeah, well, this is what we want. This is, this is it. Some people aren't going to like this, but that's okay.

Yeah. Are you, how to put this, when it went after the crowdfunding and everything, and now the book is sent to the printer, like, did you feel at that time, do you remember, did you feel like it was done? Like, were you like, this is exactly what I wanted to be? Or you feel, oh, if I only had another month, if only I had another two months, I wonder what that process felt like right at the end there when it was getting sent off. It definitely did feel done. Yeah, which is kind of unusual, I think, generally, creative projects kind of get abandoned. Even when they're finished, finished, in quotes, it tends to be because of time or budget or interest or at some point, you go, okay, okay, I got to be done with this. Yeah.

But because of that long, long process, it did feel like, yeah, this is it. The final dot on the eye, like, this is what we want it to be. And Sean Nittner was very involved as the developmental editor. And he's run Blades at this point, more than I have, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. And so he was also like very steeped and very like engaged with what it is and what we're trying to make it into. And he had that same feeling. He was like, I think we did it.

I think we made it. Yeah. That's great. For those that don't know, Sean Nittner is at Evil Hat. And, yeah, shout out to Sean. Yeah, Sean's amazing. Creative projects. That is rare for a creative project because I know, like, recently, well, I mean, so many creative projects I've had, you're kind of like, you work on it for something like two years.

And then you're like, oh, I got to, I can't anymore. This is done. This is done. And then you give it to people and they're like, it's not done. Or at least it's not good yet. You got to keep working on it. That's great that you had that feeling. I feel like it, I feel like it shows through in the book.

I feel like when I read it, I felt like there was a very personal connection between you as the voice of the book and me as a gamer. I felt like it really spoke to GMs that were, I just love the tone of the book is very like, don't do this. This is going to make everything, make this game run a lot smoother. And I'm curious, I feel like a lot of that. that it sounded to me like a lot of that tone came out of many years of RPG gaming experience in possibly many game systems and you finding what just doesn't work at tables and trying to fix it. That's the vibe I got. Is that on at all? Am I in the right ballpark there? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I started out when I was like 10 years old in 1983 and didn't have

game books. I had photocopies out of Gamma World and stuff like that and just had to make it go for this group of people that didn't know anything about how to do it. I didn't know how to do it. My uncles and older cousins play, but they didn't play with me. They were kind of that first generation of D&D people. So, yeah, through that many, many decades of doing that and trying to play as many different games as possible. Like, once I started to do it semi-professionally, when I moved to Seattle in 93, I met the Wizards of the Coast people, Peter Atkinson, and Rob Hainso and those guys. And I just realized, like, okay, this is part of the job, like, play as many games as you

can, board games, video games, RPGs, get the broadest, you know, look at stuff. And I started keeping it count. I kept a database of 353 or whatever. it is now, like, trying to, you know, play at all every RPG. There was a period where you could do that. And then the indie game scene really exploded, and there was a period where you could play every indie game because they were like, you know, 25.

Yeah. And I had a game group that wanted to do that. We wanted to play three sessions of everything and just play and play and play and play and try all this stuff out. Did that gaming group rotate GMs? Or were you always a gym? Okay. Yep.

Everybody was a GM pretty much. So we tried to play. I mean, we played a lot, a lot of stuff. That's cool. And that also helped, like, see all the ways that it can work. You know, it's not, it wasn't finding the way to do it, right? It was more like seeing all these paths and different styles and preferences. And you can play, it's, you know, it's like music or anything else.

You can, like, have your own style and your own. spin on it in your own vibes and for Blades it because of its nature of like here's a situation with this setting that's kind of defined and kind of prescriptive and then characters that kind of do one thing, they're underworld types that are there are smugglers or assassins or whatever they are. It's sort of a tight thing. It's not just like generic fantasy adventure. So when I had that kind of.

setup that was very specific, I could write to it and be like, okay, I've done this a bunch and I've done pulp fantasy. I've done generic fantasy. I've done sci-fi. I've done all these different things at the game table. This is a specific thing. And here's some stuff that has worked for me. And these are things that definitely didn't work in this, in this specific way. Instead of trying to, like, write a book about how to be a GM in general, it was like, I was able to write very specifically to that topic. Yeah. And I think that's how it comes across in the text.

What you were saying, Joe, like, it's, it's kind of me sitting you down and being like, okay, I've been in the trenches, kid. Right. I've done this. Trust. Yeah. Yeah. What were, you know, you mentioned playing all those indie games or just a lot of games

growing up, like what are some standouts to you that kind of inspire you as even now as you go forward, even after Blades, like, what do you really? remember. I mean, I was really very lucky that one of the very first games I played, Gamma World was the first one, and then Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters. Greg Costipians, Ghostbusters. Amazing.

D6 pool system. Really cool. And it still, like, it, like, it, like, it, blades draws from that because it is like, you are Ghostbusters. It's D6 Pool. You are Ghostbusters. you go on calls and hunt goes. It's very specific.

