Ask A Frequent Question: carry. a game about war.

Hiya,

This thread is for questions about carry. a game about war. It's a game about the burden's and issue that soldiers bring with them into the Vietnam war. I'll be updating this post to incoporate answers from downthread.

How adaptable to other wars is it?

It's fairly adaptable, in that the condition of pressure in war is fairly universal. I imagine that it wouldn't be particularly effective for a "defending the homeland" kind of situation, however.

The only thing you would have to do is make a new squad. Use the existing squad as a template for game mechanical information - that is, keep all of the Ranks, Profiles and Months In the same, but feel free to change the names and descriptions. The mechanical info is designed how it is on purpose, and messing with it will change tie-breaking, among other things.

The color and narration can be adapted however you want, of course.

Is it or will it be available in PDF?

No. carry will never be offered as a PDF.

I know you weren't in Vietnam - what compelled you to write a game about it?

I'm too young to have any direct experience with Vietnam (I was 20 when I began the writing the game, and 22 when I finished). But it has always fascinated me as a this thing that still is with us and still directly impacts both the self-image of the citizenry of the United States, and our governments foreign policy. We are still learning the lessons of Vietnam, as filtered through the years since and the current world situations we face. So thats kind of the answer to why I found it an interesting subject to write about.

The spark or trigger for the game came from the contraints of the Iron Game Chef competition. The genre was Historical, and I was brainstorming historical eras that I haven't really seen addressed in games. Vietnam was on the list, along with Inca and the era of Spanish domination of the New World. As I tried to fit in the ingredients with each of those, Accuser and Invincible flowed naturally into how I saw a game about Vietnam working. I've been a huge fan of the powerful, powerful book The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brian, and I starting working from that framework, of how these soldiers are flawed beings that face more internal than external conflict. And it just went from there.

I will reiterate something that I posted on my blog during the final stages of production - the game is set in Vietnam, but it's about the fiction that we as Americans have created about the Vietnam war.