Jason Morningstar
Author of Fiasco
About the Author
Works by Jason Morningstar
The Skeletons — Author — 16 copies
The Roach Returns 3 copies
The Black Drop 2 copies
Many Fires 2 copies
American Disasters : A Fiasco Playset Collection — Author — 2 copies
Fight Fire 1 copy
The Grey Ranks 1 copy
The Unspeakable Oath #12 1 copy
Unspeakable Oath - Issue 11 1 copy
The Bloody Forks of the Ohio 1 copy
Drowning & Falling 1 copy
Post-Apocbird 1 copy
Death School 1 copy
Coneycatchers 1 copy
Juntu's Floating Ice Hell 1 copy
Wisdom from the Book of Life 1 copy
Stealing Cthulhu 1 copy
Artefact 1 copy
Associated Works
The Warren: Predator Cards — Author; Illustrator, some editions — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Gender
- male
- Short biography
- Jason Morningstar is a game designer who lives and works in Durham, North Carolina, USA. In addition to tabletop and live action roleplaying games, he has also made games for clients like Google and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His collaborations include the #feminism collection, Fastaval nominee Old Friends with Ole Peder Giæver, and the popular Love in the Time Of… games with Matthijs Holter.
Jason’s games have been featured at Indiecade and in the Gen Con 50th anniversary museum. He has been a guest at a variety of events, including Ropecon, Gen Con, Lucca Comics and Games, and Dragon Con. Jason was a keynote speaker at the 2016 Living Games conference.
Beyond roleplaying, Jason consults on the use of games for teaching and learning, most recently with the University of California, University of Michigan, Kaiser-Permanente Health Care, and the Innovation Learning Network.
In addition to design, Jason has written extensively on game-related topics. His articles have appeared in the anthologies Analog Game Studies, States of Play, and Unframed. - Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Durham, North Carolina, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- North Carolina, USA
Members
Reviews
Education and LARPing are two flavors that should go together like chocolate and peanut butter, but making a good EduLARP is surprisingly hard. As a tabletop gamer and professor, I've been only moderately impressed with the games put out by the Reacting to the Past (RttP) consortium. RttP may beat the standard rigmarole of lectures and essays, but the game design is not particularly sophisticated, and my time in the RttP facebook group suggests that most professors have similar problems show more about students not reading background material, not getting involved, and the game system giving nonsensical answers about how the siege of Athens proceeds. My own efforts in this area were a near-total failure of design goals saved only by brilliant improvisation on the part of my co-instructors. So believe me when I say A) this stuff is hard and B) Jason Morningstar has cracked the code.
Winterhorn is a game about government surveillance and abuse of power. You are an interagency working group in an unnamed country loosely based on East Germany (but even western democracies have secret police, the FBI ran COINTELPRO for decades, and in 2003 a British undercover agent had a child with an activist before disappearing.) Your target is Winterhorn, an activist group composed of seven core members with ideals, desires, and weaknesses laid out in the briefing material. Additionally, you have a role as a secret police agent, with a past and an agenda of your own.
Over three rounds of thirty minutes each, your secret police squad will select seven options from deck of twelve secret police tactics, ranging in violence from hands-off wiretapping to sending 'patriotic' thugs (off-duty cops) to assault members of Winterhorn. You can also be tricky, setting up front groups to siphon away recruits and using "bad jacketing" to destroy the cohesion of the group by planting rumors suggesting some members are informers for the secret police. At the end of the game, the seven tactics that you chose in the last round are used to create a final report drawn from paragraphs in the rules, which describes how well the group succeeded in its mission. Then you debrief and discuss the ethics of the secret police.
Winterhorn is a shining example of rules-light design. Key game information like character roleplaying notes, OOC roles, and the results of operations, are contained on playing cards. The system of choosing seven of twelve options forces the group to evaluate and select tactics, but it is possible to over-commit and blow the operation. It's a brilliant piece of game design which creates an emergent narrative without getting tied down in complex rules or props. Twelve alternate operation cards provide a smidgen of replayability, but Winterhorn is mostly a one-and-done experience. The graphic design is top-notch, with bureaucratic memos describing Winterhorn, and a samizdat zine describing the secret police. You can choose to print-and-play the cards or buy them (mine are in the mail, and I full expect them to be excellent). A brief essay on the history of subverting political enemies rounds out the materials.
With the caveats that this is a read-through review rather than a playtest review, though I can't imagine the rules breaking, and that I didn't comprehensively crosscheck the cards to see if nonsense outcomes could arise, Winterhorn is an incredible game that does for LARPs what Papers Please did for videogames, making the banality of evil in authoritarian regimes real. show less
Winterhorn is a game about government surveillance and abuse of power. You are an interagency working group in an unnamed country loosely based on East Germany (but even western democracies have secret police, the FBI ran COINTELPRO for decades, and in 2003 a British undercover agent had a child with an activist before disappearing.) Your target is Winterhorn, an activist group composed of seven core members with ideals, desires, and weaknesses laid out in the briefing material. Additionally, you have a role as a secret police agent, with a past and an agenda of your own.
