Words by David C. Obenour
You’re unsure how you got here. You’re not even sure exactly where here is. Everything is so dark. Memories start coming back in pieces. Mainly just echoes of emotions. There was danger. There was fear. Then there… just wasn’t? And now all that remains is an inky blackness, lit only by some far off beacon in the distance. Whatever it was that ended seems to have been just the beginning of yet another adventure.
In Ink, players rejoin their tabletop role playing in the limbo of the afterlife. Split into sides of Shadow and a fading Spirit, this new reality presents its own set of challenges, enemies, and denizens. Also strong brewed coffee, which is nice, but you get the feeling that any meaningful spirit transgression will require more than just a shot of elixir from these oddly charming booristas.
Off Shelf: Giving new life to fallen RPG heroes is a really fun concept, can you talk about how that idea first started forming for you with Ink?
Grace Collins: As a Forever GM, I live in fear of a few things. One is boring my players by making things too easy, and the other is slaughtering them by making things too hard. It’s a hard balance to strike, especially with bosses. After months and months of a Ravenloft campaign, my over-leveled players crushed Count Strahd like a bug. How anticlimactic! I wanted the ability to make bosses and other enemies incredibly punishing. To the level that players would legitimately need to stop and plan their approach over multiple attempts, but I didn’t want that to come along with the shame and penalties of dying just as you get to the finish line. Ink helps strike that balance. Dying is expected – sometimes celebrated – and that allows GMs to throw all kinds of nefarious fiends at players without the risk of ruining the evening.
OS: In Ink, players gain benefits through total party kills. What inspired this and how do you hope that guides how players work their way through sessions?
GC: In addition to tabletop games, we’re also big fans of video games over at Snowbright. The video game world has seen so much innovation and experimentation in the soulslike and roguelite genres over recent years. We wanted to capture some of that magic in tabletop form. Different parts of Ink are inspired by moments from Hollow Knight, Hades, Rogue Legacy 2, the Dark Souls series, and more – but with a lot more adorable spirits and coffee than you’ll find in any of those games!
OS: What inspired the split between Spirit and Shadow?
GC: There’s a tension during character creation where players often want to be both a sympathetic, complex individual and an all-powerful murder demon. This leads to some strange results in games like D&D where you have an orphan looking for their lost parent while also racking up a body count in the hundreds during their journey. The split system in Ink allows characters to separate out some of those instincts and lets Spirits do some of the narrative heavy lifting while the Shadow gets to be as terrifying as a player would like. Some of this split also was partially inspired by 90s comic book culture, including Spawn. The idea that a character’s mortality could be externalized – in Spawn’s case, as his power counter – has fascinated me ever since I read those comics back as a kid. Here also, a character’s Shadow is a materialization of their emotions, instincts, and a reminder of their death that can be rationalized but can’t be hidden from.
OS: Souls that linger too long are ultimately doomed to be absorbed into the Ink. Is there a philosophical or larger meaning you’ve associated within this afterworld doom?
GC: I think that one of the greatest risks in life is standing still. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t appreciate where we are or the complexities and joy of moments, but we have to also look behind us and ahead. The Spirits that disintegrate into the Ink are the ones that have stopped searching for meaning. They are the ones who have truly become “stuck”, unable to move past an incident, a memory, a promise… We all have regrets, but we must keep moving forward. Otherwise, we just become part of the scenery.
OS: I was really struck by the imagery of a lone lighthouse existing in the center of the Ink. Can you talk about your inspiration for this and how you see that adding character to the land of the Ink?
GC: The Great Lighthouse is the only significant source of light in the Ink. When a person dies in the living world and “falls” into the Ink, many of them end up at that lighthouse. It’s a liminal place in many ways. Some Spirits stay there for ages, afraid to step out of the light and into the darkness. They’ll spend their entire afterlife there and eventually disintegrate into the Ink’s waters. Moving away from the light is an act of moving on. It’s hard. It’s the first real challenge for most Spirits. Once they can accept where they are and what must come next, that is when they are ready to begin their real journey. Superficially, I think you can see some parallels between the Great Lighthouse in Ink and The Abyss area in Hollow Knight. Thematically though, they are wildly different. Saying goodbye to the Great Lighthouse means accepting that you have died, and that’s not easy – for people or characters!
