Take Me Down to Penumbra City, an Intriguing Tabletop RPG from Margaret Killjoy

Tabletop role-playing games continue to ride a wave of popularity that the genre hasn’t seen in decades. Need proof? Just look at Kickstarter: there are over 40,000 games currently running campaigns there. One game, Penumbra City, just wrapped up its campaign earlier this month, being pledged over five times its initial goal of $13,000. What makes this game special is how it examines social class hierarchy with monsters, resulting in stories that can feel both human and fantastical, grounding the scenarios in a way that lets stories head in any direction. Healing isn’t easy in Penumbra City so players need to be cautious as they push on and persevere together, adding a flickering flame of tension to the adventure ahead.

Penumbra City obliterated its initial funding target within two weeks before smashing through some ambitious stretch rewards that backers can already anticipate, including a novel set in the game’s world and a planned expansion for the tabletop role-playing game’s adventure module. And it’s all being done by a small but dedicated team.

Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness consists of four individuals. Inmn Neruin, Penumbra City’s game designer, makes sure the world and all of its rules and innerworkings click together; without them, Penumbra City couldn’t be home to story or adventure. Illustrator Robin Savage is in charge of designing and articulating the game’s aesthetic, art, and style. Margaret Killjoy is the game’s World Designer, which includes making sure that Penumbra City is a fully-fleshed out world, with believable characters and details that fill it all in. And then Cassandra Johns rounds out the crew as the game’s Graphic Designer, ensuring that the text and every little thing have substance and style.

Killjoy, Neurin and Savage carved out some time from their busy schedules to talk to Paste about how work on Penumbra City has been going, what players can expect when it’s released, and how everyone’s love of fantasy worlds, history, and politics helped inform and shape this upcoming game’s universe and characters.

Paste: Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness has of course created lots of things, as have all of you in other formats and mediums, but this is your first TTRPG. Talk to me about what this was like, everyone’s biggest surprises, hurdles, favorite parts.

Robin Savage: My biggest hurdle is myself and my own chaotic brain; it’s so mean to me sometimes. And I think we’ve all had moments where we’ve been overly excited, overwhelmed, sad, scared, frustrated… but we have all supported each other through this and come out of it with something that I hope people are really going to love.

Inmn Neruin: The biggest hurdle for me has been trying to balance the game mechanics and make sure that all of the rules make sense. This has also been one of the more fun parts of working on this game for me. I really like thinking about the physics of how a game operates and how that affects the players’ and Game Master’s experience of playing the game. I think there are a lot of games that focus on raw damage output and can turn into a bit of a slug fest. The goal of the mechanic design in Penumbra City is focused on building dynamic conflicts and so it’s been fun to think about how different abilities interact with each other and sometimes all the pieces don’t fit together at all and it hurts my brain.

Margaret Killjoy: This thing has been in my head for so long now. I pretty much spent the whole of my 30s working on this game in one form or another. So… my favorite part is getting it out of my head and into the world? I’m incredibly proud of this game we’ve been making. As for me, the biggest hurdle was, well, I started off trying to do it by myself! That was a terrible mistake. I’m particularly excited that we’re working together as four equals. Learning to let go of something like this has been incredibly rewarding. Many hands make light work.

Paste: Congratulations! The Kickstarter campaign has been incredibly successful already. There’s still some time left as of writing, though it’s wrapping up on July 1st. How does it feel for everyone to be approaching the finish as you work to prepare everything? (The campaign ultimately made over $66,000.–Ed.)

And Margaret, you’re writing a novel set in the universe of Penumbra City too. Is there anything you can share from that? And Inmn, the Kickstarter’s success also means you get to expand the adventure module. Can you talk about that? And let’s talk also about the Hot Tub Pizza Party stretch goal– it’s at least a possibility at this point. What toppings are you all thinking about?

RS: Just like you’ll find playing Penumbra City, the real toppings were the friends we made along the way- wait no, that’s gross and sounds like cannibalism and half of us are vegetarian at least?

I’m really stunned and overwhelmed by the response to the art in particular and I’m so thrilled to see where else we are going to take this world and its inhabitants. Pizza parties aside, 100K would go a huge way toward empowering ourselves to create so much more amazing work, so the other stretch goal for 100K is ALL THE GRATITUDE IN MY WICKED LITTLE HEART.

