I spoke to Marx Shepherd, community warden, retired podcaster, and community manager at the Far Horizons Co-op. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Alex: Before we start, I want to share a story. A few years ago, you interviewed me when you were still running Yes, Indie’d, when I released Gratitude: A Horror Game. At the start of that interview, you asked me what my role was in the TTRPG space. And I panicked because I didn’t think that “I make games” was lofty enough to fill that question. So I thought about it. And I honestly answered that I run monthly public one shots of indie games for strangers in my Discord. And that framing of that question has really changed how I approach my role in the space. And so I wanted to say thank you for that.
Marx: I remember you maybe being a little harangued at the time that you didn’t really know what your place was and you were running games through the Discord server, and actually I think that’s a cool project, that’s a cool role to have.
Alex: Something people don’t know about that interview is that half of the audio was lost, and you recreated your end of it entirely from reactions to my end. And it worked!
Marx: Really? Oh my goodness. That’s so funny.
Alex: Do you not remember that?
Marx: Every time that’s happened since, I’ve said, “Oh I can’t do that naturally, we’ll have to re-record.”
Alex: A lot of people said they found me through that interview or decided to buy Gratitude because of it. And you actually gave me a tagline for that game. You came up with the tagline, which is “examining gratitude through the lens of body horror”. I don’t remember if that made it to the final cut. But you came up with that in that interview, which may or may not be lost. So I just wanted to say thank you for that. But we are here to talk about you! So, with all of that out of the way, what is your role in the TTRPG space?
Marx: I’m sort of a backroom kind of guy. The things that I mainly do are line copy editing, and I am the “community manager” for the Far Horizons Co-op. What that practically means is that I go out of my way to cheer people on into making their own cool stuff. I do sometimes make stuff. I don’t think I’m particularly good at making stuff, and I’m fine with that. I just make stuff that I like. But what I do like to do is to make stuff that other people are happy with. I like to let people make the best thing that they can, if I can facilitate that. So beyond the role that I’ve carved out myself that includes doing things like fulfilling people’s Kickstarter projects in the UK because that can be a bit of a pain if you don’t know how to do it. Or things like running game jams so people get encouraged to make that thing that they wanted to do, or things like previously running Yes Indie’d pod, or running big bundles and things like that. None of this is groundbreaking stuff and it’s none of it’s very flashy or sexy, but all of it is quite useful later.
The co-op
Alex: Let’s talk about the Co-op, how did that get started?
Marx: A long time ago, Olivia Hill, who wrote iHunt, Flatpack, and loads of other stuff, — a long time ago, about 2019, she and Nem of Sandy Pug Games decided they wanted a bit more transparency. So they set up the Co-op to make games where all of the pay rates and things were really transparent, and we would make stuff together and do a royalty share kind of scale stuff where whatever we sell, everybody would get how much they put into it. I joined about three months after it started, and haven’t stopped being a member since. I’ve been fairly instrumental in a lot of their projects since, with editing, writing, and running stuff in the background. We just do our mission, which is to make cool games together. It’s quite left-leaning, with people from all over the world doing great game design at every scale, from amateur scale up to people who most of their career is based on this.
Alex: How do new members join?
Marx: There are two ways. One is I invite people to join, and the other is people approach me, and we have a bit of a vetting process on that. There are some bad people, and we want to maintain a safe, inclusive space. But it’s kind of a free-for-all. People join, they come and sit in our discord server, they vote on stuff. They can join projects, or propose their own projects, and on it goes. It’s fairly self-sustaining now.
Alex: You just recently announced that you have a bundle out.
Marx: We’ve got quite a lot going on right now. We’ve got a Halloween sale, which is 40% off everything. We’re part of Bundle of Holding at the moment. It’s Tentacles number 7. It’s kind of wild to me that they’ve had seven Cthulhu-based bundles since the inception of Bundle of Holding, but I guess that was quite a long time ago.
Alex: And they reached out to you for that?
