Interview: "Designing PREQUEL" with Ethan Yen

I recently got the opportunity to playtest PREQUEL, a new collaborative worldbuilding RPG that makes a great introductory vignette before a new campaign. I absolutely loved playing PREQUEL. While there were a few balance issues that my group stumbled across because we were a smaller party than other playtest groups, those are things that I’m confident will be fixed by the actual release of the game. The core gameplay loop is a tactical combat, but after each move you make, there is an associated prompt that helps you fill in the world or your journey to get to the boss battle. It is a unique blend of narrative worldbuilding storygame and tactical combat that I haven’t seen elsewhere and I had a ton of fun playing it! That said, this week’s post is not a review of the game; I’d want to run the game before writing a review, to see it from the GM side of the screen, and I have not yet gotten the chance to do that.

Instead, my follow up to the playtest was a chance to sit down and interview one of the designers: Ethan Yen. Ethan has previously worked with Evil Hat Productions, Ghostfire Gaming, and Wet Ink Games. He also co-created the solo journaling game Fetch My Blade, which was one of Polygon’s “Best Tabletop RPGs We Played in 2023” and something that I’m adding to my to-be-played list (readers of the blog will know I love solo journaling games). 

PREQUEL connects to my love of history and worldbuilding because it is fundamentally a game about legacy. You are writing the history that the future generations–the heroes of a normal campaign in your favorite heroic fantasy system–will have learned about, or will uncover. The weaknesses that are built into the boss become the deep lore necessary for the main campaign heroes to ultimately vanquish the evil once and for all.  But this also makes it a game about historical memory. You’re making all these decisions, and many of them will not carry over or be remembered. It is a really cool game for me because it makes you think about the ways that history is forgotten, and which moments are important enough that they imprint in our social consciousness. 

PREQUEL is available now on Kickstarter. Normally, I do not back Kickstarters (I’m always worried that I’m not going to get the final product), but this one is far enough along and is fully playable, that I have no such doubts this time around. Any contributions through my link go towards supporting the game, with a small percentage given back in support of the blog. The Kickstarter campaign runs from today until February 16th, so consider contributing today!

Without further ado, my conversation with Ethan Yen!

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

The Interview

What is the basic pitch for PREQUEL? I had a lot of fun playing it and I know that I’m going to describe my experience, but can you share the official premise?

The basic pitch for PREQUEL is that it is a tactical storytelling game of heroic sacrifice. You play as the first heroes that are engaging against an overwhelming evil that is besetting the realm. During your final fight, you realize that you are sorely underprepared and that you are not going to make it out alive. That’s the heroic sacrifice portion. The game turns from just this fight to “what can we do to ensure that the next generation of heroes have a better chance than we do?” It becomes about what type of legacy you are going to leave. 

It is a one-shot game. It is designed to be something that you would play at the beginning of a long term campaign or just as a one shot to play for fun.

How did you get the idea for PREQUEL? Where did the game come from?

First is my love for the fantasy genre. The major touchstone was the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies. The movies open with this prequel and this massive battle of all the armies against Sauron. That moment sets everything else up for the rest of the story. That intro scene is ingrained in my mind. I thought that it would be cool to play as those heroes there, where their choices have very real consequences for the actual heroes of the story. 

Second is that as I’ve played TTRPGs, especially games like Dungeons and Dragons where combat is such a core focus of the game, I always think about what the narrative implications of my actions are.  What is my character thinking when they’re making that attack? That was one of the core goals of PREQUEL: how can we meld this narrative implication with the tactical combat choices as close as possible so that one feeds off of the other. 

And that’s something that definitely came across when I played it, and is something that I had not seen before. Games I’ve played tend to be very narrative or more tactical, but this struck a distinct balance and had both.

Yeah, that was one of our biggest challenges going into it. We knew going into it that there are games out there that, when they do combat, it is very much a conversation and less of a tactical “what power am I going to use” decision. Much more about how the actions of the characters is a parallel to their relationship. That is a very narrative way to treat it. That feels very at odds with tactical combat on a grid with miniatures; the two styles are on opposite poles. James and I really wanted to see how close together we could get those poles with the understanding that there would be a lot of tension, between concerns about keeping the story moving and wanting to make the optimal tactical decision.

How did you and James Quigley (the other developer) meet? How did this partnership come into being?

I had started working on PREQUEL sometime back in the summer of 2023. I was really just outlining the things that I wanted this game to do. I wrote some design diaries on my blog. It was very much about this idea of leaving a legacy during combat and heroic sacrifice. I shared that on social media, and James was one of the people who read the post. He responded to the post with a few ideas that he had based on the premise. I had no interaction with him prior to that. At 2023 Big Bad Con, James ran into me and introduced himself there. We got to put a face to the name from when we were interacting online. 

Late 2023 to 2024, I was somewhat stuck on the mechanics and so I tabled PREQUEL for a while. I really like collaboration, so since James had expressed interest, I reached out in early 2024 to gauge his interest in a partnership. We’ve been working together since. 

You’ve done a lot of work outside of PREQUEL, and you’ve worked with a lot of other publishers. What was your journey into game design? How did you break into the TTRPG industry?