OS: Illustrations are also an integral part of Ink, can you talk about your inspirations and what sort of world you hoped to create for players through this art?
Quill Kolat: I drew inspiration for the art of Ink from a few different places. Cute and spooky are two themes I love mashing together in my work. Some of my major influences are comics like Hilda, Moomin, and Hellboy, and games like Mörk Borg and Hollow Knight. The Ink can be a dark, scary place with terrifying monsters that will happily destroy you on sight. Though, in all that fear and darkness, there are small sanctuaries of rest and kindness in the cozy boorista cafes.
OS: Why booristas? What inspired their role within the world of Ink? They seem to add levity, but how else do you see their part playing into adventurers’ journeys?
GC: Booristas are more than just adorable buddies along your journeys. They are actually Spirits who have fully separated from their Shadows. Normally, that would result in a Spirit disintegrating into the Ink’s waters, but Booristas have one quick trick to stave off eternity: brewing. Booristas are Spirits who have mastered the art of distilling the Ink’s poisonous waters into magical, drinkable, caffeinated concoctions. This allows them to live eternally in the Ink, but at what cost? Booristas provide a respite during the game but also force characters to reckon with what eternity in the Ink would actually mean. For most players, this provides more motivation for their characters to seek out the Passage Beacon that will ultimately allow them to move into the Beyond. Then again, there’s always going to be at least one player who wouldn’t mind running an undead cafe for eternity…
OS: You also sourced your own coffee with Many Worlds Tavern, can you talk about this process – what you had envisioned and challenges or surprises that you encountered in bringing that to reality?
QK: I loved working on the coffee part of Ink. I am a daily coffee drinker and make myself a pour-over every morning. We wanted to have two distinct roasts, a light and a dark one, so Many Worlds Tavern sent me a few different bags of beans to try. The taste testing was a lot of fun. The bigger challenge was designing the actual coffee bags themselves. I had to do several rounds of edits on the bags to get them ready for the printer. The initial designs actually had too much ink on them. I had huge graphics covering the whole bag. I wanted them to be dark and moody like the game, but those designs didn’t leave room for important things like the vent that goes on the front of the bag. It was a frustrating learning curve. Thankfully, Andrew from MWT helped me get the design to a place where they could be printed.
OS: Can you highlight some of your favorite fiends, greater and lesser?
GC: The Firebird was the first Greater Fiend created, so that holds a special place for me, and I’m in love with Donn Stroud’s adorably Strahd-like “Womvamp” Greater Fiend. But if I had to pick one, it would be The Thin Shadow. He was inspired in part by a controversial but unique N64 era video game called Shadow Man. The long shadows seen in the “Deadside” in that game left an impression on me, and I think we’ve all been in a place where we imagine that long shadow hand creeping across the floor towards us at night. But at the same time, The Thin Shadow seems so friendly, you know?
QK: I really like the Blubbering Bufonid. It’s a giant weeping toad, and who doesn’t relate to that every now and then? I also love the Inferno Foxes. They’re so cute and chaotic. I can just imagine a whole pack of them bounding around a key, leaving adorable fiery chaos in their wake.
OS: Do you have a favorite instance, or a recurring storyline, that you hear from Ink’s players?
GC: That first death is always a shocker! It’s so taboo to kill your players in today’s world of tabletop RPGs! So when that first character falls, or when the entire group is caught unaware there’s a moment of scandal. Running demos at conventions, we’ve had players die within the first 5 minutes of the game. They feel like they’ve done something wrong! But by the end of the session, you can see them really lean into it. Taking risks and making choices that they never would in D&D, Pathfinder, or Call of Cthulhu. That’s been incredibly rewarding to see and such a unique experience for a TTRPG.