It's not, you know, it just does one thing. And then Greg wrote the Star Wars D6 RPG. And I think that's the first game book I bought with my own money. And I still, I mean, I feel so lucky that that was the one instead of anything else. Is that the one that's like this thin? It's the West End. Is it the West End? Yep.

It's the West End one. So I'm dying. to play this. It's a little, you know, I was pretty young when it came out, but it's an entire Star Wars game that's like, it's like this thick. It's kind of amazing, you know? When you play it now, there's going to be stuff that will annoy you. You'll be like, why are we adding up all these numbers? This is dumb. Right. Sure. What's great about the book is it's, it's not how to simulate a blaster fire

or how to simulate physics. It's like this is how you make a Star Wars movie and it has movie. It's written that way. It's like you have an opening scene. You cut away to the villains and you show the villains plotting

and like aiming the death star at the thing that the players aren't their characters aren't there to see that. But that's how the movie flows. You go here, you go there. The players should know. It makes it more rich for the Places. Yeah. And there's like dramatic mechanics. The force and that game is kind of, it's the force that the Jedi, you know, used for telekinesas and everything. But it's also like drama points kind of like, anyone can put down their force die and be like, no, this, I'm going to make the shot. I'm going to do the thing right now because it's it's the important beat in the story. And the whole book is written as like, it's a good guide for just like screen player. writing, actually, if you're, if you're interested in that, but also as a gamer to be introduced to that type of thinking about RPGs very, very early on before I had done the nitty,

gritty square by square dungeon crawling, which I turned out to really enjoy. But it started for me with like story, like character, how do we, how do we have an interesting opening crawl text that makes everyone really excited to, I'm going to be the smuggler because we'll use our ship to get all these people off the planet because that's what the problem is. They're these refugees we got to help. Oh, cool. I'll be the failed Jedi that like threw away the lightsaber and now he's going to, you know, try to redeem himself.

Great. Okay, perfect. So yeah, Star Wars D6 definitely is something that I always think about. They reissued it a few years ago and a new, I mean, they just basically reprinted it and mine was falling apart. So I have it here on my shelf. I got the new ones that I haven't even touched. really they're like pristine

awesome yeah I see it here available like oh look at that I'm getting it just send me the link job it's great it's great I mean I like that style and I think that that is something that comes through in in Blades in the Dark when I've when I've taught people Blades in the Dark there's so many elements of what you're talking about that really help new players to play your game

which is great the character sheet the focused setting the limited sort of character options that seem limited but then can be expanded upon once you know more about the game you know the action pool it's all right there and all pretty clear um all those things kind of like stack on top of each other to you know when i pitch it i'm always like the vibe of the session should feel cinematic it should feel like a two hourish you know cinematic experience because uh a lot of the A lot of the choices and actions that you're making are not defined by, you know, move action, you know, attack action sort of standards. Instead, they're just, they're a little ambiguous, a little bit vague and defined by the player in the, and the GM as a committee, which can be, which makes it really fun. And it makes it like your screenwriting together. So I, I hear that. I think if that's what you're going for, it's working because that's how my tables feel. That's, I'm glad to hear that.

I always mention what Vincent Baker said years ago about, on his blog, which I highly recommend. It's called Any Way. If you just look up Vincent Baker blog, you'll find it. All the entries are still there. It's a, if you read that blog, it's like a master's degree in tabletop game design, I would say. Awesome. It's amazing. But he posted years ago this provocative title of a blog post.

It was something like the world's most detailed combat system, which is, if you know Vincent's games, that's kind of weird for him to say that. That's not his space, really. But I took that post to heart, and it kind of revolves around when you don't have, like, range bands or specific distances for guns or speed values on your knife versus your broadsword and, et cetera. but you have players that really care about that stuff, like how long it takes to load a crossbow or exactly how much reach you don't have when you're using your dagger. For people who don't care,

if you don't have the numbers, it doesn't matter, you just play. People who do care, there's a component of the game system that also cares about that, the position and effect in blades, or you can do it a bunch of different ways. But if you have a group that really cares

and are gun nuts or sword nuts or whatever, you can have that conversation like, well, actually, you're drawing, you're, you're sitting at a bar, you know, booth and you're trying to get a blade out from under the table and it's a long sword here. I've got my dagger on my hip, I can get out faster and I don't have the reach you do, but you're too slow. And we can have this really detailed conversation down to like make and manufacturer, 45 ACP versus 9mm, all, whatever we want to say. And then plug that into a system that says, okay, cool. is desperate now because you have a long sort and they have a dirt or now it is limited effect or whatever it is and some people encounter systems like that that don't have all those details and they're like ah this is just not very detailed this system isn't doesn't have a bunch