My journey is mirroring that of a lot of folks in the US at least. I started playing D&D 3.5, a while ago. I always gravitated towards being the GM. After graduating university, I always liked creative writing–mostly short stories. DMsGuild had been running for a couple years by that point, so I started writing up some adventures that I ran for my home group. That’s the way I started taking it a little more seriously, just turning adventures that I’ve run into something for other people to pick up and run. 

I started reaching out to convention organizers for D&D organized play events. They were looking for adventure writers. So I reached out to the people running the Adventurers League program at Gamehole Con in Madison, WI. They invited me to be on their organizing team. It was a group of about four folks who outlined adventures for the year, assigned writers, and did the editing. That moved me from just writing adventures to writing and producing.  There was more product management and team organizing to that. I did that for 3-4 years, until I started going beyond that. 

AL organizing was great, but I was starting to feel a little restricted creatively because of what a D&D organized play adventure can do. So probably 2021, I started going to more conventions like Big Bad Con, where I got a POC scholarship to fly out there. That really leveled up my game design. I was able to make more connections to people who were doing things outside of more traditional spaces, which really opened my eyes to indie games. If I didn’t have to follow rules or restrictions to pre-established games, what would the game I want look like?

Parallel to that was freelancing, since 2019. That was mostly writing adventures or stat blocks or magic items. I would freelance and do my own little games on the side. But PREQUEL is the first major production I’ve done. My previous things were all done in house using stock art. For PREQUEL, it is more of an endeavor. We’re hiring a layout designer and illustrators. We’re taking it to a level that is further than I’ve ever done. 

What’s the value of a game like PREQUEL? How does writing a prequel enrich the world for a later campaign?

Prequel is a state of mind. When you’re playing  a game called PREQUEL, you know that you are not the main character. The story is eventually going to focus on someone else. When that happens, the actions you take are both less and more important. What I do will have implications for the people who will have to deal with this later. In society, we often have a mindset about immediacy and how something will benefit me. PREQUEL is focused on how your actions affect future generations, which is a very different mindset. When you go into a game like that, it changes how you make your choices. You start thinking about how you will make your actions matter to people who you–or your character–will never meet in the future. (Unless you take the power where your soul gets imbued in a sword, then I guess you’d meet the heroes). I think that in and of itself is a pretty powerful statement for the game to make.

Also, I think it connects to how history is only written by the victors. How you learn about history is always filtered through the current regime of power and through societal values. In this game, you get a chance to get to see an event from a bunch of perspectives. You’re seeing it in their present with the battle. You’re seeing it in the past with the build up that you’re writing through the prompts. But at the end of the fight, you’re seeing what is going to last and how it will get carried forward. The things you’re struggling with now won’t fully be realized by people in the future; they’re not going to see or care about every decision that you made, and that is very much baked into the rules, even as you have just spent time agonizing over your tactical decisions. Even if you come back to the world for a longer campaign, you’ll experience that story in a very different way. Being able to see both of those sides as the player is fun. 

There’s a part of the system where you have a burden for your character that informs all their decisions, something that they’re carrying with them. At the end, when they have to make their heroic sacrifice to determine their legacy, that is a reflection of that burden, either turning it into a sort of positive light or resolving it in a more reflective way. So that is how only some of your decisions are really going to carry through.

One of the core mechanics of the game is that each of your abilities during combat gives you a prompt. Do you have a favorite prompt in the game?

My favorite power is “Change Perspective,” which is one of the powers of the Swiftblade calling. It’s a good example of what we were trying to do with blending the tactical combat and the storytelling. Change Perspective just in the name connects to both parts. The power lets you move anywhere on the battlefield and take an ally with you, literally changing your tactical perspective in the fight. The prompt part of the power has you recall an event before a previous event that you’ve already written with another power. And it asks “what did you secretly change that gave you an advantage over the Evil?” So it also lets you tweak something that you already established, and you’re changing your perspective on the story that you’re writing. 

What other RPGs do you play and particularly like?

I’ve got a shelf of games, but half of them haven’t been played yet. As far as indie games go, my tastes are pretty mainstream. I love Blades in the Dark. That game is probably the first game that I played that wasn’t a major game like D&D or Pathfinder. 

Rowan Rook and Decard’s Resistance System Games, Heart and Spire, are really great games. I like those games and their philosophy and how they embrace the world of the game. The classes are not generic wizard or fighter. They are really out there and they’re really rooted in the world. My mindset now is that any game that I’m going to make, everything needs to be in service of the world.

I’ve played a lot of PbtA. Right now I’m playing Avatar Legends. I try to play new games all the time, but the long term games are probably D&D and those other games I mentioned. But I love one shots and “few-shots.” I’m a big proponent of running mini-series of like 5 or 6 sessions to try out other systems.

Where can we find you?

You can find me on my website at https://ethanyen.com/. All my other links are on that website. For socials, I’m mostly just active on Bluesky now, @ethanyen.com. You can find my games on Itch at https://ethanyen.itch.io/. 

And you can help us get our Kickstarter funded by clicking this link!