Exclusive Interview With The Creators Of Role Playing Card Game ‘Negocios Infernales’ (Part 1)

Video Games

Oct 10

Something mysterious this way comes…. CultureSlate had the privilege to sit down with authors and game designers Carlos Hernandez and C.S.E. Cooney (Claire) to discuss their new roleplaying card game, Negocios Infernales, coming to Kickstarter on October 10. Carlos is the author of the Rick Riordan Presents Sal and Gabi duology and is a professor at the City University of New York. Claire is the author of Saint Death’s Daughter and the World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans and is an audiobook narrator. We had so much fun chatting that the interview will be released in two parts. Below is the first part, in which we discuss all things roleplaying, the inspiration for this particular game, and just how deep the development of roleplaying games can go.

CS: How did the game idea come about for Negocios Infernales?

Carlos: This game is literally a love letter to Claire. I’ve been playing roleplaying games since the early 80s, and they’ve been fundamental to my writing career, my creative-thinking career, and part of my imagination. And I thought that Claire would be the most amazing person to play roleplaying games with because not only is she an award-winning writer, but she’s also a trained actor. Fits right into that roleplaying niche.

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Claire: It was just so much work. I was spending hours a day sitting on my ass making worlds. In high school I sat in on a couple of games, not playing them, but being peripheral to them. As an adult, I was in one DnD game. It was a one-shot, and I was thrown in the middle, which people say is how you’re supposed to do it, but it’s not actually how I learn at all. I was confused and it seemed very shallow. There were a thousand rules. It was difficult to understand them, and suddenly we were fighting, and I didn’t know who the characters were and why we were there. It felt stressful to play something I don’t know how to play for an infinite amount of time, with no structure. It was just incredibly anxiety-inducing. Thanks to Carlos, I learned to like board games first. In a board game, you can see the countdown mechanic. You can see a board game ending. There’s often a clock or a counter or the deck of cards—and at the end of the deck, there’s the end of the game.

Carlos: In the initial design, taking this all into account: here’s what we did. One of Claire’s favorite games is Mysterium, which she loves in part for its gorgeous, surreal cards that have this melancholy timbre to them. You can look at the cards and be inspired, even outside of the game. So I thought: What about instead of dice and all the rules that govern them, you have a deck of beautiful cards, maybe a little macabre, but also inspiring? It’s always very simple to determine success or failure in Negocios, as easy as Candyland. If your card matches one of the cards on your character sheet, success. If it doesn’t, not success! And everything else you just get to make up.

Claire: All the other sections are mini-decks: like Character Creation and Worldbuilding. Players pull four cards for Character Creation, and one to two cards for Relationships. One card for each player for Worldbuilding. Once everybody draws a card and interprets it, that part’s over. As far as a countdown mechanic, I find that very reassuring.

Carlos: Any part of the game can go longer if people want it to go longer, but there’s an end that’s easy to identify. There’s no preparation beforehand. You can go in without somebody having spent like 20 hours working on an adventure so that it didn’t feel like so much work. The inspiration for the game is something that is extremely rules-light and extremely easy to grasp the basic concept. The best parts of roleplaying are when things go off the chain. This game gets to those wild moments fast!

Claire: We discovered while iterating the game that we actually needed to give more structure than we originally intended because otherwise, it was all chaos. We realized people need a little more scaffolding—like I did when I was beginning to learn about games! These days, I love DnD. I wouldn’t mind if a game lasted 12 hours. I’m no longer as anxious about time, or learning new games. But it took practice. I was not natural at it.

Image Source: Carlos Hernandez and C.S.E. Cooney

CS: How did you decide you wanted to design games?

Carlos: I didn’t really get serious about it until about 2008. I started reading literature about game-based learning for post-secondary education. At the core of it is the idea that every game has to convince you to take on hard problems and try to solve them with multiple systems at play. And if you can do that in a classroom, where you’re trying to teach difficult subject matter in the complexity of the world, you’re going to teach more effectively.

Claire: I got into game design because I fell in love with a game designer. So even though I was anxious and nervous and feeling really out of my depth, he kept reassuring me. We’ve taken a couple of workshops together. It takes years to make a game. Which is just really fascinating. I enjoy being peripheral to it.

CS: How did the storyline of Negocios Infernales come about?

Carlos: Most roleplaying games use a very specifically Tolkien-esque version of English knightly romances for their setting. Not even other parts of Europe, but a very specifically British conceptualization of courtly love and things like that. So, first of all, can we maybe try to do something different? The knightly courtly tradition spans Europe and, as somebody who is a Spanish speaker, I thought, “Well, we haven’t really seen Spain very often in roleplay settings. What about the Spanish Inquisition?” The Spanish Inquisition is a beautifully macabre and difficult period that will be full of dramatic potential.

We discovered in playtesting that it made for pretty grim stories. I didn’t want an undiluted pogrom as my background! So we thought, “What if the Spanish Inquisition was interrupted by benevolent aliens who saw what was happening in the world and wanted to stop it before it got started?” So this becomes this comic background for the game.