of details for that stuff which is true on the page but when you get the type of people who care they can they can argue it out down to the tiniest little detail right and sometimes it really matters yeah there is a shared element i feel like in the way that you describe things that you're you intimate that the players are involved in running the game that that it's not only the GM's job that the players can pitch a devil's bargain that the players can come up with consequences if the GM is like uh uh how about if you fail this you and they've got a million things in their mind and the player can be like how but if I fail this this happens uh that interaction can yeah it can feed into a player that wants to get more

specific about that kind of stuff makes a lot of sense. can I ask you what this is just a very general question that I just I'm curious and I hope it leads you know down a road of you know how all of this works together these different games

that Evil Hat produces and others produce what is forged in the dark like as a like if you see that stamped on a book what exactly is that representing it's first

and foremost, it is a marketing tool for people who want to signify to buyers that they are part of an ecosystem of like-minded games. And that's how people should use it. If you make a game based on Blades in the Dark, you do not have to put Forge in the Dark on it. You don't have to call it that. You don't have to mention Blades at all. It's nice when people give credit and call out sources and stuff, but you don't have to brand the book that way. It is a branding component. Um, and so going along with that, there's certain expectations in the marketplace when you see that, um, if you have other Forge in the Dark games on your shelf and you see that, that logo on a new one, probably you're going to be able to pick it up and play it pretty

quickly. It's going to feel familiar. Um, and have probably will have, action ratings, position and effect, or a version of that, probably a character playbooks and a group playbook of some, a team, playbook of some kind, potentially. Generally, they'll have those features. Not all of them do, which again is totally fine. But some of the more outlier games that do things much more differently, Exile, Emma Costa's stuff, Crescent Moon, for instance, they don't say Forge on the Dard. Emma's doing their own thing with that stuff and has changed a bunch of stuff.

And it's smart to not put that logo on the back because if you're like, oh, I've plates come in villainy and band of blades and blades in the dark and grow by moonlight. And I know how to do this. And you pick up that, you have to learn a new game. Wait a minute. This is different. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. It's familiar. There's stuff there that's going to be familiar. But over time, I think that gets sorted out by who chooses to use it and who doesn't. and the expectations it creates, kind of like Powered by the Apocalypse, having that marker on the game. I didn't put that on Blades in the dark.

Blades is a distant relative of Power by the Apocalypse design. There's a lot of stuff that's common to the playbook idea. Yeah. is come from Apocalypse World. And succeeding with a consequence is something that Apocalypse World drives really heavily. And I feel like I could have put that marker on the game. And I credit it in the book as being a descendant of that game. But if I had, people would expect it to be 2D6, you know, you have moves.

And not that PBDA games have to do that, but that's kind of the expectation. And so that's why it doesn't happen. When you say I chose not to put it on there, is that something that a designer just chooses or does that designer have to go to you or to Evil Hat and say, can I put this on here? It's up to them. There are guidelines on the website where we exert as much authority as we can to say, like, hey, fascist assholes, like, don't put this on your garbage and associated with us. and you know that's all we can kind of do there but yeah they don't need permission really and the the srd that we have is kind of the the bare bones version of the game that people can use they can use it wholesale if they want i don't recommend that uh copy and

pasting text from the srd but it's a place to start and it kind of shows like the the skeleton of it and a lot of the early fortune in the dark games really leaned on that heavily and are very close to like scum and villainy is star wars blades in the dark like it's very very close to what blades is mechanically and design wise um but now like something like slug but slug blaster uh mikey ham's amazing game i think it has fortune the dark on it i have it sitting over here somewhere but um i can't remember but uh it doesn't have a crew book um it does have character playbooks. It doesn't really have position in effect. It kind of does, but not really. And it strips everything down into much more simple, basic form, which is really good for that game.

But if it does have that marker on it, I don't think that would confuse anyone. You'd be like, oh, I get it. It's still pools a D6. Six is good. Four, five is middling. One to three is bad. Like, I understand. I can push myself to do more, to have greater effect. And these familiar you're a fortune in the dark type of things. When I first heard about scum and villainy and then band of blades, I just assumed you wrote them all. And like over time, I realized that like these were different games. You know, they were designed by different people.

And that seems to be the case with the development of Blade 68, which we just had a chance to try out, which I'm really, really, really excited about. Jared ran an amazing one-shot session. It was great. I watched it. Yeah. Oh, awesome. Awesome.

Yeah. Man, didn't Jared capture that 60s Vod? like so... 100%. Perfectly. It was so great. Yeah. All of you did a great job with that vibe.

And Ross also playing Austin Powers basically. Yeah. It was so great. It was great. Can you tell us a little bit about that process? So does someone come to you and say, hey, I'm a designer? And I think I could make a game in your world a hundred years later. Or do you have that idea and say, I don't have time to write this?

