Interview: "Mappa Mundi" with Three Sails Studios

The past month or so has seen so many awesome TTRPG Kickstarters get launched. It is an awesome time for the indie RPG scene. One of the ones that I've been seeing the most press about and which shattered its Kickstarter goal is Mappa Mundi, the debut project of 3 Sails Studios. Mappa Mundi is an "exploration and ecology RPG" that is drawing particular attention for being a zero-combat game. The Kickstarter is still live for one more week, and you can back Mappa Mundi on Kickstarter using this link.

I got a chance to have a conversation with one of the designers of Mappa Mundi, George Bickers, about the game. You can read that interview below.

This interview was edited for clarity and length. It's still pretty long, but this was so much fun and I couldn't pick what to cut.

So I've read the Kickstarter and I'm super excited about the game. It looks really cool. For my readers, though, what is Mappa Mundi's elevator pitch? What is the game about and why is it unique?

Mappa Mundi is an exploration and ecology RPG--the clue is there in the subtitle. It is an original system, so it is not 5e derivative or anything like that. Players are Chroniclers trained by the Mappa Mundi Institute, and they are are essentially adventuring academics. They are normal people who have been specially trained to go out into a world that is a parallel version of our own world and to reconnect it after 100 years of ecological catastrophe. This catastrophe was called the Flux, and it took the form of giant storms that separated continents and regions of the world off from one another.

Now, the Flux is seeming to abate, and so the Mappa Mundi Institute is sending their first teams of Chroniclers to reconnect it, but also to study it and learn about it and see what has changed. The biggest example of this is to research, encounter, and learn about the world's monsters.

The world of Mappa Mundi is called Ecumene, and the core rulebook covers our version of Eurasia and a little bit of North Africa (which has been cut off by the world's equivalent of the Sahara, which is still wracked by Flux storms). Our company's motto is "The Real World Done Fantastically," so all of our games take place either in the real world or in an incredibly close parallel version, and this one takes place in that latter camp. The major difference is that monsters are a real thing.

But we use "monster" closer to its original Latin, which was a portent or a warning of things to come, rather than just as something monstrous. And that's key to the philosophy of Mappa Mundi because it is a zero-combat system. I realize I've buried the lede there a little bit. The Mappa Mundi Institute and its chroniclers have sworn an oath to do no harm, and they go into the world seeking to heal it and restore it and learn about it rather than to fight things and kill things.

Where did the idea for Mappa Mundi come from?

The initial concept came to me in a dream. I woke up and I was describing this new idea by saying that it is Pokémon, but your job is just to complete the Pokédex rather than to become an elite champion. And I know that's actually the purpose of Pokemon, too, "gotta catch them all". So I said it is that, but its medieval bestiaries.

So the concept initially was an animal collection game. But I'm a passionate, long-term vegan, and I don't want to capture and cage animals. So how do you Pokémon without capturing animals? You're writing one of those bestiaries. That was the original kernel of the idea.

It quickly developed into a game where how you got to the monsters was just as important as facing the monsters themselves. To go to those classic pillars of D&D, exploration is often challenging and little more than "you leave point A and arrive at point B five days later." Maybe you have a random encounter. But I wanted to make exploration actually worth doing and make it fun and meaningful. That was the root of the journey deck.

And beyond that, Mappa Mundi is inspired by right now. So many of us feel powerless on the edge of a climate crisis. It is not of our making, it is caused by corporations and the billionaire class, and so many of us feel powerless to do anything about it. Mappa Mundi looks powerlessness straight in the face. There are things that normal people can do; we can't stop oil being drilled or plastic pollution, but when normal people step forward and do things, they make the world a better place. Mappa Mundi takes that attitude from the other side of the climate catastrophe.

Can you talk more about the Journey Deck?

There is a pool of 70 cards in total– 36 landscapes, and then one card for each of our 30 monsters in the book, plus 2 creature cards and two opportunity cards that give the narrator (GM) the opportunity to throw some additional stuff into the journey phase.

You're usually doing three distinct phases going Research and then Journey and then Encounter. So during the research phase, as you're learning about the environment you're passing through, the narrator is picking cards from the overall deck to make a deck for that specific chapter of the story. For example, if there is a coastal-dwelling monster, the narrator might have picked out the beach, the cliffs, the coast, and the caves as landscapes.

