Nerdy City has released multiple titles in their Radical Shadows universe, a series of TTRPGs based on toys and cartoons from the 1980s.
Please tell us about yourself and your company.
My name is Megan Dawson Jaffe, and I am the CEO and head editor of Nerdy City. Nerdy City is an indie tabletop game publishing company, kind of a collective, really. It’s mostly based on a partnership between myself and my spouse Sean Jaffe. We have a couple of core collective members, but we also work with a lot of consultants as well.
What are you currently working on?
So Holomatixx is the newest installment in the Radical Shadows universe. It is a story about secret pop stars and music video powers—you are a regular kid who is gifted with the holographic ability to have a rock star alter ego with the powers of illusion. We just had a successful Kickstarter for that, so now we’re fully into production mode.
What drew you to the Eighties as a source of inspiration?
Part of it is just from growing up then. Sean and I are both Gen X, so that’s sort of our childhood. There was also a lot of free-flowing inspiration around 2016 because Stranger Things had come out.
Do you have any other projects coming down the pipeline?
We are also working on finishing up our player’s guide for Commandroids, which was our first Radical Shadows game. And we’re starting to get into playtest mode for Myrmidons of Midkiria, which is our next big game after Holomatixx. That’s like sci-fi barbarians so think He-Man, She-Ra, Thundercats, Thundarr, that whole sort of takeoff of the sword and sandal genre.
What kind of feedback have you gotten from players about your games? We have a big focus on playtesting the games in two ways. We have a regular game group locally that we run, and that kind of helped shape the world. But we’ve also been taking [our games] to conventions and we play test a lot of stuff there.
Have you used libraries while developing your games? If so, how have they impacted your work?
We have definitely used them for research, because one of the things with these games is that we love to bury a lot of deep cuts into things, and so reading up on the concepts has been a
part of that. I would honestly love to do more work with libraries, because again, there’s a lot of layered references and I feel that it could almost add kind of a fun scavenger hunt aspect [to the games].
Do you have any advice for people that want to get into developing and/or writing games?
If you are just getting into developing games, go to cons. There are some really great groups that have been set up just for trying out new ideas and putting them in front of other people. Getting something out is more possible than ever, and then you can start finding your people.