Marx: Yes. I think this is the third time we’ve been in Bundle of Holding. This time we’re in with our system-agnostic Guide to Cults where loads of our writers have written cults, and it’s been paired with artists and layout. We Kickstarted that in I don’t know, 2022?
Alex: That seems right. I know I was able to sneak my dog into there [as a reward tier].
Marx: Yeah, we’ve definitely got your dog in there. It wasn’t in the cult that I wrote, which is all about maths. Cults is really cool and follows on from our earlier one which was The Roleplayer’s Guide To Heists, which was a similar thing, but loads of different heists, which was really fun. That was San Jenaro Co-Op, which was the previous name. That was their first Kickstarter project, and it just did phenomenally well. Cults follows from that, and more recently we did the Far Horizons Guide to Mysterious Locations. They are mysterious and important. That has just been published on DriveThru, and will be published on Itch when the print on demand edition goes live.
The games
Alex: I’m going to move on from the Co-op. You say that you don’t make a lot of games these days, but you have such a great tagline, which is “Weird games for cool people and cool games for weird people.” And in the past, you’ve made several games, but I specifically want to talk about Ghostbox and A Loud Noise in a Quiet Place. Ghostbox is your most recent game, is that right?
Ghostbox
Marx: Most recently completed, yes. Ghostbox is a weird epistolary game, which means it’s about writing letters, but you’re only writing one half of the conversation. The premise is that there’s some dead letterboxes around in the UK that the Royal Mail have formerly abandoned and you’re imagining people in a community who are still using these post boxes, not knowing that they’ve been abandoned. There’s a sort of conceit to this which is in the initial letter that is presented as part of the game which is that you have gone and bought this post box that’s been abandoned and you open it up and there’s all of these dead letters inside that never reached their destinations. So the idea is that you’re writing one half or multiple halves of several conversations that never get responses that are sort of taking place over the course of weeks or months or years or even decades. The idea is that you play a sort of solitaire card game and you write some letters at the same time, it gives you weird feelings, I think. It kind of makes you think about communities and isolation and how isolation contains people and how it contains places and the way that all of these things interact with each other.
Alex: That is a really cool piece of real-life lore, the abandoned boxes.
Marx: The story that I first heard was that there was a there was a post box in Manchester Piccadilly train station, which is one of the busiest train stations in the UK, I think it’s within the top five outside of London, I would think it’s probably within the top ten of any. And it was the post box in this train station that the Royal Mail Depot didn’t want to collect anymore because they had to get a station ticket to get to it. So it was like, “We’re not doing that anymore!” Somebody went and boarded it up, and then they just gave up with it.
Marx: The piece of wood fell off. Simple as that. People kept posting their letters in until, over the course of about a year, and then it was completely stuffed and they were like “What’s going on with this?” So somebody came along and opened it up and there were hundreds of letters in this post box. And I think they were all delivered, but I mean can you just imagine opening a letterbox even for the year and finding all of this stuff which has never reached the people you expected it to reach?
Alex: That’s such an evocative story.
Marx: I love that story. I’ve only got that story as presented, I don’t know any other further downstream context. I don’t know anything about the letters that got put in there. I gotta say most of the stuff that gets sent in the post nowadays is fairly boring, usually just returning driving licenses.
Marx: I wanted to extrapolate that and make it weirder. My friend James Chip lives in the UK, and they’re always telling me about this post box that’s in the woods near their house, and there’s no reason for this post box to be here because it’s not between any communities. Is that being used as a spy dead drop or something? So a lot of this kind of fell into place at the same time. There’s the idea of an abandoned post box in a busy place and the post box we’ve got no reason to be there. And then I’ve got this kind of story in my head about espionage and abandoned communities, isolated communities and so on. All these things just kind of fell into place. I’m suddenly like, “Yeah I’ve written a solo game in a night, I’m gonna Itch fund that.” Which is what happened next. I raised quite a lot of money doing that, which meant I was able to pay Samantha Leigh to do the editing, I was able to pay my friend Duamn Figueroa Rassol to do some just incredible layout design and my friend Nynphaiel to do the illustration.
