Transcript: Lures (Heaven in the Dust) with Barclay Travis and Bee Alexander

Listen to this episode here.

Bee and Barclay are the hosts of Tabletop Book Club, a podcast that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a show with such fun energy, and of course good design talk. Because Barclay has a new belonging outside belonging game that's just come out - Begin Again, check the link below - today I'm talking with them about lures, maybe my favorite part of the belonging outside belonging engine, and specifically how they're implemented in Heave in the Dust...

Further Reading

Heaven in the Dust by Luke Jordan

Begin Again by Barclay Travis

Dream Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Socials

Tabletop Book Club, Bee, and Barclay on Bluesky

Sam on Bluesky and itch

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

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Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.

Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and go, hey buddy, wanna see what I got here? My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co-hosts today are Bee Alexander and Barclay Travis. Bee, whose pronouns are he and they, and Barclay, pronouns he and it, are the hosts of Tabletop Book Club, a podcast that is exactly what it sounds like.

It’s a show with such fun energy and of course, good design talk. Check it out. Try their recent episode about Star Crossed. Barclay also has a new game out as of last month.

“Begin Again” is a time loop game set in college about feeling frozen in place while on the precipice of facing the world. It uses the Belonging Outside Belonging engine established by Dream Askew and Dream Apart. And when I invited Barclay and Bee on the show, they wanted to dig into that engine. So today we’ll be talking about lures, a sort of relationship hook mechanic often present in Belonging Outside Belonging games.

The engine runs on a token economy. Get into trouble, get a token. Get out of trouble, you gotta spend a token. And each character has a lure sitting on their sheet that offers up a token as it calls out to the other players. Don’t you wanna get in trouble with me?

We’re also covering lures specifically in the context of Heaven in the Dust by Luke Jordan, a Hadestown and American Dust Bowl inspired Belonging Outside Belonging game about best intentions on the road to ruin. We get into not just how lures work in the abstract, but also how the context of this game changes them. So let’s get into it.

Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon and here are Bee and Barclay with lures from Heaven in the Dust.

Barclay and Bee, thanks for being on Dice Exploder. Pleasure to have you.

Barclay: Thank you so much for having us. Of course.

Bee: Thanks for having us.

Sam: What are we talking about today?

Barclay: Today we’re talking about lures in Belonging Outside Belonging games, specifically talking about Heaven in the Dust by Luke Jordan.

Sam: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about lures. I’ve found them such a compelling mechanic since the first time I sat down and started playing with them and I’m excited to dive in here. But I wanna start with Heaven in the Dust specifically because we could have picked Dream Askew, Dream Apart, the game that lures and the Belonging Outside Belonging system kind of originated from. But we picked this one instead and my impression is that that is in part because you love it, Barclay. Why are we doing Heaven in the Dust specifically and what is it?

Barclay: So Heaven in the Dust is a Belonging Outside Belonging game where you play as archetypes based off of Greek mythology. It’s very heavily inspired by Hadestown, which is part of the reason that I love it. Luke is also a dear friend of mine, so I’m biased, but he is an incredible game designer. Luke wrote about lures in a way that finally made them make sense to me. I really enjoy lures — I think they’re a really interesting mechanic and really useful for having players engage with each other in an interesting way. But I also kind of struggled to figure out how to implement them in my games and how to write them well.

Sam: Wait, so what are they though? For someone who hasn’t played one of these games before, what’s the system at play and how do lures fit into it?

Barclay: Belonging Outside Belonging is a diceless game system. Each playbook has moves — strong moves that you have to spend a token to use and weak moves that you gain a token by using. So you can use weak moves to gain tokens to then use your strong moves, or other people can gain tokens by interacting with your lure, which is a prompt: every time someone interacts with you in this specific way, they get a token from doing that.

Sam: Yeah. So generally speaking, you get tokens for getting yourself into trouble and you spend tokens to get yourself out of trouble or to be cool. And lures are like, come get into trouble with me. Like it’s a lure, right — their name says it. A couple of examples from Heaven in the Dust: Hades’ lure is whenever someone places themselves in your debt or makes a deal with you, they gain one coin, which is Heaven in the Dust’s version of tokens. So when someone comes to you and is like, can I be in trouble with you on the other end of that trouble? — they get a token they can use to be cool later. Or Hephaestus says, whenever someone brings you a grievance or object that needs fixing, they gain one coin. These things help define the flavor of the playbooks, but they’re also a juicy little invitation to come do this cool recurring vignette with me.

Barclay: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Heaven in the Dust is also very explicitly a game of tragedy, so you are setting up these characters to constantly be getting themselves in trouble and not really having a way out of it — which is really intriguing from a lure’s perspective, because you have all these characters that are also archetypes of Greek mythology. There’s a mechanic called birthrights: Hephaestus, for example, his birthrights are rust, dignity, revolution, and destruction. So you are motivating this token exchange by specifically focusing on those themes depending on your playbook, which is a fun way to inform lures. There are a few different versions of lures that are hacked a little differently in this game that make it a more in-depth mechanic.