If the players learn a beach exists, it goes in upside down, because just knowing that a beach is in their way is not enough. If they learn that the beach was recently wracked by a storm and have more detail, it goes in rightside up. Because they learned more, they're expecting it and so they'll have an opportunity or a benefit from being there, rather than just being a challenge. The deck is built by player action and inaction, so what they succeed and fail in learning.

One thing that makes particularly the journey phase and the encounter phase shine is the shaping mechanic. This is something that TTRPG tables have been doing for decades, but we weren't seeing it codified in the core rules in many places. Shaping is collaborative worldbuilding; one of our playtesters described it as "adding flavor text to the world." In many games, you'd approach a beach and the GM would give you a detailed description. You can then interact with it, based on that description. In Mappa Mundi, the narrator gives a very brief description. We go around the table and the players add detail. This gives the players not only a sense of ownership of the world and the environment, but also can add their own gameplay elements to interact with. If they want to do something specific, they can shape it in. By codifying it, we're adding a space for it. The only rule is that you cannot erase something that someone else has added. It is very "Yes and". Only narrator can say "no", but it should always be a "no but". When we were playtesting it, people loved it.

Shaping sounds a lot like the mechanic in 10 Candles, if you've played that. You're going around and building in elements of what is around you.

Yeah, it is like 10 Candles. Or it also reminds me of Microscope, is another example. It's collective worldbuilding, I'm adding this in and we're all dealing with it now. RPG tables have been doing this for a long time, we're just really emphasizing it in the rules and giving space for it and making it core, so that you don't get someone who tries to run the game where you have to experience only their world. Mappa Mundi is a game about agency and so I want the players to have that as well.

Can you elaborate on the idea of non-combat gameplay with the encounter phase? You've got the Journey Deck to support the standard D&D-esque "exploration pillar", but what does it look like to encounter a monster with no combat?

Yeah, from the outside, Mappa Mundi looks like it could be D&D or Pathfinder. The cover of the book is four adventurers with a three-headed dragon flying by. It looks like it could be one of these games. But I really wanted to subvert that idea with the non-combat gameplay, since those games are combat-centric no matter how much you try to tweak them.

When you actually encounter these monsters, the gameplay is still a lot like a boss battle. There's a delineated space where you're facing these monsters. But rather than trying to remove the monster's HP by hitting them with swords and axes, you're trying to reveal their unique behavior. Most monsters in the game have 8 unique behaviors, and your job is to use your skills, your positioning, your roleplaying, and your research from the earlier phases of gameplay, to prompt these behaviors to be revealed. Once those are revealed, you'll then document them.

There's a fail state--you irritate the monster and it flees, which means you lose the opportunity to learn about it, and even if you find it again, it will be harder to learn about it--and that has an impact in the world. If you don't learn about a monster, people might think it is a threat, and people might go out to hunt it and hurt it. You've failed in your role.

In combat games, the fail state is being defeated or dying. In Mappa Mundi, the fail state is that you've not learned enough about this creature and you failed in your duty to protect it and the world.

My website is focused on the idea of using the real world to enhance your TTRPGs, so I love that idea of "the real world done fantastically." So in that vein, can you talk more about the world of Mappa Mundi, the Mappa Mundi Institute, and how the human world has changed as a result of the Flux?

Sounds like we're a perfect match!

What I'm trying to do with Mappa Mundi is to holding a mirror up to the world in its current moment, but also to show what can happen after. In the real world, we're in the beginning of climate disaster. Depending on where you are in the world, you're experiencing that more or less, but we are absolutely in the beginning of climate collapse. If the climate collapses, we're not all going to die– a lot of people will, and lives for the rest will change dramatically– but humanity as a species is not necessarily going to be wiped out by climate collapse. So what Mappa Mundi is trying to do is show a world that is now coming out the other end of that. Mappa Mundi is showing this world that has endured cultural isolation and fear and anxiety that comes with that climate collapse, and are now emerging into this new version of the world.

So in terms of what the world looks like, the Flux hasn't been destructive so much as isolating. This is not your standard "post-apocalyptic" world, it is not a wasteland. It is lush and verdant. A lot of the post-apocalyptic genre is very anthropocentric, by saying "oh, if humans can't live there, it must be completely inhospitable," but other life exists and would flourish. That life is just maybe different from what it was before.

For humanity in this world, we're trying to capture that this is a world that might look relatively similar to how it did before. But after 100 years of being unable to move through these storms and things getting worse and worse around us, large sectors of humanity in Mappa Mundi have developed a fear of the natural world instead of a love and appreciation for it before the Flux. Now it is almost antagonistic. The job of the Mappa Mundi Institute and the players is to go out and reforge those connections, to understand that non-human life is not inherently threatening or dangerous.