Somebody else should write it. Like, how does that develop? in general the what I try to tell everyone is like the the system stuff is open and everyone can use it and you should use it and go nuts the IP so to speak the setting the characters places stuff like that for blades is is not available for use I generally I just say it's not and that mostly has to do with like you know the TV the TV show development stuff and like other other things that get into weird legal areas and um less about like i oh you you're going to mess up my perfect world you know it's not it's not that um it's just easier to kind of have a blanket policy of like no you can't use it um but there are there are exceptions um and some of those came around uh when blaze was first in development and playtesting

Strah and John Lell they basically finished scum and villainy right around the time Blades was finished Wow they started working on it during the crowdfunding

so it was ready to go right away and it was just evil hat being like okay where are we going to fit it into our release schedule because it's basically done so we can have

I think that JinCon they had both of them out that at the same time maybe I can't remember but cool And so that, some of those people being involved really early on, Jonathan Walton wrote a Leviathan Hunter kind of mini game for Blades, which uses the Blade setting and you have a Leviathan hunting ship. And he ended up just putting it out for free. It's on the Blade's website.

But that's a case where like the Blade's IP is in use there and he did it. We're friends. And, you know, I knew he was going to do that. But with something like Blade 68, that is a case of Tim Deney, just A, being a brilliant, prolific genius, who's an amazing graphic artist and game designer, getting excited about this idea. And then he made Death Match Island. Yeah, I love Death Match Island so much. It's so good. And the graphic design is incredible.

Unbelievable. One of the coolest graphic design objects in the RPG space ever. Before that, he made Odyssey Aquatica, which is like the Life Aquatic RPG. It's also beautifully designed. And it's based on Paragon system, which is in Agon, the game that Sean In their own made. And Death Match Island was a Paragon game again. And so by that point, Tim and I had been talking a bunch. And he was like, hey, I made D.E.

detailed street maps of all of Duskfall, like every single street labeled, every building, every single thing for my table, do you want to see them? And I was like, of course I do. So he sent them over and, you know, I just zoomed 1,000% into the PDF and didn't saw like everything. And I immediately was like, that's not right. That you can't call it that. That's not the way the setting works, you wouldn't, you, that, that idea wouldn't exist here. This, this word doesn't work. So I'm like, Tim, do you want me to have nitpicky feedback? And he's like, yes. So I sent him like 200 changes. And he did all of them and sent it back. And then kind of was like, what if I put this on

drive-thru? You know, that could be cool, right? People might want to use this. I'm like, yeah, of course. So we worked out a little deal and, you know, he puts a little credit on the thing, licensed by da da da da da da and then that's been going for a few years now those those street maps on drive-through yeah i i got those they're amazing they're just they are amazing just because sometimes i didn't want to have to improv everything right like in a neighborhood and i was like is and then you you know you search for it and you find it and they're all there and the detail i mean like you said in a pdf you just keep zooming right down to a street and it's crystal clear it's it's really incredible. They're beautiful. Yeah, I did the Coleridge one, and then that Tim did

everything else. But, so we had already been talking, and he figured out some things that other people have kind of figured out over the years, but there are some secrets. There's some stuff in my RPGs, especially some of the early free things that kind of suggest certain things about how the games maybe have something to do with each other their settings and some of the ideas

and Tim like a multiverse yeah sort of connecting blades with agon or connecting all of your games are part of one connected multiverse like the Stephen King novels are all connected by the gunslayer

yeah it's sort of I've got, um, the listeners, viewers, let's figure this out. There's bits and pieces, bits and pieces here and there, just for fun, just for me, not meant to be, like, actually, like, known or used or discovered, just as a creator being like, hey, hey, that's funny. I'll, I'll do that. And Tim, when he started working on Blade 68, sent me some stuff. And I was like, wait a minute, have we talked about this, that I tell you these ideas? And he's like, no, I can just tell. I, I, I can see, I could, I can see the pieces. I see how it fits. You saw the matrix? Yeah.

So I've like, yeah. A bunch of ones and zeros when he looks at a copy of blades in the dark. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, and, and he already had the initial little plate test packet and some of the graphic design done for 68 and the, the, the road Atlas thing for the city that looks like a gas station map of, of Dustfall. And he was kind of doing it for fun, I think initially, maybe just for, his home game or whatever. And this was a case where he ultimately was like, I think I want to do this for real. And it was a case of me going, please do this for real. This is amazing.

This needs to exist. So it sounds like Tim is a very special guy with a very special connection to the material, which is a very cool way for something like this to evolve out of your work. That's really amazing. Yeah. And it's stuff that I, in deep cuts, I move the, Timeline a little, a forward slightly. Things are changing in the setting. New stuff is coming around. It's pointing in a certain direction. And Tim is kind of doing it from his side,

100 years later. And we didn't really conspire too much to sit down and be like, okay, let's make sure this all connects. I would just send him the new draft of Deepcuts, and he would send me the new draft of Blade 68. And we both would look and go, hmm, okay, yep, that works. Mm-hmm. I see. I see what you're doing there. Okay, I got it. I got it. And then I kind of totally screwed him over because I, there's a thing in deep cuts where the emperor decides that the calendars are being thrown out. And now it's the first year of unity. And everyone is going to participate in unity. And the old timeline no longer matters. And it's year one. And there's a lot of like propaganda stuff in deep cuts that the empire is trying to do. And Tim immediately wrote me and it's like, you know, my thing is called Blade Six. 68, right? Because I'm using your old numbering system that you've said now is thrown out.