Sam: Yeah, I want to come back to that. First, I want to say, Bee, what do you think of lures?

Bee: I really love the lures in this game. Part of the reason why these lures are so strong is because these playbooks are characters that you’re stepping into versus an archetype that you’re building a character around. I think the lures become more targeted because of that. For Apollo, Prince of Liars, Prince of Light, the lure is whenever someone bares their heart to you or lets your music change them, they gain one coin. In another version of this game there’s probably a way for the playbook to be more general and still have the same targeted lure, but I’m not sure I’m articulating this well.

Sam: The thing I’m hearing — that I hadn’t really thought about with lures before — is that they’re almost like a weak move and a strong move tied together into a relationship. Apollo is getting to kind of freely make a strong move of like, change someone else, and then that person is getting a token for allowing Apollo to do so. And this is my favorite thing about lures as opposed to weak moves and strong moves: they’re so baked into relationships. Character is so dependent on relationships, and when I’m coming in as Hades and my lure is about debts and making deals, that just describes so much the energy and relationships I want to be bringing to everyone else at the table, even if you’re not triggering my lure. And finding out how those things interlock — that’s really interesting.

Barclay: Yeah, for sure. Something I enjoy about Belonging Outside Belonging games — this is going to sound silly the way I’m praising it — is the amount of lists in each playbook. There’s something very interesting to me about a character creation list where the choices you aren’t picking inform just as much of your character as the choices you are picking, because they are informing what that playbook’s vibe is. And so a lure for me is one of those things where it’s like, even if nobody ever triggers this, it is still informing how I am interacting with people. Obviously you want people to be triggering it, but.

Sam: Okay, Barclay, one of the very first things you said when we started talking here was that you didn’t really understand lures and then the way Luke put them really clarified that for you. I’m curious to hear what didn’t make sense about them at first, and what about Luke’s explanation made sense.

Barclay: It’s not that they didn’t work for me — I didn’t have any reaction like, I don’t like these. But I think it’s one of those things that before I got really deep into game design and picking things apart, lures kind of felt like an afterthought to me — not that people writing them treated them as an afterthought, but I was always like, oh, and also lures are there. They were interesting to me, but I didn’t really understand the importance of having them and how they were informing play in that way.

Sam: Before we started recording, we were talking a little bit about how you were reading a lot of games at a certain point and not playing as many as you wanted to. Do you think that relates to this? To me it’s so much easier when you’re sitting down and reading a book to forget that it’s going to be practically speaking in conversation with a bunch of other people. When you sit down and read the Dream Askew playbooks or the Heaven in the Dust playbooks, it’s like, look at all the juice of who this Hades person is going to be. And then it’s not until you sit down at the table that you realize: my Hades is going to completely change when I throw him into conflict with your Persephone or whatever. Since lures are so based on relationships, do you feel like that was part of what was going on?

Barclay: I hadn’t thought of that until just now, but absolutely that’s what it was. I definitely am still in a position where I don’t feel like I’m playing as many games as I would like to — I very much read a lot of them and don’t get a chance to play very often. So that definitely rings true.

What I really like about Belonging Outside Belonging games is how they paint such a picture of a character. But more than other systems, they’re very much about the messy relationships you’re forming. I think that concept didn’t really happen in my brain when I was first reading them, where now I’m like, well, of course you need the lure. How else are you going to make these relationships? How else are you going to force yourself into weird little positions of vulnerability with other characters that you weren’t expecting to have?

Bee: I think also my difficulty with lures — and I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, Barclay — but I know that we both primarily play games online. There’s a tactility in Belonging Outside Belonging games that if you’re playing online and referencing a PDF instead of having a physical sheet in front of you, it makes it more difficult to remember to reference everything you have.

Barclay: Yeah, I think we’ve talked about this with other friends too — even moves sometimes in Belonging Outside Belonging games, it’s like, oh, I’m just kind of doing improv with my friends right now. I kind of forgot there are other things on the sheet. I’m not playing a game. I’m doing improv.

Sam: I mean, I really love Fiasco, where the whole thing is like, here’s 45 minutes of procedure to get you set up to then do two hours of improv with your friends. And that’s still a game. The setup is really key framing. In the same way, I think when you have a book that’s written as well as this one, I can show up and be like, yeah, we’re going to improv in the world of Heaven in the Dust. But that really hits at my big problem with lures: forgetting that other people have them and you should use them. I’ve played a lot of these games online and in person, and it is easier to forget about them online. But in person, I find myself forgetting about them too because the sheet is all the way in front of some other person.

