Penguicon: To start us off, could you give us a quick self-introduction?
Tracy Barnett: I am the "other" Tracy, no matter what your frame of reference is for Tracys, I'm the other one. I have been a tabletop role-playing game designer since 2012, so about 14 years now. I've also done professional podcast work; I was the project manager for the One Shot Podcast Network, working on a lot of independent tabletop RPG audio actual plays. More recently, I've done Magic: The Gathering videos on stream. Now, I'm a stay-at-home parent to two kids, and I do all this RPG stuff at the same time. I'm currently getting back in the saddle, because parenthood is a wild ride.
Penguicon: Have you been to Penguicon before?
Tracy Barnett: I was a special guest in 2022. It was a lovely time, but a very strange period in my life. When I got back home, we found out my wife was pregnant with our second child, which was a complete surprise. I actually had to leave the con early that Sunday because she'd had an accident at home involving a gash on her wrist from a can. I had to get a rental car and drive home real quick. Our oldest was only nine months old when we found out the second was coming. So, I'm really looking forward to coming back now that I understand the nature of my life a little bit better.
Penguicon: So you have two children, one around three and the other around four?
Tracy Barnett: My oldest will be five in June, and the youngest just turned three in December. They are 18 months and two days apart. I stay home with them full-time. My wife has a fantastic job that keeps us afloat, and the RPG work is what I do to help us live.
Penguicon: You've been in the RPG space for a long time. How did you get into that? Would you say you're a "tinkerer" who takes stories apart, or more of a "builder" who creates them from scratch?
Tracy Barnett: I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was eight or nine. My cousin had a copy of the "Red Box" at a family reunion; it had dragons on it, and I had already read some Tolkien, so I was in. I didn't actually play "real" D&D until college. I played 3rd Edition, took a break, and then ran my first games when 4th Edition came out in 2008.
I slowly started making stuff for the games I was in. For a while, I was convinced I wasn't going to be a game designer. I didn't want to fiddle with mechanics or break things apart because my only experience was D20 systems, which are a very particular kind of "fiddly" that I've learned isn't my favorite. I started with setting work and world-building instead.
Then, while driving back from a convention in Kansas City, I was bored and took a joke from Twitter and started rhyming things. I thought about D&D skills, like if you're lanky, you have "ranks in Lank." Then I found every "ank" rhyme I could: tank, blank, bank. I was getting a teaching degree at the time, and my brain just went: I'm describing high school students. My first game, School Days, was born from that. It's a simple experience where you put together high school students and play out a high school movie.
Penguicon: How do you view the relationship between the story and the rules of the game?
Tracy Barnett: To me, story and the experience of being in the story go hand in hand. The games I like and make most often are those that situate you within a very particular circumstance. A fantasy game like D&D purports to be a game where you can do everything, but it really has a very particular thing it does: killing monsters and taking their money.
The games I love weave the narrative and the mechanics in lockstep. If you take an action in the story, the system should trigger a mechanical thing that then has a narrative outcome to push the story forward. The story is shaped by the premise, the rules I write, and the collective experiences everyone brings to the table.
That "alchemy" is unique to every table. If you give two different groups the same book and the same setup, five minutes in, they will have completely divergent experiences because everyone comes with their own lens, pop culture references, and life experiences. That's why RPGs are so artful to me. You can capture the audio, but there's only one way to experience a game, and that's to be at the table. Even watching streamers isn't the same. It's a cool parasocial engagement, but meeting someone's eyes across a table and "charactering" back and forth is fantastic.
Penguicon: It sounds like you're finding that passion again.
Tracy Barnett: You get rusty. Life has thrown a lot of curveballs recently, both personally and globally. Being reminded of the power of human-created art, art that is ephemeral and exists only in that space before it's gone like wisps of smoke, is magical.
For the last five years, I've been putting myself aside to focus on being a stay-at-home parent. It takes a lot of energy to keep two small, loud, rambunctious humans alive. I haven't had the space for creative work that is "real work" rather than just passing the time. Coming back into this and remembering the glory of those moments is what keeps you going. I was actually trepidatious about even emailing to ask if you'd have me back because I felt so rusty, but when you all said yes, it was a huge boost.
Penguicon: Looking at your itch.io page, you have quite a range of games, everything from "Kidnapped Santa" to "Rocket Penguins." What is the intended audience for these?
Tracy Barnett: I have to look at my other monitor to even remember what some of these are because it's been a long time since I wrote them! The games I write tend to be inspired by very specific things. My second game after School Days was OneShot, a two-player game where one person is someone who has been grievously wronged and given a single bullet guaranteed to kill the target of their vengeance. The other player plays everyone else in the world trying to either help or stop them.
