No Truce With the Furies Interview

No Truce With the Furies, a police procedural RPG from ZA/UM Studio is being published by Humble Bundle, and to help promote the game, the folks at Humble Bundle have set up an interview with ZA/UM’s writing team at ComicBook.com. The interview is aimed at people who aren’t all that familiar with the title, so if you’d like to get acquainted with this unique and innovative upcoming RPG without delving too deep – now’s your chance. An excerpt:

I’m excited about this game because I researched it, but my readers are still wondering what the hell a “police procedural role-playing game” even is. Let’s try something fun. Let’s just assume we’re working with about a 30-second attention span, here. Can you give us your best elevator pitch for No Truce With the Furies? Tell us real short-like what makes this game unique.

NTWTF: By calling the game a “police procedural”, we’re paying homage to the buddy cop show genre that inspired much of the game’s narrative structure. Think “The Shield”, “The Wire”, “NYPD Blue”, and throw in some “Miami Vice” for good measure. But with disco. And problem drinking. And some of the most devious dialogue choices ever attempted in RPGs. As for what makes it unique… press “lobby” on the elevator panel and lets go!

No Truce With the Furies takes place in a fictional universe first featured in a novel written by our lead designer, Sacred and Terrible Air. Estonian literary critics have described the genre of the novel as “fantastic realism”, a fresh take on crafting a world that is *not* just fantasy, science fiction, or even some sort of alternate history. It is as though whatever set of dice was rolled for the rules according to which our own world was developed had been rolled again, resulting in a sort of strange, shifted realism. While it reflects many aspects of our world — disco music, modern art, recreational drug use, international treaties, communism, nihilism, gangbangers — the game-world is unique and full of painstaking detail that makes even the familiar disorienting.

As far as gameplay goes, we emphasize reactivity above all. We aim to tell a compelling story that’s different from the ones you typically see in video games, but also just very human. You are not the chosen one. You are not going to save the world. But, after starting out pounded into a pulp by the vagaries of life and your own poor decisions, you might be able to stop drinking and get back on the proverbial horse. Get your colleagues to respect you again. Maybe even become a better person. Definitely find loads of secrets in this pretty ambitious little open world we’ve crafted. Isometric RPG’s haven’t tried open worlds yet, I believe? Well, we have an open world, albeit a compact one.

Alright now let’s get our hands dirty. The world in NTWTF is a dark one. In the real world, we have a perennial fascination with an ever-impending apocalypse. For every generation it seems the end of the world is far-out, yet potentially imminent. In No Truce, it’s kind of taken for granted that you could get obliterated at any moment, right? There’s something called “the pale” which has shaped our characters in a grim way. Do you want to tell us more about that?

NTWTF: We get this question a lot, but there’s little we can say about the impending apocalypse at the moment. In the game, we try to present the player with more-or-less realistic choices in a more-or-less realistic setting, and, thus, the player will come upon several mysteries to solve (as a detective should!). However, you can discover grander mysteries along the way, overarching mysteries relating to the nature of the world you find yourself in. These are unknown not only to the player, but also to most of the world’s denizens.

So as not to spoil the fun of exploring and trying to understand the essence of the world we are constructing, we can’t really disclose more details about “the pale” or other such phenomena. (We call them extraphysical — the pale is by far the grandest and most foreboding, but not the only one)