Interview with Mike Martens

Mike Martens is the creator of holiday games The Wassailing of Claus Manor and Black Mold of Claus Manor, as well as the upcoming Tourist Hole.

Hi Mike, thanks for talking with us today! Let’s jump right in: what is The Wassailing of Claus Manor?

So, imagine you’re a maid for a weird old noble family in an ancient manor. You notice they’re acting peculiar … occultist books lying around, wolves prowling through the halls, blood splats everywhere. Suddenly, the family is demanding you help with whatever they’re up to: Things that seem bad and that you have no skill in … but you do really need to keep this job.

Also? The head of the family is Santa Claus.

Why Christmas? 

There’s a duality in Christmas that we don’t like to acknowledge.

We look to Christmas as a pinpoint celebration of the warmth in togetherness. I love that German word for the feeling, Gemütlichkeit: We’ve built all sorts of rituals and symbols that help us manifest that feeling. But trying to consistently create that thing on the same day for everyone we know or meet is excruciatingly awful—there’s a darkness, a Dunkelheit.

If you’ve worked in retail service, you know this duality: Long hours, customer hordes, impossible work/life scheduling, anxious demands, the chant of Mariah Carey burned into your eardrums. But even then, your cohorts share a warm camaraderie in the chaos. 

The Gemütllichkeit makes Dunkelheit, but the Dunkelheit makes Gemütchlichkeit. 

We can’t break that cycle apart, because it’s just the same thing.

I ended up capturing that in a game.

The Wassailing of Claus Manor has a lot of depth. What’s your favorite part of the game? 

The skeleton of The Wassailing owes a lot to David Kizzia’s Bedlam Hall. One piece of meat that we kept on those bones is an early-session exchange of gossip. And this bit always sings.

Players immediately take to painting a devious picture of the Manor. The questions are nudging them there, sure, but they’re fleshing out the Manor as both a community and a place of weird and lurid secrets. It’s really the moment—before Santa’s demons and Gertrude’s blades and whatever else come into the picture—that the players realize “Oh, this is what this game is about.”

And The Black Mold of Claus Manor adds even more weird? 

Absolutely. It gives keepers more options to tailor the tone for their table. Some Troubles (the game’s character-rooted scenarios) push harder into the horrific and some pull back where the original Troubles might have crossed common lines or veils. Cassi Mothwin’s spidery, antlery folk-horror "Trouble for Kringla Claus" somehow does both.

Each year’s holiday annual has Michael, Brian, me, and a growing family of contributors riffing on a different arc of themes, while enhancing the tools for playing the game. 2024’s Black Mold focuses on the things festering within the walls of the Manor. This year’s Pine Tar will set sights on the surrounding landscape: the forest and the village and how they encroach.

You talk a lot about designing with an outsider’s perspective. How does that shape your process?

Any art or design perspective is inherently in conversation with the history that led to it. And TTRPG design has some predominant history that’s hard-coded into the scene—even in a lot of its mavericks.

While I grew up in subcultures that had Dungeons & Dragons concepts floating around (I get it), the D&D subculture itself wasn’t a developmental form for me. So, even though I can often sense where a creator felt they were working against a constraint, I don’t necessarily experience that same constraint.

I have my own “programming” as an artist –  instinctive truths that I’ll embrace or fight – but the walls and doors I perceive are in different places. I’ll effortlessly do a thing that another designer considers impossible or, conversely, struggle to solve a thing that has precedent in the broader scene. Keeping in dialogue with a diversity of design perspectives has been fascinating and valuable.

You have a new weird game hitting tables, bars, and cars soon. Tell us about Tourist Hole.

Tourist Hole started as a point of frustration on a road trip to the House on the Rock with a few other game designers. (It’s the weirdest place on the planet, but that’s a story for another time.) Whenever we found a pocket of time to play a game, we were still hesitant to commit to the standard 3 hours for even a one-shot game.

Around a bonfire, I started wondering if there was a way to make a story game that was the shape of water – able to fit whatever time or player number container you have.

Tourist Hole is that, against a backdrop of existentialist discovery, as you imagine visits to roadside tourist traps. A game where all who wander are indeed lost.

Any plans for this holiday season? What do you like to do when you’re not designing unusual games?

Fittingly, my holiday tradition is a cross-country road trip. Everyone should make the drive from LA to Denver (with a detour to Moab) once in their lives, and I’ve been lucky enough to do it – and then some – for the past few years.

Aside from taking in deserts, mountains, and roadside curiosities, I’ll also be catching up on Triangle Agency and a stack of Adam Vass zines. Send your other recommendations!