One of the absolute joys of doing these interviews is the chance to speak with folks within the TTRPG space who are simply impressive. Eli Hauschel is so much so, I’m skipping my usual introduction so we can get right to it. Enjoy!
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Brent: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me, Eli. For our readers not yet familiar with your work, please tell me a bit about yourself.
Eli: Hello, my name is Eli. I am a Kanaka Māoli Creative Audio Professional, Gamemaker, and Award-winning AP producer. I’m known for my work with Mayday Roleplay, a fantastic group of folks passionate about telling very heartfelt dramatic style Actual Play backed with a cinematic production quality, primarily within Horror. I also write Games geared toward teaching thematics and diving into character development. Outside the TTRPG space, I am a professional audio engineer focusing on Quality control and English/International Dubbing.
B: What drew you into tabletop roleplaying games? What was your “hero (or villain, we don’t judge) origin story” in the hobby?
E: Tabletop came a lot later for me. Growing up, I was more into role-playing blogs on social media platforms such as Gaia Online and Tumblr, and that’s where I built my foundational roots in writing and collaborating. Then, in 2019, I decided to take a chance and play with some peers in the film and TV space. I enjoyed it, eventually leading me to take on my first home table and share my adventure.
My hero’s journey in tabletop is a common one. I was just kind of jumping from table to table looking for a good place to be, and at one time, I did have a home table that kind of dissolved in the middle of the pandemic as a couple of people had to leave the state during that time, but eventually, it kind of led me to MayDay. Through having to deal with some of the unsavory behavior that kind of shows up in tabletop we were able to kind of walk out of that as this incredible team that I would play with any day all the time, like these folks bring something special when we’re able to tell stories together.
B: How and when did you shift from player/GM to designing your first game content? Was the shift gradual, or did you burn to design something right away?
E: I started designing a year into the pandemic. The thing that started it all was Titanomancy’s Caltropcore. I jumped into one of the game jams and made my first game: We Lick Toad Goblins. That connected a lot of dots for me. Creating games was a challenge, like a puzzle. Still, systems like Caltrope Core break it down in such a simple way that you can build a foundation of what game design could be like. Then you can begin to explore the more complicated mechanics and lore and those kinds of things that more seasoned game designers have been able to accomplish with their core books and their systems. So I highly recommend that anybody who’s looking to start a game design journey to look towards Caltrop as a way to like ease yourself into it.
B: So tell me about Ghost-Fi. You mentioned apprehension about death and grief at the gaming table. What led you to want to explore that more, and how can Ghost-Fi help folks to do that?
E: Ghost-fi is an Aftercare tool and an agnostic game centered around exploring themes of death and grief. Players play either as characters from previous campaigns that may have met their final fates or as new characters, but either way, it’s centered around those that have passed. They are navigating the final moments and impressions that they leave behind, to find and seek those tethers that connect them to the world, and sort out how they ultimately can let them go or not let them go and see how those burdens shape the final chapters of a character’s story.
Looking at the tables I’ve gotten to play at and the mindset of the min-maxer, things get incredibly tense around death. Often, when a player loses a character, a lot of defeat comes into play because we just move on. We don’t give catharsis to these moments, which can leave players unsatisfied.
For instance, one of my first characters was a Ranger with an animal companion, and I lost this companion amid combat. At the end of combat, it was easy for us to pick up and move on from the story. Still, I requested in role play and demanded in that role play to have a moment where my character could make peace with the loss of a friend, and for me, having the agency to do that allowed me the peace of letting this part of my character’s story go and allow my character to move forward with a new insight and a new understanding of what’s happening to them.
But that’s not always the case for many, and I hoped that this opportunity to play through Ghost-Fi would allow peace for the player and deeper role-play at the table. Ghost-Fi can be played as a solo game, co-op, or even guided as a traditional table top can be played and this allows an opportunity for a GM to offer something more for a player than helping them reroll a new character, and ultimately bring resolution to the table.
