Fantasy art! You know the classic style: swirling magic, snarling dragons, wizards with long beards straight off the side of a stoner’s cool van. It’s the vibe that’s defined tabletop roleplaying for fifty years. I’m not here to knock it, but one of the coolest things in the modern TTRPG industry is the effort made by creators and companies to use the art as an integral part of the gaming experience. MÖRK BORG made a huge splash on the scene with its chaotic, black metal aesthetics married to OSR design sensibilities. Now SINK!, a brand new RPG project from Crimson Herald and Samurai Rusk, wants to make an even bigger splash using saturated, vibrant tattoo art and its natural pairing: piracy. I got a chance to chat with half of Crimson Herald, NFL fullback and D&D designer Johnny Stanton IV, about the origins of the radical and piratical new game.
I’m curious about the genesis of it all. When you sat down to create SINK!, what were some of the things that you wanted to do that would make it unique?
Johnny Stanton: First off, I think the whole art style itself is unique to TTRPGs. One thing I’m really excited about is getting the opportunity to really diversify the aesthetics of what a TTRPG can be. I think the most successful and disruptive TTRPGs in the industry that have been developed have an art style that does not look like the usual fantasy art style. It doesn’t look like that highly rendered, realistic, sometimes dark and muted aesthetic. SINK! is bright colors in an art style that you recognize being very inspired by American traditional tattoo art. But Sam puts their very specific spin on it with bright colors and pop art style, she calls it pop traditional, as opposed to American traditional or neo-traditional. And that’s the whole reason why we wanted to work with them in the first place.
When we first got to meet each other at the last San Diego Comic-Con and she tattooed my displacer beast on my leg, we talked about the fact that I don’t think either of us had worked on a TTRPG book at that point. I was kind of hinting at the fact that I would love to be able to work with them. So I texted Sam, if you could work on any TTRPG book, what would the theming be? If you could make anything, what would it be?
She said, “I would love to do something with pirates because the aesthetic really works there. And as a Dungeon crawler fan, I think that would be really cool to do so why not both?” She took it as like a “what’s your favorite color?” kind of question but I thought “I kind of want to make this now.” so I came back two weeks later working with my other co-creator Rick and said “Hey, let’s build some mechanics off of this,” and came back to Sam’s and said “Hey we’ve done all this stuff, when can we get started?” I guess she just said “I guess we’re partners on this now.”
From that point as I was building out the story, I was really enamored with the idea of souls and the souls of the sailors and Davy Jones Locker. There’s so much mythology there. Like within the “Treasures of the Deep Grotto” adventure I just ran at Gen Con, Grim Scar and the lair and the traps, like to solve the traps, you have to sacrifice some of that. But in the San Diego Comic Con game, it’s getting pulled from you and then released as more damage. In the game that we ran earlier, it is a token that you’re gambling away. All these different ways that I try to represent the soul and how you can lose it or regain it.
So it’s your first time, you and Sam, first time working on a TTRPG like this?
Johnny Stanton: I think Rick has some experience. Rick and I have known each other for about six years now. He and I have been able to partner on things that I’ve been trying to do like the Path of the Gridiron Barbarian. He helped me design that. The Oath of the Executioner Paladin. He’s an incredible graphic designer. He and I are both fairly new to the TTRPG industry as creators.
What was it like entering the space with a team of new people with an unbound creative vision?
Johnny Stanton: Anybody creating their own company for the first time knows got its own ups and downs and roadblocks and ways that it can go wrong. I created Crimson Herald to be able to partner with Sam on the project and later on to try to partner with Hit Point Press. And Rick and I were gonna be running that, and what we realized is that it’s a lot of work to try to make it a collaboration as opposed to just coming together. So that’s why we started working moving forward just as the general SINK! name. We have been relying so much on Hit Point as well. SINK! is a design we still feel very strong like we are the creators, Sam, Rick, and myself, but the Kickstarter side Hit Point have been incredibly helpful. The amount of support that they are able to offer as co-owners of the project is really important for us.
So you had the theme, you had the stuff you wanted to do. What was the decision to do a play test, to offer that early access and get feedback from players?
Johnny Stanton: Free RPG Day does such an incredible job of marketing than advertisements on Meta or Google or trying to do things at cons where oftentimes you’re limited to people coming to your booth and being interested in what’s happening at the booth. Whereas Free RPG Day brings a physical copy of a booklet to everybody’s local game shop. And getting I think 16,000 copies around the country, to all these different game shops.
It was fun that we got to translate what was previously the one shot that we had designed. that we were happy to throw on DM’s Guild or whatever as just a standalone product. And what we decided was like, let’s go to Pax Unplugged to see if we can get anybody to partner with us on this. So we created a pitch deck out of it. or a pitch document went around to a bunch of publishers, Hit Point Press being the one that was interested in it and that we wanted to work with. That we decided, let’s create something, I knew about Free RPG Day, let’s create something that we already have pretty much done. We didn’t realize how much work it actually gets to finish it and to put it into a layout and design and everything. huge having that knowledge that’s going to continue our knowledge into creating the book itself. So having the Treasure of the Deep Prado be something that not only we get to send out for free RPG day but also something we can hand out to people that we admire that you know or people that… know about what we’re doing and we get to give to them. It’s like, hey, go spread the word. It’s really important. And especially with Hit Point being as generous as they are with offering it at their booth as just a free handout is really cool.
Is there any feedback, any response you’ve gotten that’s been surprising or has really been really helpful?
Luckily, people are very polite. I’m sure that if they have bad feedback, it’s been uncommunicated. But yeah, it’s been funny at some of the live shows that we’ve been doing. We have some people who are like…a little bit more boisterous in there. I think that the action economy, the bucking your fighter is a little bit screwy. I’m like, you don’t know the full, nobody knows the full character sheet, the whole sheet subclass.
We’ve had a lot of people play the third level adventure. You don’t know what SINK! is gonna look like at 10th level, 15th level. So we are incredibly proud of the mechanics that we built out with the project, the subclasses I adore, the magic tattoos, we are constantly building more and more. We’re designing over 50 of them to make a full playing card deck The mechanics are what Rick and I get to get excited about in the campaign itself, but it all comes down to the art, you know, and how evocative it is. That’s the MVP of the campaign.
It hits crowdfunding later this year, correct?
Crowdfunding starts on September 17th. And will, I believe, finish in early October. We have a lot of stuff planned for that campaign leading up to it. A lot of our favorite people will be working with us on promoting it and I think we’re going to try to do some sort of live stream where Sam’s going to tattoo us as a launch celebration. We’ve got an actual play planned. We’re excited.
Images via SINK! and Crimson Herald
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