Well, they went back. They went back at some point to the old numbering system. I mean, I just added a section to that page that's like basically no one except government bureaucrats cares about this new year system. Everyone else still uses the old years because they think it's stupid. Amazing. That's a funny, that's a funny little wrinkle. But we, I want to move on here and talk about some other stuff. But I, I, one last question, and this will kind of lead us in, you mentioned deciding to narrow down this setting and make it very clear, you know, and so that you could develop a game that is meant to work within this exact sort of area. And so it was, it could be more focused and everything could sort of help each other out from the playbooks to the character design to the story and everything sort of fit together. Like you said, the player, the characters sort of address things as scoundrels. That's really what they are.

And I'm curious, honestly, why? You know, with all of the potential settings out there and all of the different games you played, why is this, why is Blades, what I think to be a beautiful, elegant, mechanical game design, why is it a game about crime and criminals? I'm a big, big crime genre aficionado in general, mostly cinema and TV and movies, like big time, like everything, consuming everything in that space. And also, I have thoughts, a political lean. um around the nature of what uh of criminality and who decides what criminality is and um how oppressive systems um create uh that that situation for people um and how most or a lot of crime

fiction is really about poverty uh and scarcity and lack of resources and support um and that's It's to do with my background and also just, like, my current state thinking of the way of things. And in researching that stuff and immersing myself in all this crime fiction of various sorts, it just gets into your bones, you know, and I started to think more and more about the nature of RPG play and how so many of our games, regardless of what they were. were kind of ultimately were about people that couldn't do otherwise, they, or chose not to. They didn't fit in to the normal societal system. And that might just be because of unexamined defaults. Like, you're an adventurer. Like, it doesn't matter why.

You just are. But generally, games are going to put characters in that kind of space where they don't have a lot of options. They're turning to violence or they're turning to violence. turn into crime, most RPG groups would be, you know, instantly jailed. Yes, sure. They're all up to no good all the time for good reasons or not or whatever. And so, that's exciting. Like, this is a fun, it's fun to play outsiders and scoundrels and underdogs and stuff.

And also, it's the active side of things. heroes tend to be reactive, you know, the trouble alert goes off and they got to deal with the bank robbers or whatever, but the bank robbers are the ones starting the stuff kicking it off, you know, they're the ones instigating the action. So that can be fun too. And the combination of those two things, like I felt like I understood that genre in terms of having fun at the game table and then also an opportunity to kind of have something to say about criminality and society and what that means and the lenses on that and maybe creating the possibility for an empathy there if you're if you're embodying that side of things and like starting to see

it from that side yeah i personally think it's it's genius the way the book the way the faction system is laid out there's when you're starting out as a tier zero crew you're looking at these other tier ones maybe that you would interact with or maybe tier two's and they're all gangs right everybody's a gang uh trying to do to get you know survive get their make their place and and whatever but then as the tiers increase i just love how the government the real criminal factions come to play well i just love how they're all statted the same as your tier zero crew it's the same thing it's just bigger more influence more power developed over a long period of time but they're all the same thing. We're all just gangs. It's all just a bunch of gangs.

Right. And, yeah, I think it's just a brilliant way to show players their place in the world. It's really awesome. You mentioned being a huge crime aficionado. So this is just my nerd out question. Like, what are your standouts in terms of movies, books, TV? Yeah, what's the best of the best in crime fiction? Yeah. The starting point, what I always say, I told Allison we might talk about this, and she immediately said this because she knows what I'm going to say first, which is a thief, Michael Mann's 1981 film, James Con, an incredible just movie in its own right. It has one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema, two people talking at a diner, and it's just incredible. But it is. a tent pole definitive crime film, perfectly executed, and also a story of, of criminality. This James Kahn's character has been in and out of prison his whole life, and he just portrays this character that's so human and relatable and real. And it has the, I think it's the coolest, one of the coolest, heist,

scenes in movies where the heist crew, they show up at the place and do the job and no one says anything to each other. They just look at their watches and they look at the guy in point and they all do their jobs. They're not like, oh, you should get the thermobaric drill because it's this type of safer. No one says a word. They just do it. They just go to work. It's so professional and cool. And then you see how they're real and human and fall flawed. And, you know, things are not the way they might seem. But yeah, Thief and Michael Mann has kind of his like trilogy of heat and collateral kind of go along with Thief as more explorations of like the people behind the roles

of cop or criminal or a killer or whatever. You kind of see the person, you know. Yeah. Here's the thing. I know that Joe hasn't seen Thief because he hasn't seen anything. But I just added it. So almost every week. on this show.