IN: I’m pretty excited we hit all of our original stretch goals, which still feels completely unreal. But, I’m certainly biased in being especially excited about the longer adventure module that I get to write now. I’m excited to get to experiment with form a little bit. The module will explore the player characters’ relationships with the various factions of Penumbra City. And, as our tagline suggests, the campaign will probably revolve around finding your friends and killing a god king. We’re hoping this will be a dynamic adventure that players won’t be able to just murderhobo their way through and may involve embodying more than one character and uniting disparate factions. I’m really excited about exploring campaign mechanics that allow players to explore deep narratives where winning doesn’t always mean surviving. As some games are about slowly becoming demi-gods, Penumbra City is about becoming the heroes of the revolution, but sometimes heroes don’t make it.

The hot tub cosplay pizza party would be unreal. A fun fact is that the four of us have never all been in the same room despite having worked on this game for years together. So, if the first time we got to all hang out was cosplaying as our favorite Penumbra City characters and eating pizza, with mushrooms obviously, then that would just be delightful.

MK: We set the initial stretch goals as like “ha ha wouldn’t it be funny if we made $30k, $40k? if so, let’s write some more books.” Then it quickly became apparent that was exactly what was going to happen–we hit our initial goal in less than four hours. Pretty soon it dawned on me that I’d be writing a novella set in the world. Which, yeah, as everyone as said, it feels unreal. It’s not out of the blue, this success–we’ve all been making games, art, theater, books, all of that for decades at this point. We just weren’t certain exactly how this game would hit, you know?

So I figure, Inmn is writing an adventure module that’ll ask the big questions, like “is this god king really immortal, what happens if we shoot him with crossbows and rifles and stab with swords and sic demons on him and rally together all the gangs of the city in the process?” I’ll go another route, so that everyone has a chance to see a bit more about the world, about daily life. I’m guessing the story I’ll tell will be a bit more intimate.

Paste: Can you share anything with people that have never played a tabletop role-playing game that will help them approach Penumbra City? It seems like the game is meant to be more accessible game newcomers, but do you have any tips for Penumbra City, and starting out a tabletop game in general, for the first time?

IN: I think playing TTRPGs is an exercise in collaborative storytelling between the GM and the players and so for Penumbra City, it’s no different. The players and the GM should decide together what kinds of stories they want to explore, whether those feature a series of intrigues to uncover a community threat, a deep exploration of the characters’ backstories, a grinding crawl through a dungeon of strange and hungry creatures for impressive loot, or a plan to unite the Revolutionists and take down the god king. Players should look to the world of Penumbra City to see how it can help them tell their stories in the ways that they want to. Penumbra City is a radically queer place and so we hope that this world as a setting can help people who don’t always see themselves easily represented in other games more easily find the stories they’ve been waiting to tell. Penumbra City is a large and complex world, so for new players, I would encourage them to start small and to not focus too heavily on the rules. Start with a group of friends in the Plaza who get asked by a friend from the Erreni Federation to help clear some giant centipedes out of their favorite pie shop’s basement. Explore the city like you would any city, street by street, building complexity and finding new friends along the way.

Paste: I love these characters, a motorcycle-riding dog girl, rat kings, and nightmarish patchworker whose scalpels are feared by all. Can you talk to me about where some of the inspiration came on these, and about how your love of fantasy storytelling and fictional worlds, and your knowledge of politics, history and involvement with activism inspired the characters and world of Penumbra City?

MK: Well the original setting came out of my head, so I guess I’ll start. The pieces of this game have been floating around in my head and notebooks and computers for so long! We’ve done so many versions of these characters, too, through playtests and for me through bits of fiction. But in general, the character classes grew out of the world we’re writing. I knew some basic stuff right away–I wanted to write a world about people revolting against their immortal ruler and arguing about the best ways to do that. Since it’s a fantasy world, it opens up an incredible number of possibilities… I guess why not have the healer class be a terrifying street surgeon who uses fungus and flesh to stitch up wounds.

When I was a kid, history seemed boring. That didn’t last long. As soon as I started looking around the world and asking myself “how can we improve this?” and “what have people done in the past? What’s worked?” history became this grand sweeping narrative that we’re all players in. The world of Penumbra City absolutely comes from that, though of course as fantasy. In particular, I found myself drawn towards a lot of the social upheaval and struggles that ran from, I don’t know, 1880-1940 or so? Striking workers, cooperatives seizing farming land, antifascists of every stripe trying to stop the rise of facism. But also during all of that, you have this explosion of culture, of theater and art and theology and philosophy and queer politics. So… that, plus demons and difference engines and mycomancy.

Paste: How long is a typical game of Penumbra City? What can players expect and how does it compare to the length/time to learn for other TTRPGs?