We talk about reconnecting the world a lot in Mappa Mundi, but a lot of it is about restoring human attitudes and healing through climate trauma.

Something that I ask everyone that I interview: what's your journey to RPGs, game design, and the TTRPG publishing world? What was your path to this point?

I grew up really poor. The one thing we did have were books and a second-hand Playstation. Over summer holidays, while babysitting my four younger siblings, I played a lot of Final Fantasy. A game that lasts 120 hours kills a lot of time. I had that and books. At around 10, I discovered Warhammer Fantasy and could never afford any of it, but I started writing stories and theory-crafted lists for Warhammer armies that I could never afford.

As I got older, I discovered tabletop roleplaying games. It felt like a very natural transition as someone who always enjoyed writing and imagining and who grew up on a diet of JRPGs. My first TTRPG was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. I absolutely loved it. I didn't play D&D for the first time until I was in my 20s, so I had a lot of other roleplaying experience before D&D. This meant that D&D has never been the standard for me. I feel quite liberated from the D&D monopoly. I've played it and enjoyed it, but it has never really been my main TTRPG "thing".

In terms of design, I started with tabletop miniature wargames. I used to be a Youtube content creator for A Song of Ice and Fire Miniature Wargame. I was a big fish in a small pond there. I realized through that that I was able to talk about games in a way that people enjoyed, and to dissect games and communicate that to other people.

And I always wanted to design games. I wrote scripts for Final Fantasy ripoffs in my teens. One day, I just had an idea for a game and so I designed a tabletop miniature wargame. That gave me the confidence to do TTRPGs. Initially I was doing both, but then I transitioned fully into TTRPGs.

I built a team of three. There's me, there's Joel Kilpatrick who is our artist, and there's Jeremy Blum who is our developer, editor, and co-writer. We all three co-own Three Sails Studios. Mappa Mundi is our first big project. I've done writing for some other TTRPGs, Joel has done illustrations for other TTRPGs, Jeremy has written and been a cultural consultant for other TTRPGs, but this is our first project and it is quite big. The Kickstarter has been going really well, especially for a first project, and we're talking about expansions and how we'll continue Mappa Mundi from here. From humble beginnings to where we are now.

Do you have a favorite thing that you got to write into the game?

My favorite thing, conceptually, that I've gotten to do is that there are a number of monsters that are inspired by real-world folk monsters where, as far as we're aware, we're the very first English presentation of those monsters. So for example, the Mo Sin A are indigenous Taiwanese monster. Jeremy Blum is Taiwanese-American, and as far as he can tell, the Mo Sin A are only featured in one Taiwanese movie series that has not had wide release. So we're bringing that to the western canon for the first time. As far as we can tell, Joel is the first person to every visually depict it in the west.

We've got a number of other monsters like that, where they are somewhat known in their countries of origin but they don't exist in English.

Another example is the Sumpurni, which are Lithuanian monsters. They're 8 foot tall dogs that mimic humans and are very aggressive. There's no record that I can find of them in English until we brought them into Mappa Mundi.

That's my favorite thing that we've done in the game. That'll also be a key part of the game as we think about expansions.

You mentioned Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying is how you started. What other RPGs do you play now and particularly like?

I had a long time with no in-person group, and we just finally got an in-person group back together. So my current group--we're about to have our second session--we're just playing a series of one-shots.

We did a really fun hack of Paranoia the other day. We're doing Mausritter this month. I'm running Doomsong in April, which I was really excited about backing the Kickstarter. Maybe top of my list that I'm desperate to try is Fabula Ultima the TTJRPG, that probably figures with my previous answer. I haven't gotten a group together for that because it is difficult to find people around me who are as obsessed with JRPGs as I am, but I'm really looking forward to that one.

I read far more RPGs than I get to play, but that's something I love about RPGs. They're simultaneously games, books, art objects, and worldbuilding calls. I love them for all four of those categories. I get a lot out of just reading them as well.

Where can we find you?

I don't really do social media separate from business accounts. So you can find Three Sails Studies on Bluesky and Instagram, both @threesailsstudios. You can find us at threesailsstudios.com. And obviously the Kickstarter is the big one at the moment!

Back Mappa Mundi on Kickstarter today before the campaign ends!

This article may include affiliate links, which allows me to get a small portion of the price you pay, at no extra cost to you or the creator.