Somebody brings up a movie I haven't seen. So I have a literal work task list now that is movies to watch. And it has sub things. So there's a whole list. And I just added Michael Mann's theory. We got to number it. But you know what? I'll be honest with you.

I haven't seen Thief. I think I started it one time and I didn't get through it. Not because I wasn't enjoying it, but I just got distracted or something. So that's on that. Thief is a great place to start. And then alongside that is Lasson. Samurai, the John Pierre Melville, Frenchville, Alan Dillon, is the titular samurai, who's like an assassin in 60s, France. And it's kind of like thief.

It has that vibe of like, there's a guy. He's not a faceless killer. There's like a person. And John Wu's film, The Killer is also in that vein. I always recommend that. to live and die in L.A. definitely goes hand-in-hand. I just watched To Live and Die in L.A.

It's amazing. Yeah. It's about counterfeiters. It's another one of those. William Friedkin, who I love, he is really good at that like subculture film, you know, the Exorcist, being one, I guess. Right.

But to live and die in L.A., it has that, again, it's that crime world. You feel the factions and the world, the underworld, and how it's function. and who's involved, and his film Sorcerer is also a wonderful, and it's in that space. It's about these down-on-the-luck losers in Bolivia, I think it is, or Chile. Right. And they have to transport, like, truckloads of nitroglycerin through the jungle. I got to do that as a Blades smugglers mission. Yeah, totally true.

It's just having to transport volatile electroplasm. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to, I actually made a list because I want to get through those just recommendations. We'll go, we'll go quick. Please, please. This is awesome. Movies, a lot of people haven't seen, because we could get into, you know, there's like the classic, like, Chris Cross out of the past, the killers, all the classic noir stuff, which you can easily just search and find. I love the killers so much.

The killers is amazing. Yeah. Yeah, Burr Lancaster. So movies, a lot of people haven't seen. destroyer from 2018. Oh, that's the Nicole Kidman film. Michael Kidman, yeah. One of her best performances, Karen Kusama made it. She made Jennifer's

body and the invitation, which I love. So I kind of watch whatever she makes. And it is just the gritty, like, Nicole Kidman plays just this washed up, burnt out, dirty cop. That's just the worst. And we kind of just follow her. The whole movie, the camera's like right here. And we follow her through this terrible, terrible day of just, it's awful.

And she, her performance is incredible. It reminded me of, it kind of like bad lieutenant or something in that vein. It's not as raw and gritty as that, but it's really, really captivating. and Joe Carnahan has a movie called NARC from 2002, Ray Leota and Jason Patrick, which is kind of similar. I always think of those Destroyer and NARC together because they're kind of portraits of these like really bad people. Right. And you kind of feel for them. Yeah, well, that's noir, right? The people are all very flawed. But you kind of have to.

I don't know if you root for them, but you definitely sympathize. Yes, yes, I would say that too. Okay, more things people haven't seen, generally. I haven't seen Narc. I need to see Narc. NARC is great. It's 2002, so it's like of that time. Everything's handheld.

It looks like the shield. If you've watched the shield. Yeah, sure. That's a huge influence on Blades in the dark. The shield and peekie blunders and the wire are like the three main shows. was probably. Yeah. It feels, there kind of feels like the shield, the movie in a way, kind of.

The shield is awesome. CCH Pounder, dude. I know, man. Everyone is so good. And that is a show that has an ending. Like, they figured out a way to have this, okay, it's the dirty cop series. How do you end it? What happens to him? Like, how can, how can you end that story? Right. And the ending is Very few shows.

This is why I'm a little down on TV shows sometimes. I prefer movies generally. Very few shows stick that landing. Yeah. Their goal is to just exist forever, which nothing really can, you know. Yeah. They do. Okay.

The Unknown Girl, 2016, French film. I'm just Googling things while you're listing them. The Limey. Oh, I know the Limey. Yeah, Steven Soderberg. Yeah. Terrence Stamp is the lead there. Those two go together.

If you've seen the Limey, a lot of people have. The Unknown Girl, it's vibes. It's similar. In the Limey, Terence Stam's characters, comes to L.A. He's out of prison again. He's trying to find his estranged daughter. And he kind of wanders around the L.A. underworld causing problems. and going to places you shouldn't go and talking to people he shouldn't talk to.