IN: I think the leveling structure that we’ve created in Penumbra City lends itself to generally shorter games than some TTRPGs. For instance, our leveling system kind of ends after level 5. Players are free to continue exploring characters after they hit level 5, of course, but we hope that generally short campaigns will allow players to explore playing different classes and characters more often. I think that Penumbra City can be easily learned in an evening. The mechanic system is very simplified, requiring almost no math and very little referencing of modifiers or tables. Mechanically, a character can be created in less than ten minutes and a lot of the other rules can be learned along the way. We wanted to develop a system that made for easy math and light number referencing while providing players with creative and interesting abilities that enhance the narratives of the game rather than focusing on raw damage. Besides the rule book, some dice and imagination all a party needs is to answer the call to adventure. And not get eaten by giant murder cranes.

MK: Our sessions have been running about as long as a game of any other TTRPG, which tend to just be the like… limitations of coordinate free time for 4-6 people? I love roleplaying because it can so easily expand and contract time. Sometimes you spend half your session just… with all the characters hanging out at the pie shop comparing weird backstory information. Other times half the session is a particularly epic battle against pressgangers or something. It’s just all up to the players, and it can be different session from session. That’s not unique to Penumbra City, of course. It’s just something I love about the hobby that I don’t get anywhere else. There’s also been an explosion of interest in TTRPGs more broadly lately… Once the gatekeepers were cleared out of the way, it turns out that all kinds of people love to play. I’m excited for Penumbra City to be part of that, so we’re working as hard as we can to make sure our language is inclusive and clear and to provide the extra resources, like the GM’s guide, to make it accessible.

Paste: Penumbra City was a collaborative effort, like most games. Can you talk about how it was approaching this as a team and how doing this as a group informed the project and made it better?

RS: Margaret has been inspiring me to draw for over half of our lives now, and through Inmn’s game running and playtesting we have all helped to shape this world during the development process. And Casandra has put their talent into making the art and story into a layout and design that will be not only beautiful but functional–I got pretty emotional when I saw it all coming together for the first time. And we have so many other friends along the way who have inspired us, talked us down off of ledges, etc. I feel like we’ve been dreaming of this for so long, but this perfect combination of people has come together and it all feels right for this moment in time as well.

IN: I love seeing how all of our separate roles influence each others’ processes. I remember talking about the demons that Goeticists summon and there were questions of how to portray them. There was a concept that Robin really liked that differed slightly from a world lore aspect that Margaret was exploring and mechanics that I was creating for the creatures. But, we loved the art so much that we altered aspects of the world lore and game mechanics to match up with the art. And, then when considering layout questions about how to represent information taxonomically, which led to changing game mechanics to make everything cleaner. All of these changes led to a much more dialed in creature. It’s just fun to see how connected most aspects of the world, game, art, and book are

Paste: Margaret, I want to ask you about your work on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. It’s such a great podcast because there’s obviously so much suffering in history but people and communities can also be bright beacons of hope. It’s so inspiring learning about the communities and heroes in history that have bravely pushed back against instruments and institutions of suffering. Can you talk about how the podcast informed Penumbra City, and also vice-versa, if it has?

MK: Yeah, for sure. My day job is that I run a twice-a-week history podcast, it comes out every monday and wednesday from Cool Zone Media. In it, I try to talk about, well, hopeful stuff. The kinds of thing I find hopeful, which has a lot to do with different people from different walks of life coming together to fight (often physically) against bigotry and oppression. Like we’ve got episodes about the Jewish assassin who took out the guy who’d ordered the death of his family, about sufi wanderers who broke gender and political expectations, about the Diggers in England who demanded that common lands stay common lands, about strikes and rebellions against authority and exploitation. I’ve been running that show for about a year now, so most of Penumbra City was written well before I started, but frankly it’s the same thing, right? Penumbra City is designed from the ground up to be a game about people from different backgrounds working together to fight for a better world–or at least just have fun.

And honestly as we go into the final stretches for writing Penumbra City, now that I know history even better than I did before, I’m finding more and more ways it influences the game… especially anything related to Weimar Germany, that time in 1920s Germany when street gangs in shifting alliances fought for control of the country. Obviously, it didn’t go well, but antifascists did the damndest to stop Hitler’s rise.

Paste: Margaret, do you have a favorite episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,, or an episode you’ve researched that inspired you the most? Everyone, are there any parts of history that you’ve researched that have inspired you and informed your work on Penumbra City?

MK: Oh geez, I love all my little podcast children equally? Except maybe right now I extra love the episode about The Battle of Cable Street, which was this time in 1936 when Jews and Irish Catholics teamed up in London to just completely overwhelm and destroy the rise of fascism in the UK. It sort of coalesces everything that I love about history into one place, that episode. Plus, of course, all the many episodes on the Spanish Civil War, especially the episodes I did last summer with Jamie Loftus about the role of the women’s militias in that fight—which, once again, pit a scrappy alliance of antifascists against an authoritarian foe. Which, I hate to keep harping on this specific theme. It’s definitely not the only way to play Penumbra City! It’s just what’s on my mind these days for… some weird reason.

