Katanas & Trenchcoats by Ryan Macklin and Tim Rodriguez

What is Katanas & Trenchcoats?

Katanas & Trenchcoats, at its core, is a love-letter to 90s style supernatural drama: the television, the role-playing games of the time, and the style of the goth scene. But it’s not just nostalgia. It’s a tongue-in-cheek look backwards that appreciates all of the sources that it comes from while being quite aware of how very silly and pretentious those things could be.

What inspired you to write this book?

My co-writer, Ryan Macklin created the first version of this game as a joke to raise money for charity, for a children’s hospital in Seattle. After he shared a joke on Twitter with a friend, Ryan threw together a joke game and raised a couple of thousand dollars. Later, he decided to run a Kickstarter for a “full version” of the game book. I came on as a publisher and developer after the project had languished for a while, and became co-writer as part of that process.

What part of the writing process did you find the most enjoyable with this book?

Ryan and I have been informal collaboration buddies for a long time, so turning that process into formal “product” writing was great. We got to really tear apart the phoned-in “full version” manuscript he’d gotten together and turned it into something we’re both legitimately proud of. 

How is this roleplaying experience different from others?

The joke answer is that it’s way more melodramatic! For real though, I think there are a couple of things that really drive what makes Katanas & Trenchcoats special. The first is the gradient of uncertainty in the dice. There is no static “difficulty” in the game, ever. We consider two things: the narrative weight and the potential payoff of an action. Then we pick a number between 4 and 10, and that’s how many dice the Herald of the Darkest Cosmos (our term for the game master, storyteller, et al) rolls. Four dice indicates low narrative punch, while ten dice is scaled for a climactic scene. And it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. The second thing is the kinds of control we ask players to take for their characters. We offer a baseline experience with the “splat” write-ups, but then explicitly ask you to write your own custom features as you learn the game and how you want to play your character. We’ve worked really hard to balance “homework” with “pick up and play.” One of my favorite examples is someone who took the Phantom splat and made a hilariously upbeat famous Kid Detective, where as authors we’d imagined Vincent Schiavelli’s subway ghost from “Ghost” or Brandon Lee’s character in “The Crow.”