I just followed the inspiration. I heard a song by the band Red Light King called "Bullet in My Hand." Instead of thinking about the obvious metaphor, I just listened to how it made me feel and thought, that is going to be this game.
Penguicon: And your third game, Iron Edda, seems to take a completely different turn.
Tracy Barnett: That one is Iron Edda: War of Metal and Bone. You play Norse-inspired people in a world where Ragnarok is happening in the form of 40-foot-tall metal dwarven destroyers. Humanity uses giant skeleton mecha, summoning the bones of dead giants and binding their souls to them, to fight back. It's essentially Pacific Rim meets Norse mythology.
That was largely inspired by the video game Skyrim. I had an opportunity to make a mecha game, and since I'm not really an anime mecha person, I wondered what else I could do. I went down the road of bone giants and metal giants.
Penguicon: Is there a specific age range you target with these themes?
Tracy Barnett: I don't really have any games explicitly for kids. School Days can be toned down, though there are some swear words in there. Most of my work has a bit of an edge to it. I like dark themes and tones.
For instance, I have a two-player game called Arm. You each play a person who had a bionic arm put on after an accident. Because your insurance only covered a cheap model, the AI meant to assist it has gone rogue and thinks it's you. One player is the person, one is the arm, and you don't actually know which is which. You can play the whole session and reveal who is who at the end by uncovering dice you rolled at the start, or you can just choose to never know. It's a game about biological identity confusion. It's not the kind of thing you just pitch to anyone; you have to know who you're playing with.
Penguicon: You also have a series of solo RPGs. How do those work?
Tracy Barnett: The best known is You Are the Dungeon. It's a solo journaling game where you build a dungeon map over successive iterations. You start with the history of "the bad place," and then adventurers come in. You roll for their names and dispositions and figure out what happened to them. Then, the dungeon grows.
I wanted to capture that old-school D&D feel where dungeons like the "Caves of Chaos" didn't have much rhyme or reason to them. In this game, your brain decides how the dungeon grows, but it's treated as being half-alive and expanding forever. I've actually linked this with three other games: one for a tavern, one for a town, and Palace of Dreams for the deities. If you put all four together, you build an entire campaign setting just by playing.
Penguicon: It's interesting that you feel TTRPGs are on the "fringe" of technology. Penguicon is rooted in open source, and I feel like these games are the pinnacle of that, you've essentially "open sourced" these experiences.
Tracy Barnett: Tabletop RPGs and licensing are very interesting because, at a fundamental level in the U.S., game mechanics cannot be copyrighted. They aren't considered a unique enough system of actions. You can't really patent them either, except for very specific brand identities, like how Wizards of the Coast patented the term "tapping" and the action of turning a card sideways for Magic: The Gathering. Other games have to say "exhaust" or "expend" instead.
But technically, you could take the rules for first-edition D&D and publish them as your own thing, as long as you don't use the specific words and presentation from the original books. Gaming has this inherently hackable nature. No two groups tell the same story, and most groups come up with "house rules" by their second session.
The pipeline to becoming a game designer is freakishly easy. All you have to do is start playing and ask, "What if this worked differently?" You don't have to learn to code, you just change a number from a four to a five and see what happens to the dice.
Penguicon: You mentioned earlier that TTRPGs can feel like a "fringe" hobby. Is that because of the commitment it takes to actually get a group together?
Tracy Barnett: Exactly. It's a hypersocial format. If you want to tell stories that make you feel the way you do when you read a great novel or listen to an amazing song, there has to be a high level of trust. That's hard to do at a convention; you have to put up "hard rails" to get everyone locked into the same level of emotional investment and safety very quickly.
In games like D&D or Pathfinder, some tables just sit down and fight. To me, that's boring. I want to know what happens when the arrow misses the goblin. What does the goblin sound like? Getting those details to happen is a magic in and of itself. But we're all busy adults, and trying to get a session together is like herding cats. It takes a massive commitment to say, "I'm going to leave my house and do this for a second, third, and fourth week in a row." It takes about six sessions to really get into a story. If one ingredient in that "stew" is off, the whole thing can fall apart.
Penguicon: And the pandemic certainly didn't help that social ingredient.
Tracy Barnett: When lockdown happened, our group had to stop. We tried playing online, but the magic wasn't the same. My former roommate and our friends used to meet at a house literally five doors down from mine. When they eventually moved, that space was just gone.
It's taken me years to get over that loss because something truly difficult to obtain and treasure was gone. I'm finally playtesting a new game with many of those same people now, and that magic is coming back, but it takes someone in the group to say with intention: "Are we doing the thing? Let's do the thing." You have to keep pushing for it.