B: Besides Ghost-Fi, you also have several resources for rounding out character backstories and relationships, such as your Ten Questions to Ask Your Next Character series, as well as your Four Song Character Playlist (all available on Gumroad). Could you tell us a bit about them? Do these represent a particular approach to character creation and campaign building in general for you?
E: So, the 10 Questions to Ask Your Next Character series is centered around trying to ask new and non-traditional questions, that might spark tidbits within our characters that give them a level of depth that is relatable to not only you as a player or as a writer, but also for audiences to connect with. People in real life are very complicated and have a lot of nuance that general character creation or the beginning of character exploration needs to cover.
The Four Song Character Playlist is designed to connect characters through the power of music, as music can often set a character’s tone and aesthetic.
I’m a very character-focused GM. When I create things, I get obsessed with the onion peels that make up their existence. Knowing more about these characters and getting players or collaborators to dive deeper allows me to navigate plots and themes to enrich and support a character as they engage with the story. The more understanding of a character, the better it is to find creative choices during encounters; it improves gameplay.
B: You have also designed a setting for the Orbital Blues RPG, Fortuna Major. Why that system, and what inspired this campaign setting?
Orbital Blues is an exciting system by Soul Muppet Publishing, and the system predominantly centers around a character’s troubles which is a wound the character possesses that drives the choices that they make, supported by the mechanics of the system. I enjoy flawed characters that are not afraid to lean into their failure. Sometimes, TTRPGs are centered around creating you as an unwavering hero. They are fun stories to tell, but I am also interested in why people make bad choices and why we must deal with the consequences of unresolved hurt, and Orbital Blues captures that beautifully. Plus, Orbital Blues is so Cowboy Bebop coded and scratches that space itch that I’ve been looking for for so long, and it’s, you know, there’s a musicality to it that’s just super fun.
Fortuna Major started with the small adventure I wrote attached to it, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I wanted to write an adventure centered around two players to pay homage to the Romance of the Month in February. As I was developing the adventure, I realized that there wasn’t a setting that filled the idea I was having. I took it a step further and started to write in a whole campaign setting, and one thing led to another, and I made Fortuna Major.
E: Many settings I’ve seen currently written for Orbital Blues seem like either desolate places or small manageable spaces like stations or outposts. I wanted to create a place that made a space cowboy feel small, that there’s just so much grandiosity happening around you that you can make a wave big enough to shake a city; but has as many people as the stars in the sky that also felt like a player’s potential actions in the town could be like a domino effect the course of things. A playground if you will for a sad space cowboy to thrive and destroy themselves in.
B: Besides game design, you are also a highly skilled actual play producer and editor. What drew you to the production side of AP?
E: I’m a film and television industry member as an audio engineer by trade. I spend a lot of my time working on various kinds of projects, from short films to features to even radio and broadcast, so coming into actual play on the production side was another avenue in which I could explore my art as a sound designer and an editor. Working with Mayday, I was able to have total creative control over an experience supported by the fantastic storytelling from players and GMs. What draws me to TTRPGs a lot, especially in the production side of things, is that I have a set of skills that people value, and allows me to express my creativity through that without the restrictions or demands that often come with working in film and TV.
B: Looking at the current actual play space, where do you see friction points in the production of shows? Are there things everyone does because they’ve always been done, for instance, that are due for an improvement? Is there a change in the space you would like to see happen, or happen quicker?
E: The most significant friction in actual plays comes down to its viability and future. We often try to find ways to get our performers and production teams the monetary value they deserve. Creators need to sustain themselves in a way that allows them to give them time to make art. We only have a few sustainable models of success in the AP scene, but none that look at the various degrees of creation in the way that film and television define it. We have such extremes in both success and no success that there is no middle ground, and that’s where a lot of debate is being had.
And yeah, we are in some way, shape, or form trying to do the same thing because of a lack of definition through the spectrum of the AP scene, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon. It’s going to come down to creative innovations on how we expand. For instance, many consider the TTRPG AP scene hyper niche. But have we made honest attempts to reach audiences beyond the TTRPG space through genres and story types, and presenting a format that might be edible for audiences that don’t occupy these space?
