Grunge Influenced TTRPG - Interview with Asa Donald

Plus Award-Winning Music-Inspired TTRPGs: Last Train to Bremen & Sound Check

In this week’s newsletter, we go deeper into a few music-themed indie TTRPGs that I covered previously. First, Last Train to Bremen won an Indie Groundbreakers Award last week in the category of “Most Innovative.” As I profiled early last month, Last Train to Bemen is “a storytelling game of doomed musicians and poor decisions” in which the characters are animal musicians who made a deal with the devil. Congratulations to game designer Caro Asercion on the award!

While perusing the other award winners, I saw that Sound Check by Misha Grifka Wander and Envi Wiklund received an honorable mention. I covered this game back in December 2023, and here is a description:

Sound Check is a game about being in a band. Rehearse, party, get interviewed and get intimate - but don't forget, it's all leading up to one thing: the Big Show. Each player will have their own musician with a unique playbook, but everyone works together to tell the story of an up-and-coming band, in any musical genre you like.

Congrats to Misha Grifka Wander and Envi Wiklund!

And if role playing being in a band sounds like fun to you, I encourage you to also check out Limelight from Session One Studios, a tabletop roleplaying game in which you play high school students who have started a band. I interviewed Limelight creator Gregg Lauer in an episode of the Appendix LP Podcast:

Interview with Asa Donald

Last week I covered an upcoming Neil Young-inspired TTRPG. The game’s creator, Asa Donald, reached out to me and we conducted an interview via email. Asa is an independent TTRGP creator who has published under Backwards Tabletop since 2020. His newest project is Rust Never Sleeps, a grunge solo TTRPG about doomed mecha pilots. Claim it now on itch.io, and you’ll receive the beta for free when it releases on May 1st, 2025.

Please enjoy my interview with Asa:

Matt: What is your origin story for listening to music and playing TTRPGs? Have you always seen a connection between the two?

Asa: I had an experience that I suspect many players have had. Some of my early GMs used music to set the tone for play, and they changed songs, for example, when you enter different play modes, like combat. The music creates an experience and informs our state of mind, much in the same way that music in a film sets the tone for a scene. And I remember some cool moments where the music that we were listening to as players was also the music that our characters were listening to in the fiction – and how impactful it was when that music suddenly stopped.

I’m talking about games beyond D&D too, games where music can drop you into a certain decade of your life. Everyone at the table knows the song, and there is this certain energy in the air that’s feeding a collective imagination. It’s like magic.

Beyond play, when I’m writing, I use music to set a “tone” or “vibe.” I’ll listen to a song on repeat and find inspiration in its concoction of lyrics, instruments, voices, tempo, volume, and so forth. I can be a little obsessive about it, and I’m always chasing the magic. Because it really does seem magical or maybe it’s just the Barnum Effect — it’s a sense that the song is “perfect” for the exact circumstances or fiction that you’re trying to create.

I expect a lot of writers do that, and I’ve seen others post their playlists on Bluesky. Heck, some of them use music to create cool stuff like I Don’t Belong Here — which is Adam Station’s RPG sparkbook inspired by the lyrics of Radiohead.

So, I don’t know if I have a unique origin story in that way, but I do think music is already embedded in our games in a way that we don’t always examine because we’re too busy enjoying it.

Matt: How did Neil Young and grunge music inspire your Rust Never Sleeps game?

Asa: The setting and premise came first: mech pilots in the Pacific Northwest; a deck of cards is your battery pack. Then came the grunge: the crunchy instrumental distortion, sludgey rhythm, crashing cymbals. It was a Seattle sound for an industrial game, and I decided that the mechs came with grunge mixtapes for players to listen to during solo play.

A lot of the game developed organically after that. It was pretty early on when I looked back to Neil Young as the Godfather of Grunge and his album Rust Never Sleeps. “Hey Hey, My My” and “My My, Hey Hey” are super influential songs for the grunge movement, and their lyrics give the album its name: “It’s better to burn out / because rust never sleeps.” I oriented the game around mech pilots who inevitably burn out and named the game after the album.

These two songs are bookends to the two playlists that you use in the game, just as Young used them to bookend his album. But I flip the order. Your playlist begins with the sort of rebellious, crunchy “Hey Hey, My My” and it ends with the melancholy “My My, Hey Hey”: two very different takes on burnout, despite the similar lyrics. The rest of the playlists are more classic grunge: Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam.

Matt: By the way, my dad was a singer in a Seattle band in the early 60s, so we always joke that he is the true grandfather of grunge.

Asa: That's fantastic! I'll admit that I had mixed feelings about grunge music, which was popular when I was growing up. Nirvana and Alice in Chains were not my thing back then.

Through this game I’ve come to love the grunge music that I used to dislike. The game has a post-apocalyptic setting, and for characters in the game, the music is framed as “songs whose meanings are ancient mysteries yet resonate into the present.” And as a player you listen to them and appreciate them from a new perspective and in a new context. It’s wonderful what games can do. I really love Nirvana and Alice in Chains now.