Claire: Because it's fantasy, we decided to set it in a world called Gloriana, not Earth. The nation’s called Espada—and in Espada, the queen and her court mistake the aliens for devils.

Carlos: Because they have deelyboppers on their heads!

Claire: And because Espadans don’t really have a framework to think about the cosmos in the way the 21st-century culture can. The Espadans asked their “Benefactors” if they can sell their souls for unholy powers.

Carlos: And the aliens are willing to work within the Espadans’ metaphor. They’re like, “Sure. Close enough.” We’ll give you powers and slowly try to guide you towards better behavior than your moral compass is currently capable of.” This misunderstanding about the nature of the aliens is where a lot of the comic tension comes from.

CS: It’s such a fun story. Very unique. A lot of roleplaying is elves and dwarves, which is not bad, but you get tired of it after a while. The next question I have is: specifically looking at mechanics, what other steps did you take in this game design?

Carlos: We followed a very traditional process of think of an idea, try an idea, change an idea based on playtesting. It’s definitely the iterative process that all you game designers out there know and love. One pretty unique thing about our process was that it was mostly a process of adding things rather than subtracting things. When I’ve worked on other games, it’s usually been a process of, “Oh here are all my ideas, and there’s too much going on, and how do I simplify this to create the kind of fun kind that I’m looking for and want my players to have?” But what we found is that people needed more ligature for storytelling, not less!

That meant creating supplemental support decks for the different sections of the game. For instance, in the Worldbuilding section, we created a supplemental deck of 40 cards that asks you questions about the world. Just that little addition has made all the difference. Now, you get all the fun of making up a new world in seconds—there’s never going to be an Espada the same as any other version you create—but with enough guidance to keep things moving.

Claire: One of the things that always worked is our main mechanic, the 70-card inspiration deck, “la Baraja del Destino,” or just “Destino.” Rebecca Huston did all the weird, wonderful images.

Carlos and I wrote the adages. There are 7 suits total, 10 cards in each suit—but the seventh suit was a late addition. Initially, Carlos had six suits corresponding to the six parts of a human body: Hueso for bone, Sangre for blood, Carne for flesh, Rayo for light meaning spark of life, Aire for air, and Lágramas for tears. When we were first playtesting, we found we needed an extra suit or we'd run out of cards during the game. So we came up with “Espacio”—space. Everything outside of the human body and experience.

CS: Do you have to know Spanish to play the game?

Carlos: Absolutely not.

Claire: No more than anybody reading Harry Potter needs to know Latin.

Carlos: It’s just for flavor. For instance, we have a map in the game that uses a very ornate version of Spanish to give the feel of the old maps in Latin that you might look at in times gone by. But 100% you don’t need any Spanish to use the map, or in any other part of the game. You can if you want to, but only if you want to!

CS: Plus it’s Spanish so it’s a little easier to look up definitions if you really want to.

Claire: Anybody can do a quick Google translate and they’ll see Espada means “sword” and [the country of] Pelea means “fight.” And it’s just a joke because Pelea is the natural arch-enemy of Espada. But players don’t need to know that for the game.

CS: How did you come up with the name for the game?

Carlos: That was an interesting debate. At one point I had advocated to our publishers, “Outland Entertainment,” that we go with an English name, “Infernal Negotiations” or “Infernal Bargains” or something like that. Though I’m a Spanish speaker, and I wanted to have the title in Spanish but thought it might put up a barrier. They said, “No! You’re gutting the whole flavor and tone of the game! It needs to be in Spanish.” I hope that what will happen, à la Darrington Press’s [Critical Role] Candela Obscura—which is also using that evocative non-English name—having a non-English name will invite people in creatively and not put too many barriers up.

CS: How long is a full game?

Carlos: About an hour per player. Depending on your group, the game will take either one or two sessions. So you can use one session to basically build your world and use the second session to roleplay your world. And each of those could take 2-3 hours.

This is the end of Part One, but stay tuned for Part Two where we discuss the fun and hard steps to building a game, more discussion on gameplay, and what Claire and Carlos like to play when they’re not designing games.

In conjunction with the Kickstarter, there will also be a special playthrough of Negocios Infernales on Twitch. The playthrough is on Wednesday the 11th (part 1) and Wednesday the 18th (part 2), from 4-8 PM EST. It is featuring Cassandra Khaw, Brandon O’Brien, Will Sobel, and Anna Russell. Carlos will be the living rulebook and Twitch wrangler. It will stream live on twitch.tv/arvaneleron. Carlos and Claire are also hosting an Infernal Salon (where writers and artists can use the beautiful artwork and stunning adages in their own fun creations) on Twitch on Halloween, October 31, from 3:30-6:30 PM EST.

Negocios Infernales runs on Kickstarter from October 10 – November 10. Check out all the information here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/687027744/negocios-infernales

Be sure to check it out and bring home your copy of this unique roleplaying game today!

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