Penguicon: Is that why you've leaned into solo games? Because you don't have to worry about finding people?
Tracy Barnett: Solo games have come a long way. Before 2015 or 2016, we didn't really have many experiences written explicitly for a single player. Now, I have about eight or nine solo games on my page, like Muscle Wizard Gets the Job Done or You Will Rest Your Head on Your Parents' Grave. It gives you the option to explore that creativity whenever you want.
There's also a subgenre called "Lyric Games" that was very present online for a while. It's almost a poetic experience combined with live-action role-playing. One of the best pieces of design in that space is a game called We Are But Worms. The entire game consists of a single word: "Writhe."
It's easy to be dismissive at first, "Okay, fine, your worms writhe," but if you let it unfold, it's gorgeous. What does that mean to you? Are you an actual worm? Is it a metaphor? It's free-form poetry you're telling with yourself. Even we, by discussing it now, are engaging in a form of play.
I wrote a game called Draw a Bath for Your Love, which is about finding out what the person you love needs in a moment and trying to meet it. I'm actually bad at playing my own game sometimes! But I had a feeling, and I wrote a game about that feeling.
How to Become "The Kind of Person Who Does The Thing"#
Penguicon: For someone struggling to take that first step into art or design, what advice would you give to encourage them?
Tracy Barnett: Honestly, you just have to start. For a long time, I'd see people in movies or podcasts talk about journaling, and I'd think, man, I wish I was the kind of person who did that. To be that person, you just have to do it. I felt so pretentious at first, pulling out my little brown notebook in public. I felt like everyone was watching me. But no one cares! No one is paying attention to you the way you think they are. That is a freeing feeling.
Eventually, I looked at my shelf and realized I had six full notebooks. I became the person who journals by doing the journaling.
Penguicon: It sounds simple, but there's a lot of emotional baggage tied up in "doing the thing."
Tracy Barnett: There's a great episode of Bluey about this. The youngest kid draws wild stuff and doesn't care. The older kid gets self-conscious because she's "leading the story" and it has to look right. The dad stopped drawing in elementary school because a kid made fun of him. The lesson is: just by doing it, you're doing a good job.
You don't need to attach anyone else's expectations, or even your own, to what you're making. You can burn it when you're done if you want! Capitalism has poisoned our brains into thinking our art has to be "pinnable" or at a professional level to be worthy.
My wife is a great visual artist, and she honestly does not like the style of my drawings. But I love my "creepy little dudes." I've found a place where I can appreciate that it's not for her, but I'll still show them to her because I enjoyed making them. It took a long time to get to that place of growth. I'm not saying "I'm not good enough," but I have a place I want to get to, and I'm enjoying the process of growing toward it.
Penguicon: We've talked about the struggle to start. I once saw a video that gave the best advice for new creators: "Make terrible art." Don't worry about making it good, just focus on creating something.
Tracy Barnett: I love that. Because if you just keep making it, you'll find the things you actually want to work on and get better at. Every artist goes through an evolution. If you look at the very early Garfield strips compared to where the character is now, the shape and presentation changed drastically. You see the same thing in long-term webcomics, some artists even go back and redraw their old work because they can't stand how it used to look!
I can see that in my own sketches. I draw the same basic faces, but I can feel my comfort with the motions growing. I'm not a professional illustrator, and I'm not at a level where I'd hand-draw my own RPG zine yet, but the point is to just do it. Make a piece of art, then make the next one, and then the one after that.
And that's how you learn the most important skill of all, how to finish. You learn how to say, "I'm done with this project." Maybe you feel bad when it's finished, that's fine. Sit with that feeling for a bit, and then go make the next thing. Being human means we have to wake up and keep going every day. We might as well move into the "acceptance" phase of that process and keep making art. It's so important to me that people find a way toward art they love, whether they're making it or just appreciating it in an authentic way. Life is hard enough; let yourself love art without feeling bad about yourself.
Penguicon: That's a wonderful note to end on. Before we sign off, is there anything specific you're looking forward to at Penguicon this year?
Tracy Barnett: At this point, I've thrown just about every word I have at this! But honestly, I think the con is going to be a great time. I know it's coming back after a hiatus, and run-ups aren't always smooth, but the people of Penguicon were so warm and welcoming the last time I was there.
Just like getting a group of people together to play a game, pulling off a convention is a special kind of magic. When you do it with the heart and good intentions that the Penguicon team has, it becomes something really special. I'm just excited to get back into that space.
Penguicon: We are excited to have you back, Tracy. We're only about 25 days out now!
Tracy Barnett: Thank you for having me. It was great to talk to you. See you soon!