PICARO! Interview with Wythe Marschall

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Plus One team member Will talked to Wythe Marschall of Stillfleet Studio about his adaptation and modernization of PICARO!, designing for the GRIT System, and the tale of the game’s mysterious origins.  

Hi Wythe! Tell us a little about yourself and PICARO! 

Hey Will! Thanks for taking the time to chat. I’m Wythe Marschall (he/him) a writer and game designer. I was trained as an anthropologist of food and medicine, and my passions are science fiction, weird biology-inspired art, and ecosocialism. 

Through my publishing company, Stillfleet Studio, I write and produce “rules-bright” (“medium-crunch”) adventure games that explore these themes. Our north star is to make fun games that put players in immediately engaging narrative structures. For example, in Stillfleet, the flagship game, you play as a crew of far-future voidminers working for a greedy space company, meeting aliens and confronting complicity with capitalism in an absolutely goofy and satirical but often epic and cinematic way. 

The new zine-edition of PICARO! is the fourth physically published game using the Grit System and the first not published by the Stillfleet Studio. In a way, it’s the lightest-touch of the games I’ve worked on but grows out of the same DNA. 

In PICARO!, you play as picaros—outlaws, exiles, “adventurers,” witches, orphans—roaming a fantastical Earth in the year 1700 (give or take two centuries). You can learn the game in five minutes. In the first playtest campaign (what’s up, Jeff, Ben, and Christian!?), the picaros basically fought Dracula (legally distinct name), Cthulhu (legally distinct name), and a Russian wizard who really wanted to win the Great Northern War against Sweden. 


PICARO! has a bizarre origin story, doesn’t it? 

It does! At Gen Con a couple of years ago, I picked up a copy of a classic game book I’d seen as a kid but never read. Inside were a lot of extra loose pages. I thought—sweet, rando GM notes from 1983. In fact, these pages were dated 1970, had no author, and formed a complete game! Someone had typed up a sweet, rambling, mechanically dense RPG about riding horses, casting spells, shooting flintlocks, robbing nobles, and giving away silver. 

My first thought was, this would be better with the Grit System! My second thought was—since I was just realizing how deep the RPG Zine Club collection truly is—this would be a perfect reanimated game if I could cut it down in some ways and expand it in others. 

The long and short is, the bones of the game are rad: the nobles and early charter-company bosses c. 1700 are… honestly some of the worst people who were ever born. Robbing them is 100% a great thing to simulate, and the game features playable golems with horse’s heads, gray aliens (called “shadow gnomes” in the original), and a literal “orphan” class. The Grit System makes all of this simple to play and GM. 

 

What is the GRIT System and why use it for PICARO!? 

The Grit System is a simple, easy-to-learn, player-empowering, “rules-bright” engine for TTRPGs of all genres. Your scores are dice from d6 to d12, and you roll one score at a time when faced with a check—a difficult task whose success or failure will propel the story forward. 

In the base system, you usually succeed on a 6 or better. You can also burn a resource called grit to add a +3, +6, or +9 to any check, but you still fail on a 1. You also burn grit to use special class powers that tend to be quite narratively potent. 

The system works really nicely to model epic moments. The scores in PICARO! are combat, movement, reason, will, and charm—which appear in some of our other games—as well as a new score called infamy that represents how big of a deal your picaro is in the game world, for better or for worse. 

Infamy is a good example of how the system works to quickly set up narrative tension: you can roll it when you’re in town or at a farmer’s cottage (etc.) to beg for help with your current caper—using your celebrity as an outlaw to convince a fellow non-rich person to just give you a meal and a place to sleep, or whatever. But whenever you roll infamy, the GM gets to roll it, too, to see if the local law knows where you are right now… 

The result is a really fun in-between system that has some of the adventuresome hallmarks of a d20 and some of the storytelling hallmarks of a PbtA/FitD, but with satisfying ranges, clear and easy to GM results, and a lot of agency for players. 

You can read more about the Grit System, download the SRD, and hack it yourself here: https://stillfleet.com/pages/the-grit-system 

In terms of adapting an older game, my goal was to preserve the very fun feeling of the picaresque itself. I’m a big literature nerd, and I love Henry Fielding, Tristram Shandy, and the Quixote (mostly in cinema, since the book has a lot of maaad boring asides, although it also has many flashes of brilliance). I also loved that the original game underlined the colonial time-setting of these stories and implied the game should be global and anticolonial, so magic and ælves and so forth would preempt or at least slow down globe-stealing empires. 

I kept these themes top of mind while stripping out 90% of the rules (though we left bits of them in the lists on the inside front and back covers). 

Robbing Aristos! What were your inspirations for the theme? 

The original game insisted that you both keep track of how much silver your picaros rake in and how much they give away. The system functioned like ye old gold-as-xp but with the twist that you only gained experience for giving away money. 