Over three rounds of thirty minutes each, your secret police squad will select seven options from deck of twelve secret police tactics, ranging in violence from hands-off wiretapping to sending 'patriotic' thugs (off-duty cops) to assault members of Winterhorn. You can also be tricky, setting up front groups to siphon away recruits and using "bad jacketing" to destroy the cohesion of the group by planting rumors suggesting some members are informers for the secret police. At the end of the game, the seven tactics that you chose in the last round are used to create a final report drawn from paragraphs in the rules, which describes how well the group succeeded in its mission. Then you debrief and discuss the ethics of the secret police.
Winterhorn is a shining example of rules-light design. Key game information like character roleplaying notes, OOC roles, and the results of operations, are contained on playing cards. The system of choosing seven of twelve options forces the group to evaluate and select tactics, but it is possible to over-commit and blow the operation. It's a brilliant piece of game design which creates an emergent narrative without getting tied down in complex rules or props. Twelve alternate operation cards provide a smidgen of replayability, but Winterhorn is mostly a one-and-done experience. The graphic design is top-notch, with bureaucratic memos describing Winterhorn, and a samizdat zine describing the secret police. You can choose to print-and-play the cards or buy them (mine are in the mail, and I full expect them to be excellent). A brief essay on the history of subverting political enemies rounds out the materials.
With the caveats that this is a read-through review rather than a playtest review, though I can't imagine the rules breaking, and that I didn't comprehensively crosscheck the cards to see if nonsense outcomes could arise, Winterhorn is an incredible game that does for LARPs what Papers Please did for videogames, making the banality of evil in authoritarian regimes real. show less
Simply an amazing game. Fiasco emulates the kinds of movies where hapless people engage in criminal misadventures that invariable hilariously and tragically fall apart with elegance and grace. The system is a paragon of rules-light mechanics, avoiding task resolution nearly entirely in favor of getting the group to generate a fascinating and bizarre cast of characters, and having them stumble towards catastrophe. Both readable and playable, Fiasco is on of the best indie RPGs I've played.
Storygaming all-star team here, with Jason Morningstar (Fiasco) creating a Powered By The Apocalypse game about the Night Witches, the all-female Soviet bomber regiment.
It's a really specific topic for a game, but one that has been customized perfectly, as witnessed by Jason's thoughts on character sheets. Characters are distinguished by Natures (a personality type, which is fixed), and a Role (which can change). Perhaps the cleverest bit of game design are the Marks, a sort of strategic show more damage track representing the psychological toll of war. There are long odds against the Night Witches, and even if they avoid the simple Harms of flak, Nazi fighters, and crash landings, they'll eventually run out of options and be forced to Embrace Death. The gameplay itself is similarly made to order. Each mission has a day phase where characters rest, recuperate, prepare and generally live, and a night phase where they brave the hazards of the Eastern Front to make attacks on German positions. Unless players are ungodly lucky, they will take damage, but failure means interrogation by the NKVD. Better to die honorably in the air for Mother Russia!
This is a brilliant, but very narrow game. The art and presentation are great. While there are great quotes from real Night Witches, and a solid bibliography, there wasn't enough fluff to make me sure of my ability to portray the unique challenges of friendship and combat that the game demands, a problem that might be amplified by a rotating GM model. The systems ties to the Night Witches setting are great touches, but make it hard to adapt. I could see some of the ideas being used in any setting with a strong rest/hazard divide; like fire fighters or Battlestar Galactica Pilots.
So yeah, buy this game if the idea interests you, or you want to see some absolutely brilliant design. I loved reading it, but I honestly can't see myself ever playing it, sadly. show less
It's a really specific topic for a game, but one that has been customized perfectly, as witnessed by Jason's thoughts on character sheets. Characters are distinguished by Natures (a personality type, which is fixed), and a Role (which can change). Perhaps the cleverest bit of game design are the Marks, a sort of strategic show more damage track representing the psychological toll of war. There are long odds against the Night Witches, and even if they avoid the simple Harms of flak, Nazi fighters, and crash landings, they'll eventually run out of options and be forced to Embrace Death. The gameplay itself is similarly made to order. Each mission has a day phase where characters rest, recuperate, prepare and generally live, and a night phase where they brave the hazards of the Eastern Front to make attacks on German positions. Unless players are ungodly lucky, they will take damage, but failure means interrogation by the NKVD. Better to die honorably in the air for Mother Russia!
This is a brilliant, but very narrow game. The art and presentation are great. While there are great quotes from real Night Witches, and a solid bibliography, there wasn't enough fluff to make me sure of my ability to portray the unique challenges of friendship and combat that the game demands, a problem that might be amplified by a rotating GM model. The systems ties to the Night Witches setting are great touches, but make it hard to adapt. I could see some of the ideas being used in any setting with a strong rest/hazard divide; like fire fighters or Battlestar Galactica Pilots.
So yeah, buy this game if the idea interests you, or you want to see some absolutely brilliant design. I loved reading it, but I honestly can't see myself ever playing it, sadly. show less
I read through the book probably for the 3rd time last night in preparation for playing Durance for the first time. The book is well organized and explains things well, though we had a hard time translating it into play (I was the only one of the 4 who had read it). I'm not sure if this is a failure of the mechanic of setting up scenes with questions or a failure of the players to understand our communal goals of telling a story. I think with a few more games and more people having read the show more book this could be less frustrating.
Other than the problems we had, the game is interesting, has great setting and character generation, and sparks endless stories in my mind. show less
Other than the problems we had, the game is interesting, has great setting and character generation, and sparks endless stories in my mind. show less
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- Rating
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