In RNS, these songs belong to mech pilots, hopelessly fighting against an authoritarian. And listening to them with that context in mind is meant to hit close to home and raise some real world questions, especially around burnout. The lyrics that I quoted earlier have a very tragic history themselves, and it’s changed how they’ve been understood over the years. Neil Young even vowed not to play “My My, Hey Hey” again after Kurt Cobain quoted the lyrics in his final words. But the surviving members of Nirvana encouraged him otherwise.

I want to say that although a song recording is static, the context in which we hear it matters, and the music that we listen to while playing games is influenced by our play experience. In fact, our understanding of those songs is forever changed by the games we played them with.

Matt: Can you talk about how music informed the mechanics of Rust Never Sleeps?

Asa: When your pilot is listening to music, you’re listening to the same song. The cassette player seems to have a mind of its own and kicks on at oddly appropriate circumstances. Often it’s while you're drawing cards for the action scenes. But sometimes when something sad happens, the mixtape flips over to side two, which is the sad and slow playlist.

More inventively, I’m trying something new with “oracles” in RNS. Some RPGs, especially GM-less or solo games, use an “oracle” to generate your character’s circumstances. They’re often tarot cards but can also be playing cards, dice, even magic 8-balls. They simulate a Game Master through randomness and provide vague but evocative prompts or themes that facilitate storytelling. “Good” oracles can give that sense of magic and an uncanny connection to the plot.

For the solo mission generators in RNS, I have created an oracle that is based on a shuffled music playlist, rather than tarot cards. It has its roots in Ribbon Drive by Avery Alder, in which your characters are on a road trip and you listen to songs, letting their music summon a scene that continues the current narrative. Ribbon Drive invites you to think of the plot as a road trip film and asks what scene would open with this music?

In RNS, each mission also begins with “an opening theme” from your playlist, and you sit with the song, creating a wordbank of evocative lyrics and noting the song’s tone and themes. This wordbank is used to guide journaling and flesh out details in the story, uniting story elements under that song’s themes. The song comes back at the end as a framing device.

Finally, I also use the simplest version of an oracle, which is just a random table. And in RNS, each of your playlists have ten songs and you will have tables with ten options. You shuffle your playlist, get an option, and can listen to the music for further inspiration.

Matt: Has music influenced any of your other games or gaming experiences?

Asa: To expand on how I listen to songs when I’m writing, I wrote a southern gothic adventure once, for example, and I looped The Death South’s “In Hell I’ll Be In Good Company” for a weeklong writing frenzy. I did something similar with “A Man of Constant Sorrow - Radio Edit.” And for something that I never published, I wore out Hotel California on Spotify. In the end, I couldn’t get the haunting southwestern vibe that I wanted and gave up. But maybe one day I’ll hear Hotel California on the radio and feel compelled to jump back into my draft.

Those were all OSR-style adventures, and I’ve moved into a more adventurous indie space since then, seeking out games that use music not only as inspiration or ambience but as their central mechanics. Honestly, I think it’s super hard to accomplish that, and I genuinely marvel over how subtly great Ribbon Drive is and how seemingly modest its instructions are.

As far as I’m aware, Void 1680 AM (2023) is probably the best and most notable music-oriented game since Ribbon Drive (2009).¹ In some ways, this is a solo playlist building game. And in other ways, it’s about a lonely soul, getting calls from other lonely souls. You’re the DJ of an AM radio station with some weird callers, and the playlists that you build set the tone for your gameplay. They also inform the fiction but not quite so explicitly as in Ribbon Drive. What’s cool about Void 1680 AM is that the prompts get you thinking about the music that you’re playing, such as their “emotional intensity” and what that can mean outside of tempo and volume, as well as their personal meaning to you as the DJ and as a player. It’s definitely for music lovers.

I’ll mention a few shorter games that I’ve looked at recently, some of which were shared with me via the Dice Exploder discord. One is Hello Stranger, which is about two people trying to communicate to one another using songs. Picture, for example, a secret agent with their handler or a medium with a lingering spirit. The premise is really clever. I’ve also been looking at “Hey, this song reminds me of you” and “Musical memories,” which are more in the vein of Ribbon Drive.

Matt: At Critical Hit Parader, we have a concept of an Appendix LP: a list of inspirational and educational listening that influence and enhance tabletop roleplaying. What bands/artists would be on your personal Appendix LP?

Asa: First, I’ll share the starting playlists for RNS: Mixtape Side One and Mixtape Side Two. I’ll argue that these enhance tabletop roleplaying, especially in this game, where the musical themes and the game themes collide.

I spent a lot of time curating the songs for these short playlists, and I know some people will push back on what’s “grunge” in them. But I’m okay with that. If folks listen to any of these songs, I recommend comparing “My My, Hey Hey” with “Hey Hey, My My” and checking out Bam Bam’s “Ground Zero,” which is delightfully weird and will grow on you.

For educational listening, I recommend some grunge or grunge adjacent collaborations and tributes:

• The Long Road by Pearl Jam, feat. Neil Young

• Sleeps with Angels: Neil Young’s tribute to Kurt Cobain

• Big Green Country by Neil Young, feat. Pearl Jam

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Claim Rust Never Sleeps for free before its May 1st release from the Backwards Tabletop itch.io page.

1. I covered Void 1680 AM in a previous Critical Hit Parader newsletter.