We tied it to the Grit System’s scores-as-dice by making the choice all-or-none: when you survive a caper, you gain a level (i.e., we use narrative leveling, which we use in all of our games to date), but you must also choose whether to keep the money you’ve earned, pay off the rich people pursuing you, or give it away. If you give it all away, your infamy score improves by one die type: you grow more infamous! 

As for why we’d promote the idea of robbing the rich… We live in a New Gilded Age in which 1% of households hold 31.7% of U.S. wealth, industrial capitalism is tending toward technofeudalism, imperialism is rampant, a massive number of jobs are being replaced by AI, housing costs in the U.S. are out of control… Old aristocrats, new aristocrats, old marks, new marks. 

Or said simply, if magic were real, if Dracula was real, rich people would use magic and dæmonic blood-pacts and such to oppress us. 

 

Tell us about the PICARO! team. What was it like working with HODAG? 

I love working with HODAG. He’s the MF DOOM of indie TTRPGs: he doesn’t show his face, prolifically collaborates with so many cool creators, and is totally in control of his own recognizable style. 

Because PICARO! comes from the tradition of games that depict people on horses with swords and ælves and dwarves and so forth, I wanted to capture that for immediacy. But HODAG brings more to the party than ælves and dwarves and so forth. He’s a clever designer himself and always comes up with lovely ideas for kinetic scenes, not just static character concepts. 

In the case of PICARO!, HODAG and I talked about it for an hour or so, he went off to watch Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, and he came back with so many good ideas for this zine! I think the first piece he finished was the full-page smirking arsonist, which sets the tone of the game perfectly. This is not Blades in the Dark: you aren’t Ocean’s 11-coded “master thieves”; you’re true outcasts who may very well burn down a building to cover your exit. 

I have to add: major shout-outs to our designer, my wife, Sunaree Paiwong. She and I researched different print materials from 1970 to pull out the right textures, colors, and ornaments for the text. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve worked together, but it was fun exploring “old school” books (actually printed c. 1970–1980, often pastel) vs. “old school-adjacent” games (designed c. 2011–on to look minimalist and brutal, often either black-and-white or blood-rainbow electric Borg-fetti). 

You can see more from Hodag on wordpress and itch.io follow him on Bluesky.

What’s the response been like from players? 

I’ve never played a game of PICARO! and not had players end the story with a big cinematic tilt of their own devising. 

At a con recently, I had one player, playing the diabolist class, decide that he would side with the dæmon the other players were trying to banish from a cave (while robbing an English geologist). The ensuing last-minute PVP wrestling and violence was basically all player-led and had the consent of the whole table. 

At another con game, earlier, two IRL siblings played a pair of picaros with a brother-like bond—but one of them was a gytrash (horseheaded golem, one of the six basic species in the game) made from the dead horse formerly rode by the other character. So they had this bizarre familial bond that they invented, right away. This made the story so much more fun and intense. I didn’t have to convince them that body horror—just like fantasy—can be a useful lens for looking at our bodies, our identities, our worlds. 

In the original playtest campaign, the group decided to play three old Lithuanian ælves (well, two old ælves and one fech—dopplegänger—pretending to be an old ælf). The campaign played out like a Coen Brothers movie, with moments of vivid action and a lot of traipsing through the snow, bickering. It was hilarious. 

If you want to play a game with us, just hop into the Stillfleet Studio Discord server and give me a shout in the general chat: http://discord.stillfleet.com. 

What do you like to do when you’re not delving through 50 year old game booklets? 

Is there a hobby outside books? I guess my wife and I spend a ton of time thinking about, cooking, eating, and looking at pictures of food, so I should note that. 

In terms of news, we have at least two Grit System games coming out in 2026, including the high-fantasy/portal-fantasy game, The Sometimes Kingdom by Ethan Gould and me, and the near-future oops-aliens-showed-up-and-polluted-earth dungeoncrawling game, ULTRADELVE by Konstantine Paradias. Both take the system to new places. The Sometimes Kingdom adds a unique and highly flexible magic system. ULTRADELVE is like a prequel to Stillfleet, with an amazing, fast generator for alien Structures (game-term, cap-S). 

But the biggest news is that we’re relaunching Stillfleet over the next year as Stillfleet 2.0. This is a community effort, so check out the system, and join us! 

 

PICARO! was released as the Zine Club adventure zine for November 2025. Want more? You can find more at The Stillfleet Studio and give Wythe a follow on Bluesky. 

Want even more PICARO!? 

Watch the Let's Play: Arthur, Fabs, Jenn and Wythe from Stillfleet Studios take you to a fantastical Tortuga for part 1 of PICARO!: 

Join Tony and Wythe as they dig into the GRIT System in Plus One's Procedures at Play: 

 

 

PICARO! was released as the Zine Club adventure zine for November 2025. Want more? You can find more at The Stillfleet Studio and give Wythe a follow on Bluesky. You can see more from Hodag on wordpress and itch.io follow him on Bluesky.