B: Despite the obvious benefits of diverse lived experiences on projects, we still see many actual plays and excluding traditionally marginalized groups in the TTRPG space. You were part of founding the Mayday Roleplay channel, can you talk about your thoughts and approach to combatting this exclusion?
E: One of the core foundations of any successful table is trust and a relationship with the people you’re creating with. That’s the most essential thing with collaboration. I understand why, in many cases, folks who lack diversity often say they’re trying to play games with their friends, and that makes sense because they’re the people you trust most and can collaborate with. Still, we sometimes forget that when we produce for an audience, there is a level of expectation. It’s been clearly defined over the last few years in actual play that we seek representation, authenticity, and perspective from places we don’t often find. And it’s not impossible to find good people from any corner of the world.
My deepest consideration for combatting exclusion is to change the mindset that when creating APs, you should not treat it as a hobby. You have to treat it as a production that is being produced, and that means that sometimes you will have to seek outside of your usual circles, you will have to do auditions, and you will have to have table tests to see if the table is cohesive enough to tell that story. Maybe it was fortunate that we were able, through casting, to find each other and found the like-mindedness of what we’re able to accomplish as a table. It is not impossible to see the people you want to tell stories with and connect to people authentically.
B: The fragmenting of social media seems to have made any freelancing, but especially freelancing in the TTRPG space, increasingly difficult. Do you have any thoughts on what freelancers can do to compensate? Do you see a change coming around how you’ll find an audience for your creations?
E: As a freelancer in the TTRPG space I’m also struggling to find some sustainability, and social media is absolutely affecting how we can find our work. Many don’t consider that a lot of freelancing deals with networking. It’s about how we reach people and how we communicate with people, and social media was for a long time the forefront of how that would be, you know, joining spaces at the top of the pandemic in 2020. People were able to connect with audiences and build their platforms directly. Still, we’re seeing less of that because of things that are simply out of our control.
B: Similarly, do you see a change coming for how Actual Plays will find their audiences? There are concerns raised that the Actual Play “bubble” has burst, do you feel there’s any truth to those concerns?
E: Finding your audience will come down to how you present your product and how you market yourself. I don’t think the bubble has burst because actual plays really fall in line with some other forms of entertainment, like radio dramas, which have existed for Generations. It’s really coming down to where we take this beyond the TTRPG space.
B: As a designer and an AP producer, what other games out there right now excite you? What are you drawn to as a designer and as a player/GM?
E: I’m still in my Orbital Blues era right now. I’m interested in some of the World of Darkness materials; Werewolves, for instance, Hunters as well. I’ve also touched a little bit on Kult and kind of want to explore more of the horror genre, that’s not typically where I tell my stories. We recently produced a Beam Saber series with some guests, and I hope that in the second installment I get to be a part of that because who doesn’t want to fight big monsters with big mech
I do want to produce a Godkiller series at some point with Mayday because I think it would be hilarious to recall some of our moments between players and GMS in an epic showdown, with all of us being GMS.
B: Are there other projects on the horizon you can discuss?
E: Absolutely. With Mayday, we’re gearing up for our summer haul, so you can definitely expect some potential Orbital Blues games and other space games. Plus the triumphant return of our Vegas by Night series.
As for me I’m looking to expand the Hundred Insightful Questions series to more and more and more questions. I’ll be releasing some other supplements and games. I’m looking to release a card and dice survival system called Quick, Draw, Survive to incorporate into games that don’t center around survival. And I’m looking to to provide some support to game dev and writers, as well as those who are looking for some creative audio support through some monthly subscription based opportunities. Those will be coming down the pipeline as well during the summer.
B: Eli, thank you again for talking with me! Where can folks find you if they want to follow what you’re up to?
E: You can find me at home with Mayday Roleplay and everywhere on social media as aGhostofeli.
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Thanks again to Eli for taking the time to talk with me! Please follow all those links above and grab some excellent games and supplements, and keep an eye out for what Mayday Roleplay has coming next!