What I want is a lure that I can take action to bait someone else into taking. In my mind, Hades’ lure — whenever someone places themselves in your debt or makes a deal with you, they gain a coin — I want that phrased as: when you offer to make a deal to someone or put them in your debt, you give them a coin. They would be used more frequently at least if they were in front of the right player.

Bee: I do also like reframing it as “you give them a coin” because it makes me think about strings in Powered by the Apocalypse games. Especially because Belonging Outside Belonging is so much about interpersonal relationships, I like it more as something you are giving to somebody instead of something you’re gaining nebulously.

Barclay: Sam, what you’re suggesting is actually very similar to how the birthrights work in this game.

Sam: Oh, interesting. Tell me about the birthrights — I’ve read the game but haven’t played it, so I’m much less familiar with them.

Barclay: Yeah, so I’ve played it a couple of times with Luke and other friends. Each playbook or archetype has four birthrights that are things that God is a God of — things relevant to that character. Hades’ birthrights are authority, death, desperation, and despair. The prompt in each playbook says: whenever someone interacts with your birthrights, you may suggest a ruinous action they could take. Should they accept, award them one coin.

So it’s not giving them one of yours, but how this often comes into play is a scene you are not a part of — you are tuned in because you’re listening for your birthrights — and you say, that sounds like something in my wheelhouse. What if you did this awful thing? And then they get a coin for it.

Sam: That is very compelling. It also really highlights the God side of the theming. Hades totally has domain over authority, death, desperation, and despair, and in some ways almost feels like a little mini setting element for whoever’s playing as Hades — you can do a little GMing when it comes to those themes.

Barclay: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And I do think it fills in that gap of, I kind of forget what other people’s lures are. My solution for that when I’m writing lures is: how can I write things that you’re already going to do based on the vibe of the playbook you’re picking? You have to kind of be listening for your own lures. For Hades, it would be like, if someone starts to make a deal with you, you can go, oh, you get a coin — we just did this thing. But it should be things that are naturally happening.

Sam: I’m thinking about the birthrights more. One of the things I really love most about lures is how specific they are — you can really imagine the scene of most lures, especially the well-written ones. The birthright ones are much more open-ended. Maybe you pay a little cost there to make that kind of mechanic run, but when you make something more open-ended it gives you as the player more room to come in and play. It’s so hard to come up with good specifics. That’s one of the things I love about lures — yes, I can build a whole session around, oh no, I made a deal with Hades.

Barclay: Yeah, for sure. And the birthrights thing, because they’re so vague, becomes really interesting in play. There’s something so fun about being on the receiving end of someone going, hey, this sounds like this thing — do you want to do this awful thing? In play of this game I’ve had scenes where I’ve been prompted by multiple people within the same line of dialogue, all saying like, something bad is about to happen to you.

It’s really, really interesting for a game that is so forged in creating tragedy. It also makes it very compelling to go, hey, here’s a chance to get some leverage — especially because the moves in this game are also a little different. There are no strong and weak moves. You have to spend a coin to take any of your five moves, and there’s no other way to gain them other than interacting with lures and birthrights, which puts it in a different framing than a lot of other usages of similar mechanics.

Sam: Yeah, that feels like you’d have a lot more, oh no, how do I get coins? I guess I better pick up everyone else’s sheet and find out.

Okay, so we’ve been talking about birthrights. This game also has duties. What’s the deal with duties?

Bee: You start with as many coins as duties you have — it’s usually two to three. You lose all coins anytime you break a duty, and you ask the table how fate punishes you.

I really love that the only way you can gain coins is by interacting with other people’s lures. You’re losing coins all the time in this game unless you are somehow interacting with people’s lures more than you’re making moves, which is just sort of not possible. I really love the operating-at-a-deficit there, especially because this game is tragic.

For Hades, since we’ve been talking about him the most — his duties are give a job to anyone who asks, enforce each contract to the letter, and keep the factory running no matter what. Persephone’s are answer whenever your patron calls and put your freedom first. And I think that in order for the game to be interesting, you have to be breaking duties.

Sam: I like the degree to which you’re always operating at a deficit. People have to be threatening you with the good time of breaking your duties. The juice of duties is: am I going to break this? Please, someone put me in a situation where I have to decide whether or not to break my duties. They are in that way like anti-lures — if someone wants to mess with you, they can look at your duties and come do exactly that.

Barclay: This game is so interesting because while there aren’t strong and weak moves, it kind of takes lures and makes them into strong moves and weak moves — and also a secret third thing — because there’s the duties we’re talking about. That thing of threatening people with a good time has, in play, absolutely happened to me: someone suggests a ruinous action, and it’s like, I will get a coin for doing this — but it’s also breaking one of my duties.