Marx: It just meant that it took two and a half years to complete it after that, but we we came up with this idea that the game is presented as a series of letters and each of the playbooks as it were is a separate suit that you put into the solitaire game. You can deal them in and out, some people have written extra ones that we’ve published. Then that’s all letters, you’re reading these different letters that are presented in different styles, like one of them handwritten, one of them was like a spy field report, which I think was my favorite because it’s like a cold war field report. Absolutely fantastic stuff on that one. And then there’s one which is — there’s this kind of idea that in legal practice in the UK sometimes you have to send a letter that’s just got a photograph in it, sometimes being printed off from a computer. But it’s a photograph of a screen screen that had a scan of a document in it but the scan was done on a phone so it was really bad. It’s that kind of thing. One of [the letters] is presented in that sort of format, you can imagine. I think there’s a screenshot where we sort of mocked up Windows 95. It was just so much fun, I’m absolutely in awe of what was done with the layout on that.
A loud noise in a quiet place
Alex: You have another game that’s very personal to you. And I know that you’ve shared the story of how this one came about, but talk to me about A Loud Noise in a Quiet Place.
Marx: I’m trying to remember when this happened, maybe 2019. I sort of lost all of my hearing temporarily, and I found this to be a profoundly isolating experience. It meant that people — it was difficult to have conversations with them because you’d be asking them to repeat themselves all the time, and they get frustrated with that. I can completely understand that point of view, but then even my partner was struggling to communicate with me, and I just found it to be very isolating. I’m not normally a massively gregarious person, shall we say, but not being able to have any conversations with people that were more meaningful than, I don’t know, how are you, it was really difficult.
And this went on for quite a long time. And while I was doing this, I wasn’t able to cycle to work. I normally cycle, but it wasn’t very safe, because I couldn’t hear well. And so I was on the bus one morning and I was thinking, “I’m so fed up.” So my solution to being fed up was to write a game. And so A Loud Noise in a Quiet Place sort of dropped out of that. It’s sort of this duel game, where one person is the world around you, and the other player is the person who’s experiencing temporary hearing loss. And the idea is that you play through a week of your life, and you come across various scenarios where you can either succeed or not succeed, or bad things can happen to you, or your hearing as a result of what’s going on around you. And the twist in this is that— I think if I’d written it nowadays, I would have made it a solo game. But the person who is not the person who can’t hear is not supposed to speak throughout the entire experience.
Marx: So you’ve got this monologue, this one person is doing this roleplaying monologue and the other person is this play aid, which is kind of set up like a mixing desk. And they’re pushing the dials on this mixing desk to make things harder or easier in forms of what the present situation is like in terms of noise. It’s a very weird game!
Alex: You and I were doing ZineQuest at the same time for that, I think for that. But you were a podcasting host at the time of this hearing loss, right? Did that affect your work on Yes, Indie’d?
Marx: I don’t think I was. A Loud Noise In A Quiet Place was originally published, I just wrote it myself in LaTeX and published it on my own DriveThru [RPG] page. And I think a year later when ZineQuest hit, I was like, “Oh, no I could publish that properly.” So I actually cheated a bit. I think it would have not been very easy to be a podcasting host and not be able to hear.
Marx: I’m so cautious about this nowadays, because I feel really different about A Loud Noise in a Quiet Place. Because this used to happen to me kind of annually, and it doesn’t so much anymore. So I feel like my relationship to this game has changed a lot over time. Having met a lot of people in the deaf community, and having met people who experienced hearing loss and this isolation every day, I feel very differently about the game. How that manifests is me being really cautious about how I talk about it. I think it’s an interesting game, and it was an interesting experiment to write and publish. But in terms of being meaningful or useful, I think it becomes a lot less obvious.