And the unknown girl is this French film is about a doctor who this person in need bangs on their door after closing hours at night, and they don't let them in. And then she finds out that the person died. And so she's just this doctor. She doesn't know, she's not an underworld person, but she just starts to go places and, try to find out what happened to this unknown girl and she should not be where she is she should not be talking to the people she's talking to

and the sense of like tension and dread in that movie is great it kind of reminded me of the limie a little bit then the neo-noir let's run through these real quick Winter's Bone a lot of people have seen Winter's Bone Right yeah I saw Winter's Bone

What I saw one Nice Joe saw one A great neo-noir, like she's a hard-boiled detective if there ever was one who, again, like, goes to places she shouldn't, talks to people she shouldn't. That's a Jennifer Lawrence, maybe debut for those things. I think that was her first big, yeah, thing. And then what you would call it is amazing in that John Hawks. I remember being like, I couldn't turn, I couldn't turn away. He was so good.

That's where I'm from. I'm from Appalachia and not. from the meth town, but they do a really good job with that setting. And then in that vein, too, Blue Ruin. I love the Blue Ruin. And revenge kind of go together in my mind. They're both sort of revenge stories about a guy who needs something done. And the movie starts and you don't know what he's doing.

You don't know why he's doing what he's doing. You just have to follow him through this very, difficult, violent situation and kind of discover how it goes, which is something I like about the crime genre in general, I think. You can tell those stories where you can have formulaic stuff in that detective vein or the noir type stories, but you can also do like really weird experimental things. The limies like that. There's all these like flashbacks. Right. Yeah. You don't really know, like, when, what the order. of events is exactly like memento of course is in that style but yeah kind of like

blades in the dark in that way or you know when you say like a character that's doing a bunch of things and you don't the audience you don't really know why they're doing them i mean that's that's kind of how blades in the dark just the the score just starts and you're kind of like oh you're you're standing here what do you know um yeah all the players just silently going through the score pointing at guard three more you know more done uh Mystery Road by Ivinson and the sequel Goldstone. It is set in Australia, an Australian Aboriginal Sheriff who, it's another neo-noir type thing.

Like something bad happens in the Aboriginal area. And he's kind of an outsider, even though that's his background. So they kind of send him in like, oh, you can go talk to them. you know, they'll, they don't realize that he's, like, totally an outcast. And, um, I absolutely goddamn love Australian crime movies, westerns, you know, the proposition was the one I saw recently. So good. Have you seen Rover?

The Rover. I haven't seen Rover. Guy Pearce. Um, it's an Australian, uh, neo-Western post-apocalypse. movie, but it's not Mad Max style. It's like, the first couple minutes you're like, is this just Australia or

like, what am I watching here? It's all, everything's dusty and broken down. I think it's an apocalyptic situation. I'm not sure. Yeah, it's Robert Pattinson and Guy Pearce and they're just dirty and Drami and it's, the rover is great.

The capstone, the final thing I'll say, because this list could be hundreds of movies long. a great masterpiece, maybe the great masterpiece of crime films is a city of God for me. Right. I've seen City of God. Whoa, Joe. That's a great one.

I'm so proud of you. Wintersbone and City of God. Amazing. City of God has that. If memory serves, like they're right around the same time, I feel like City of God and Wintersbone. They're like aughts, like early aughts, right? Mid-a-Outs. The 2002 city of God, yeah.

When was Winter's Bone? I don't remember. I feel like, I mean, Winter's gone to be right in that pocket. It's good, yeah. Oh, no, it's 2010. So it's a little later. Oh, is it that late?

Oh, wow. It's a little later. But City of God does that great thing. I mean, I feel like old Cagney gangster movies do this where it's like you see the children, you see the environment that they're growing up in. You see what they have to do to survive. And so as you see the criminal. element kind of come in, you understand, you know? And it's so many of the things that you're

talking about with like, you know, what creates criminality and how it's about poverty and all of those things. And in addition to being an absolutely gorgeous to look at movie film, yeah. It is beautiful. And it's one of those pieces where I just, the first time I watched it especially, I was just asking myself, like, who are these people? How did they find these they're actors but like it just it almost seems like a documentary like yeah the characters are they feel so real and they're just like nothing else um and i'm just thinking what was the casting process for this like how did they find these people they're so genuine um yeah and that adds so much to a crime movie too like you know i think about uh the town that ben affleck

directed film and my favorite thing about that film is that it feels like they got actual Boston locals to play all the small roles, which gives it, you know, I mean, it's a, it's a box officey kind of a crime, you know, feature. But getting those like kind of real people to fill in those parts of the environment, make it elevates it a little bit. It makes it feel like you're really in that gritty environment. So, yeah, yeah. It's funny that you mentioned the town. That one, I just rewatched the town and I hadn't seen it in years.

And the, thinking about haunted city, without giving any spoilers, anybody who hasn't watched it yet, like, there is, there, there's a lot of PVP elements that develop, you know what I mean, in the game. One of the most awesome aspects of the town is the tension within the friend group of, of, like, Like, you know, because you've got this wild card that you're just like, oh, I wish you would just not get us all killed with your actions. And it's really interesting. The tension feels so real. Yeah. It's total malchus. Well, I mean, if nothing else today, Joe, we got like John Harper's top 10.

