decay. - Beyond Five Minutes Transcript

A thumbnail image for decay. by Seren Briar, with art by Smiling J

Transcript

DANIEL COPPER: Welcome to Beyond Five Minutes, where we delve a little deeper into the games discussed in Five Minutes, Not 5e. My name is Daniel, otherwise known as The Copper Compendium, and I’ll be your host. On this episode, we’re expanding on my chat with Seren Briar about decay.

To begin, then: what inspired you to make this game? And why mushrooms?

SEREN BRIAR: I just really like [laughs] mushrooms! I think mycology and fungi are so cool, like the way mycelium communicates is so similar to how the human brain works and the fact that even though we usually think of mushrooms as plants, they’re more closely related to us! I made some doodles before I started writing the game of these creepy-cute little mushrooms with teeth – trust me, the illustrations done by Smiling J are way better than mine – and I just kinda took that image and ran with it until I had a game!

DANIEL: You described this game in our first interview as a “pick-up-and-play party game”. Was that the aim from the offset?

SEREN: For the most part, it was! I wanted it to be a one-page game for sure — at the time my friend group would often just play a game of Everyone is John while hanging out and I wanted to write a game that would fulfil that same niche but be a lot less ableist.

DANIEL: I see that there are two editions of the game. Why did you decide to rework the game, and why did you choose to keep the original available?

SEREN: decay. was the second game I ever designed; I’ve grown a lot as a designer since then. I’d received some feedback over the years, both by playing it myself and from others who’d played it. I realised I first needed to rework the success rate – there wasn’t enough tension or failure in the original – I needed to reorganise the information to make it easier to take in, and redistribute some of the mental load. In the first edition, the player describing the world had a lot to keep track of — since I wanted it to be playable while hanging out and potentially imbibing, I needed to reduce the overhead for any one player. It also desperately needed to become printer-friendly.

I kept the original version up because… well I just didn’t want it to become lost media, y’know? It’s a piece of my history, and even if it’s not perfect, I’m still really proud that I did it. People go back to and play old editions of games all the time, and I didn’t want to take that away from folks. Since it’s digitally sold, I didn’t want the only people with access to copies to be those who’d acquired the game already — I don’t have print costs or anything, since it is online, so it was a pretty easy decision to just leave the first version up.

I don’t make games to necessarily make money, so the second edition is available for free to people who already owned the game as well.

DANIEL: As a one-page game, the game has to be concise. Are there any rules you would add if you had more space to expand, or are there any ideas that you had to cut along the way that you thought were interesting?

SEREN: In the very beginning stages I had a much more involved movement system for the fruiting bodies, before I realised that was more boardgame-y than an RPG [role-playing game]. Honestly, I’m not really sure there is anything I would add: I try to design tight games, I’m not a big fan of scope creep or bloat. I want to make sure every rule has a purpose that furthers the game’s design. You might not be able to tell from these interviews but I’m actually quite a concise writer — get in, get out, say what you need to say.

DANIEL: Thank you again, Seren, for chatting with me about decay. Where can people find you, and your games?

SEREN: My Bluesky is faefatalegames.bsky.social and my itch is faefatale.itch.io; that’s spelled F-A-E-F-A-T-A-L-E. I’m also cooking up a game jam to encourage people to make hacks of decay. since I honestly think the ruleset is extremely hackable, so if you follow me on Bluesky and itch you’ll get notified when that goes live!

DANIEL: You can find those links, as well as links to the transcript of this episode and links to the game, in the video description [below, here]. If you want to find games with similar themes or gameplay to this one, there will also be links to relevant playlists.

And that brings us to the end of the expanded interview! Beyond Five Minutes is an expansion of Five Minutes, Not 5e, so if you’ve not heard my previous discussion with Seren about the game, you can find it linked in the end screen and description. Thank you for listening, until next time!

[End of transcript.]

Links

The Game and its Designer

Get the game: https://faefatale.itch.io/decay

Check out Seren's games on itch.io: https://faefatale.itch.io/

Follow Seren on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/faefatalegames.bsky.social

Relevant (YouTube) Links

decay. - Five Minutes, Not 5e: https://youtu.be/R7gzMA3zWfQ

decay. - Five Minutes, Not 5e Transcript: https://thecoppercompendium.co.uk/decay-five-minutes-not-5e-transcript

Horror: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsLJ-CI8A8CB3e1RL3ba99hq4hQ_x--Gs

One-Page: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsLJ-CI8A8CAMC2bWmQX13_T3_iirjkoz

Party Games: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsLJ-CI8A8CA3JTf6HXBmxTrhpJ14RhBB

Single Session: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsLJ-CI8A8CCvMCwKjot2cwDzU1vDw35U