So I’m going to lose all my coins by doing it. It’s an interesting way of twisting this concept of lures and moves and framing them a little bit differently in a way that makes them more actionable. There’s also a failing that every playbook has, similar to a weak move: you are doing something bad and you get a coin from doing it. All of the moves in each playbook are just reframings of lures.

Sam: Yeah, because the failing is just a weak move — but it’s always you’re doing a thing to a person. It’s really relationship-based in the way that lures are, and that is the biggest strength of lures.

Barclay: Yeah, a lot of really strong bait for interacting with people in ways that are going to harm both of you.

Sam: I’m thinking about my favorite way to play Belonging Outside Belonging games, which is to try to play for the high score and get as many tokens as I possibly can. My high score in Dream Askew is something like eight tokens, which I was very proud of. And I feel like that would be extra hard to do in this game because you’re relying so much on other people’s birthrights to come give you coins — you have to play with smart people who can really mess you up in order to get those coins.

This is something I was also thinking about with lures at large: how you could do lures without attaching coins or tokens. You could just say, here’s a cool relationship thing about this playbook — come at me. But when you attach the token, people are like, oh shiny, let’s try to get the high score. And I’m sure someone’s written a PhD thesis on incentives of this kind. They are powerful. But it is interesting that they’re also not necessary — if I’m playing at a table with friends who are all just like, the incentive for us is to mess each other up, I don’t need tokens for that.

Barclay: Yeah, and that’s also the sort of crowd this game draws in, especially with birthrights — you are not getting anything from them other than messing your friend up. They’re getting something if they take it, but you don’t lose anything by not taking it.

Sam: Yeah, the incentive of using a birthright is: wouldn’t it be funny if your character got into even more trouble in this particular way?

How much, in playing Belonging Outside Belonging games with lures, have you done the thing of looking at your sheet, seeing your lure, and then approaching someone else to be like, do you want to be in my debt now? Like flipping the action of the lure to really go up and put it in other people’s faces? I do feel like that’s how they end up working most in practice for me, because of that thing we were talking about earlier — I can’t see what’s on other people’s sheets.

Bee: It’s not something I’ve done, but it feels like a pro strat I should start using. I just wish there was a way to see other people’s lures all the time so you wouldn’t have to be the first to initiate for your own lure.

Barclay: What I often do is as we’re going around doing character creation, I take note of what other people’s lures are so I can be more proactive in helping them use them.

Sam: It does make me want to, if I’m playing this game on Google Slides or whatever, just have a whole slide that is a list of everyone’s lures so I can look at it at any time.

Barclay: Yeah, for sure. I also think my proclivity towards helping other people do more things definitely informs that. Even in games where this is not a role I can take, I am a support player.

Sam: All right, any last words or takeaways about lures here?

Barclay: I think there’s also something to be said about how social these games are — how important the social relationships between characters are — and how social relationships are never going to be smooth. You kind of have to be a little bit clunky and say, hey, do you want to take this moment to be weird and vulnerable with me? Maybe you’ll get a coin about it. There’s something a little bit clunky about that that I think is kind of fun in a social, messy relationship game.

Sam: As much as I was complaining about people not using lures in practice because they don’t remember to pick up other people’s character sheets — it’s kind of cool to have an incentive to just grab someone else’s character sheet and take a look at it. While you’re there, maybe you’ll see something else that’s neat. I love putting mechanical attention on relationships like this. I would really love to see designers trying other things that just live in the space between characters, in relationships, rather than on one playbook — what is my cool superpower ability? That’s just so much less interesting to me than what is the nature of my relationship to my weird friends.

Barclay: That is so at the core of everything that I write and design. I’m so intrigued by the relationships between people, and my pipe dream game is a game that is as socially crunchy as a lot of games are combat crunchy. It’s so intriguing to me.

Sam: It’s also interesting — does more crunch pull more focus to that thing, or does bringing a lot of crunch to relationships make them feel less relationship-y because now they feel mechanical, as opposed to the weird free-form flowing thing that is constantly negotiating relationships?

Bee: But then also, what can you do with making relationships feel more mechanical and something you have to really manage?

Sam: Yeah, totally. Everyone else go out and design your games about relationships so that we can play them and send them to me. Well, thanks for coming on Dice Exploder. It was great.

Bee: Thank you so much for having us.

Barclay: Thanks for having us.

Sam: Thanks again to Barclay and Bee for being here. You can listen to their show, Tabletop Book Club, wherever podcasts are sold. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon. As always, you can find me on Bluesky at Dice Exploder and you can find my games at sdunnewold.itch.io.

Our logo was designed by Sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray and our ad music is Lily Pads by Travis Tessmer. This episode was edited by Em Acosta. Thank you, Em.

And thanks to you for listening. I’ll see you next time.