I like it when games look nice: an interview with Erin Tierney
Adapted and edited from a conversation on July 10, 2025.
Alex: I first met you on a Cyberrats actual play that Jack of RPGs Uncovered ran.
Erin: Yeah, that was actually my second ever actual play.
Alex: Have you done more since then?
Erin: I’m not permanently on a channel, but I jump around between a few different places doing one shots or mini series, things like that. I don’t really consider myself an actual player. It’s something I enjoy doing, and have fun with, but I much more consider myself a game designer. And really, by volume, a layout designer.
Alex: Dreaded and the Deep was your first published game, is that right?
Erin: Yes. It’s a nautical terror game, and it’s one that I created at the time I was playing a lot of Sunless Seas, the Failbetter game. It takes place in [the same universe as] Fallen London. Sunless Seas is sort of a very slow roguelike. You go out, you travel, you slowly discover islands. You make money, you make shipments [to] places. And one thing I found out is that as you start taking longer trips because you discover farther and farther away islands, you’re really more likely to die at sea. And so I decided to make a game about traveling out and becoming more and more obsessed with the sea. There’s a stat that goes up that basically forces you to take — your trip cannot be shorter than the number of days equal to that stat. So it’s basically a play-to-lose game in that it is infinitely ramping difficulty, and it forces you to take more risks. There’s only so many resources you can fit in your ship, you can only have so much food. And so the goal is to die at sea.
Alex: I love play to lose.
Erin: I find it a really interesting place to play in.
Alex: After Dreaded and The Deep, you did Necromancy Doesn’t Exist, a game that I get the sense you’re really proud of.
Erin: Yes, that’s a one-page RPG. I am really into arguing over taxonomy for fun and profit. Largely because my actual opinions on taxonomy — the study of categorizing things — is that it’s imperfect, it’s a tool. It’s never going to fully describe how things are actually categorized, because the real world doesn’t make neat categorizations. Which makes it really fun for me to argue about. So Why Necromancy Doesn’t exist is a game where you play as a bunch of academic wizards and you write short little publications about how every other academic wizard is a complete imbecile who doesn’t understand that fireball is actually a conjuration spell, and not a destruction one.
Alex: And this was inspired by the Elder Scrolls, right?
Erin: Yes, it was! There are a few instances in The Elder Scrolls where in-game books will argue about the mechanical classifications of the schools of magic. Partly that’s because in between games they change what schools of magic certain spells are, but that’s just a very fun thing I found in the games because I’m one of those nerds who reads all of the books when I’m playing Skyrim.
Alex: Are you familiar with Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things?
Erin: I’m not.
Alex: The author spends several hundred pages arguing that categories are fake. One of the examples he gives is about mothers, where in some contexts you would say that a foster mother, a step mother, and adoptive mother are all mothers, but in other contexts the question is “have you given birth”. It’s written like a textbook, not a popular science book.
Erin: The actual title of Why Necromancy Doesn’t Exist does come from a pop science book. It’s half memoir / half pop science called Why Fish Don’t Exist. It’s an anti-taxonomical argument about the categorizing of fish, because it’s a wide genetic diversity of what we call “fish”.
Alex: Like the QI podcast, No Such Thing as A Fish.
Erin: I was a bookseller when Why Fish Don’t Exist came out, so that title stuck in my head.
Alex: On that note, where do you find your inspiration?
Erin: Today the current thing that I’m working on is very much inspired by Fallout and Wasteland. They’re sort of post-apocalyptic faction-based video games that I am a huge fan of, but [they] have not actually made their way into my other works so far. I am in the early stages of working on a worldbuilding game that has quickly gone from collaborative worldbuilding to competitive worldbuilding, almost.
Alex: Competitive worldbuilding?
Erin: Each player controls a faction and is trying to play cards and take actions as that faction to basically take over the area or achieve their objectives. It’s a worldbuilding game in that this is all in the service of creating a post-apocalyptic setting with a 200-year-old history of different factions jockeying for power. But as I started making it, I’m just like, “Oh, but what if you were doing a world building game where you were trying to win at world building?”
Alex: Lately you’ve been doing a bunch of stuff with Masks lately, making a bunch of playbooks, and a template.
Erin: It started from the playbooks. I wanted to make some playbooks, and the layout designer in me was like, “Well I want to make them look nice so I’ll just—” I had made extensive use back when I designed third party D&D stuff off Nathanaël Roux’s D&D template which is very comprehensive. Using that template is where I started learning layout design. [I figured] there must be one for Masks, it’s a popular enough system. I did not anticipate the gulf between a popular non-D&D game and D&D, and there was not a template. So I decided, “I’ll just make one. How hard can it be?” And the answer was about four months of work!
Alex: You said you see yourself mostly as a layout artist first?
Erin: By volume, I’m a layout designer. I like to joke that I do layout design to fund my writing. Because layout design is a skill that I have learned, and a lot of people need. So it’s very easy to get hired on a gig that I can then take the money and hire an artist for a game. I’m very passionate about layout design, because it is that instinct in me that I like it when games look nice so that has influenced how I think about games as existing as an art object.
Alex: Say more about that.
Erin: There’s a lot of discourse in the tabletop space over, well what is a game? You know, is a game a set of rules, is a game the act of playing at the table, what constitutes a game? A lot of people take it as [exclusive], like if it is this thing, it is not any other thing. I come at it more from a literary or film theory perspective, that these are lenses that you can interpret game design through. My favorite lens is that a game is an art object, and that layout, art, and even the physical binding of the book, or the current condition that a book is in is part of the experience of the game. That’s what drives my passion for layout, design, and art.
Alex: I especially like what you said about the condition of the game being a piece of it.
Erin: I think if you have a battered up old copy of, say 4e D&D that you played in middle school, I think that is a part of that experience of playing that game.
Find Erin’s Games on Itch.