Oh, my God. I got a spectacular list of films. You got a lot. Yeah. I got to get through. I tried to pare it down. I knew we were going to maybe touch on this. And my list was so long.

I knew. Yeah, no, I was hoping. I was hoping we'd get this much. That's amazing. And we appreciate it. Let me, we'll get out the door here. Let me ask you one more question. Sorry, I'm being a bad interview subject. I'm backing up. But I intended to mention this because I mentioned Peky Blinders. Stephen S. Tonight's new show, I haven't seen a lot of buzz about it. Stephen Graham stars. It's called A Thousand Blows. and it's amazing. If you like Piki Blinders, even if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it.

It is about the 40 elephants, the all women street gang, Victorian London Street Gang. Holy shit. In 1880s, London. Yeah, they were real, and they portrayed them in it really well. They were very famous at the time.

And that collision with that year, when the Marquis of Queensberry rules of boxing started to be enforced. And so, like, bare-knuckle and pit fights and stuff became illegal. And a way for poorer people to make money was criminalized. And boxing became a sport for the entitled and the rich. And Stephen Graham play as a boxer who is going through that process of, like, losing

his livelihood to being taken away by the rich and powerful and how he deals with that situation as an extremely violent person. Joe, it's a couple people from adolescence, which we've talked about on the show. That's Stephen Graham. Adolescence. Yeah, Steve, he's up for an

Emmy. That's, Warp Films made that, which they're the people that are developing the Blades TV show. They made the adolescence. And Stephen Graham is my pick, my pop pick for Bajo Baz Oh, awesome. Yeah.

If that ever comes around, yeah, he's perfect. So I love to see him in everything. Wow. Yeah, sorry, a thousand blows. That's incredible. I'm going to check it out. That's awesome. One fun one out the door.

I feel like I remember back in the haunted city days that when you would tune in to watch, when you sent pictures of like charcutory boards and stuff, then you like sit down. down and make yourself a plate of cheese. That was our ritual. Yeah. What's the best cheese? What's your favorite cheese? That's really tough.

I know. As a cheese fan myself, I would have totally, I'd be a deer in headlights at this question. I definitely, I like to do like a little spectrum generally, like a, a, like raw sheep's milk or cow's milk, like sharp, kind of dry, hard cheese. have a softer like Camemberg goat breed something their spreadable kind of situation and then something Roquefort blue

funkiness try to cover those three bases and with that in mind like go into PCC or whatever and being like okay there's 16 different kind of blue type things here we haven't had that one let's try that one you know create a new little set

so all of them is his answer Yeah, clearly. And then what are... I kind of have a current favorite that's not like hoity-to-a-dy or anything. It's... I think they're a smaller cheesemaker, but they're... I think you can find them nationally. I cannot think of their name right now.

The cheese is called Tennessee whiskey. Ooh. And... I feel like I've seen this. That's what it tastes like. It's amazing. It's like having whiskey with your cheese, which I generally like to do. Nice.

So, yeah, I can't think of the maker. right now. But that's definitely been a favorite the last few times. Did you get Tennessee whiskey? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. I got it. It's good. Amazing. Is it Sartori? Sartori? Yes, I think that's right. Velaetano. Yeah. Interesting. Everything we've had from them has been good. But yeah, I don't have a favorite really. I do. My favorite is to have that spectrum because I want to as I'm eating it. I want to do this. I want to do that. Let's mix this. Put the fig paste on the blue and like, what is that? Yeah, like, you know. Nice.

You do it up right. You do it up right. We try. That's awesome. It's been a while, actually, because our charcutory was our haunted city, like, ritual. So I think we've only done it like two or three times since the show. Oh. Well, if we didn't need another reason.

I mean, there's another reason to get more plays. Throw that on the list. On YouTube premieres. John, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Thank you, guys. This was great fun. Yeah.

This was really awesome. So enlightening and, uh, and really looking forward to deep cuts and, and, uh, and Blade 68 and, you know, all the other fun stuff. The dagger aisles. We didn't get to talk about. Oh my God. That's on the last too and like kind of coming out. It's coming out. You know what?

We'll have to have you back on. We'll have to have you back on live and, uh, yeah, we'll have you back on live and, and we'll talk dagger aisles. That sounds like a great, uh, sequel to this. So thank you so much for your time. That's going to wrap it up. for us today, everybody. Thank you so much for hanging out. Yes. For a little pre-recorded Glass Cannon Radio. Thank you again, John. I hope some people called in any way and we're like,

why aren't they answering? What's the contest question? Uh, no, we, in fact, this is a great time to think about what, what's your feedback? What do you want to talk about next week? So, so come with your questions and I will talk a little bit more next week as we look back at this awesome hang with, uh, with John Harper. So thanks again, John. it easy and we'll see you soon. Thanks, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye.

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