One Against Marco Arnaudo - The Interview

Marco Arnaudo is a professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, a video reviewer, and an occasional designer of board games. He was nice enough to spare me a little time over this holiday season to talk about Fat Goo.

I love the fantastical nature of the Lovecraft universe and have played pretty much every game within it. With a market so saturated with this mythos what made you decide to make this game?

The main reason was very selfish, which is: I wanted to play the game! I love the Four against Darkness system, especially when it uses outdoors locations as in Four against the Titans. I thought it'd be perfect for a story of Lovecraftian horror, so I simply proceeded to design it. Considerations about the market really didn't enter the equation. It sounds very purist and cliche, but I did design it first and foremost for myself, making it exactly as I thought a Lovecraftian game show be: brimming with lore from the stories, and utterly sadistic.

Was there ever a thought to not having Cthulhu in the list of the final bosses or at this point do you think it's mandatory?

I think it's mandatory, at least for me. The Call of Cthulhu is one of my favorite stories by Lovecraft, so I never considered not having an encounter with the big squid guy. However, as my game is very close to the original story, I did include a certain aspect of the original text that other games on the topic tend to exclude. I want to avoid spoilers and I'll also say that most people think of Cthulhu in a Dertleth-oriented perspective (whether they know it or not), but my Cthulhu is truly Lovecraftian. The difference may not be obvious, and that's ok, but I know a player did contact me saying that the encounter with Cthulhu felt "off". I replied that he was right if thinking about games featuring Cthulhu.

You are an obvious Lovecraft fan. I use to work for The H.P. Lovecraft Historical society so I was happy to see some very subtle nods to characters I like (Erich Zahnn for example). Was there any character you left out that you wish you could have put in that might be seen in an expansion?

Oh, so many, like Dr. Muñoz, the frozen dead professor from Cool Air. An expansion may have him as an Investigator or Helper. Low Sanity because of the weird stuff he experienced, but Life N/A - basically cannot wounded or killed. However, cannot travel south of New York or he melts! What do you think?

I'm for sure down for that. Let me know if you need me to playtest. Did you depart significantly from the source texts in some cases?

There's a location that Lovecraft never used for his stories - maybe it was too scary even for him? But I love that place, so I made it all up, and instead of populating it with Lovecraft lore, I filled it with Easter egg from modern pop culture. Also, sometimes Lovecraft was very vague about some characters, so my take is a sort of a guess - an interpretation based on clues in the texts. For example, Lovecraft does not tell us exactly what the nature of the Terrible Old Man is. My rendition of that character in the game is a lot more explicit, but my interpretation is strictly based on clues in the text. It is at the very least compatible with the sources.

I really like that an encounter can only happen once as opposed to other FaD games. Did this come from playtesting or is this something you did right out of the gate?

From the beginning that was one of the innovations, I decided to bring to 4aD. I wanted to ensure variety in the experience, and one thing that sometimes bored me in some titles in 4aD was to repeat the same encounter over and over again. Also, you can kill orcs all day in a 4aD game, and every time you roll the same encounter you imagine it's a different group of orcs. But if I was to have unique characters from Lovecraft, like Herbert West or Akeley, I could not have players meet them over and over again, each time as if the previous encounters had not happened. It would have ruined the illusion. So that was a structural feature from start.

Are you currently working on anything non FatGoo related?

Other than my full-time day job as a professor at Indiana University, and as full-time parent (my wife works at the hospital), and as a full-time homeschool teacher (due to the pandemic)? No; all my design efforts are about FatGOO as of now. Carcosa Rising, a non-standalone expansion based on Bierce and Chambers, is at a very advanced stage, undergoing a final round of playtesting.

I also started drafting Temple of Ancient Terror, a standalone expansion that is more similar to the original 4aD, with a randomly generated dungeon, I mean temple, that you attempt to explore. While standalone, it is also a prequel to FatGOO. It explains how each Investigator came to learn about the Great Ritual, and if you win with an Investigator you gain advantages you can transfer to FatGOO.

Do you have a favorite solo play board game/rpg?

Of course - but I can't tell you. As a reviewer and a scholar, every time I say that something is my favorite thing in anything, I start getting messages that use a lot of words to basically say: "but how about me and my awesome desiiiiiiign?!?". So I don't step into that trap anymore LOL.

*Marco escapes the trap with zero damage*