Alex: If you were to remake the game, you said it would be a solo game. Are there other changes you would make?
Marx: I think if I were to remake this game today, it would be as a solo game. And we did hire various sensitivity readers, but I think I would actually sit down with a deaf or hard-of-hearing person, and we would write this game together from a deaf perspective, and not from a hearing person who has temporarily lost their hearing. It’s one thing being deaf, and living your whole life like that, and understanding how you move through the world. And it’s different being a hearing person who temporarily loses one of their senses — it could be hearing, but it could equally be sight, or maybe you can’t feel things very well, or you lose your sense of smell, and taste, things like that. That’s a completely different lived experience, because suddenly you’re having to adapt instantly to something that a deaf person has experienced, and I think that’s where the interesting part of A Loud Noise in a Quiet Place lies.
Alex: I think it’s an inspired choice to have a person there who’s not allowed to speak to you. It highlights that sense of isolation that I think you were going for.
Marx: Yes, I think that was the lightbulb moment. It is that isolation, that sudden isolation and a sudden change in how you live your life. And it’s not you, it’s the people around you. And the way it manifested at the time is that when I was working in an office environment people would often come over to me asking questions and get my opinion, and over the course of the week that stopped completely because people were too frustrated by the conversations they were trying to have. So all of these environmental things come in to get this feedback loop where people just kind of give up — both from a kind of personal perspective where it is frustrating to talk to me, but also for my benefit. It’s the experience I had at the time. Maybe if I remade it today it would look completely different. It’s certainly of its time, five or six years ago.
The podcast
Alex: Talk to me about Yes, Indie’d.
Marx: Yes, Indie’d was a podcast that I used to run. And that was an interview podcast and I would find lots of people from around the indie tabletop roleplaying game space and I always get them to come and talk about themselves, their projects, what they do, how they make their games. I always wanted it to be like a bit more game designy, but in the end it just kind of became the kind of “Come on, tell me about your stuff, joyously express to me what you love about making games, and what you love about your game in particular. And across the three years and hundreds of episodes that we made, I just met so many cool people, so many people who I continue to be in touch with like yourself, and just had an absolute blast. There came a point in my life where it was not really practical to make anymore and I honestly felt really sad. But then Thomas Manuel came along. That’s been so fantastic too, that it’s continued to exist, and that all of the previous episodes do still exist, and that they’re out there on that feed, but also that it continues and Thomas does a fantastic job.
Alex: I know how this happened, but can you share how it came to pass that Thomas took over?
Marx: I put out an episode that said, “I’m sorry guys, I’m not making it anymore.” And then three days later, I got a DM off of Twitter that said “Hi, my name is Thomas Manuel, I listen to Yes Indie’d, would you like it if I took over?” And yes, absolutely, 100%! So you know, we did the practical side of handing over, but we also had this cool thing where I interviewed Thomas and one week, and then the next week he interviewed me and that was really cool because for me that really bookended the show.
Alex: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
Marx: I’ve been writing this game called The Drover’s Almanack on and off for about three years now, the experience of walking 300, 400 miles across a landscape with dozens of cows. It’s something that used to happen in the UK, it still happens in other parts of the world too. I’ve been offered a publishing deal with Long Tail Games, so it’s really important to me. If you are a fan of walking and/or cows, look out for that.
Alex: What makes a Marx game?
Marx: What makes them specific to me, is that they’re weird, they’re quite small, they’re designed to make you feel something, and it’s not always a comfortable feeling. Sometimes it’s a feeling of being isolated, sometimes it’s the feeling of finding joy in something completely bizarre, and sometimes it’s a kind of wistfulness. I don’t want to say nostalgic, it’s not specifically that, just longing for something you know never existed. All of that is to say, that I write in a very weird way that is quite specific, and is there to make you feel something that you maybe didn’t expect to.
Find Marx’s thoughts on Bluesky, and find all of his games on Itch.