RS: There’s a champagne bottle molotov cocktail in the background of one illustration in honor of the Josephine Baker episode, for when she fled Paris from the Nazis with a car full of champagne bottles full of fuel. I know that’s maybe not what the bottles were for, but I choose to believe they were at least in part maybe intended to fuck shit up. The episodes on the resistance during the Spanish Civil war, queer resistance during Weimar Germany and WWII and conversations we had before and after, all these things have crept into the art in their own ways.

IN: I think the pieces of history that feel especially exciting are a lot of the tiny cultural pieces of antifascist resistance that can be found peppered through history and peppered through Penumbra City. For instance, something I particularly love in my communities is radical theater and theater has been a part of antifascist resistance forever, from Shakespeare writing positively about the Enclosure Riots in As You Like It, to hearing about anarchist theater troupes in Chicago in the late 1800s, to groups now like Bread and Puppet who having been doing radical street theater for decades, to the playwrights and actors who were writing and putting on plays for their communities in the Vilna ghetto during the Nazi occupation while awaiting an uprising. And even though there isn’t a theater kid class (except maybe there really needs to be one now), the Erreni and the Outsiders both have differing but vibrant theater traditions.

Paste: Margaret, you’ve written a few books, including your latest must-read, Escape from Incel Island, and you’ve also created music, zines, and now Penumbra City, a TTRPG. What’s next? Could you see yourselves designing a videogame?

MK: I’ve wanted to make videogames since I was tiny. I’ve always had a brain where once I’m consuming something artistic, I want to try making it too, and in middle school I used to program games in this ‘90s game-making program called ZZT. That said, lord, I don’t know that I’ll ever have the time or resources to do what I’d really like. When I was younger, it would have been an RPG, for sure. These days, I like playing RPGs with friends more, so I’d guess I’d want to write the lore for some strategy game, with base-building and alliances and battles and such. Yeha, that’s what I’d do… Penumbra City would make a great videogame, but especially if it used the medium to tell a story that’s at larger scope than, say, the TTRPG where everyone only gets one character.

RS: A videogame would be such a wild thing to do. I’ve got galaxy brain just thinking about it. I don’t know if we have the resources to do such a thing, but gosh, what an absolute dream. I’d love to start doing comics, if we’re on the subject of dreams, and you can bet if we DID make a videogame it would have a super sick instruction manual with cool illustrations in it, like the ones that captured my imagination when I was a kid.

Paste: Talk to me about the zine and art prints, which are available as add-ons for backers. This concept art on the campaign page is so detailed. Is there anything you can share about the creation process behind these, like their inspirations, or what people can expect from them?

RS: I wanted to use the watercolor look to create a world that seems always a little murky, and mysterious. We talked a lot about whether or not to do full color art, but for this world the black and white with tones of gray felt more appropriate ultimately. Beyond that, a lifetime of being a nerd with a weird brain prone to falling down weird rabbit holes and obsessions, as well as a career in fashion design, have all crept in through the cracks. The art print with the Owl Demon is one of the first things I created for this game and still one of my all time favorites. It’s my hope that the art I create for this game can engage the creativity and imaginations of the players, and maybe make them feel seen in a way I think so many of us didn’t get when we were younger, and a lot of us felt like just… lonely little weirdos.

IN: We are including the zines as add-ons to further help players get started. Although the core rule book is all a group needs to play Penumbra City, we’re creating the introductory quick-start adventure and A GM’s Guide to Penumbra City to make it even easier for groups to get started. The introductory adventure gives players and GMs an introduction to the world and mechanics of Penumbra City that can either be self-contained or the start to a longer campaign. A GM’s Guide to Penumbra City gives the Game Master easily accessible resources to drop into adventures, including resources for navigating Reputation dynamics, NPCs, adventure hooks for different factions, tips for running combat, and cool loot.

Paste: Final thoughts?

MK: Just that we’re excited to be part of this growing world of indie games. We’ve seen a massive outpouring of imagination in the field in the past decade or so, and seen so many new players. I’ve come a long way from playing D&D in my friend’s basement in elementary school, in terms of my life, but the core idea of it: get together with your friends and make something beautiful happen–has been core to my life. I think roleplaying games are important, not just to kill time, but to develop and reinforce our sense of self, to experiment seeing the world through other eyes, and also to create something beautiful that usually only exists for that evening, living on only in memories and inside jokes.