Podcast: Miguel Ángel Espinoza on Nahual, His RPG Adaptation of Mexican Outlaw Comic Operación…

Podcast: Miguel Ángel Espinoza on Nahual, His RPG Adaptation of Mexican Outlaw Comic Operación Bolívar

This month I’m joined by Miguel Ángel Espinoza, creator of the urban fantasy tabletop role playing game Nahaul. Nahaul is based on the Mexican outlaw comic Operación Bolívar by Edgar Clément, originally published in Mexico in the 90s and recently republished in a new collected edition in Spanish. So this episode is a collision of my interest in obscure comic books and indie tabletop role playing games.

As always, the music is by Krudler.

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In Nahaul, you play superpowered angel hunters in modern day Mexico City. But you don’t just hunt the angels who have invaded your continent. You run a side business harvesting angel parts, whether that’s by running a taco truck that sells angel meat tacos, or running a bar that sells angel blood wine. So yeah, it’s pretty dark. I got the chance to playtest Nahual with Miguel in 2018 and I can tell you it’s a blast. The combination of angel hunting and running a business, along with all the individual player character’s personal lives, leads to really fun, messy role playing scenarios. If you think role playing is nothing but Dungeons and Dragons, it’s definitely worth checking out this game. It’s based on the Apocalypse World engine, which emphasizes storytelling over rules and complex game mechanics. If you’re into gaming, you might know it from Dungeon World or Monster of the Week. It also happens same game engine I used for my own cyberpunk game Mission Driven.

• Nahual the role playing game is available in print from Magpie Games or as a PDF from DriveThruRPG.
• Operación Bolívar is available in print from Pura Pinche Fortaleza Cómics or digitally from Amazon.
• Miguel publishes work through Smoking Mirror Games.
• He has also contributed to Tiny Dungeon and Cold Shadows from Gallant Knight Games and has done layout and graphic design for Magpie Games, Gallant Knight, and others.

Show Notes:

Miguel mostly reads TPBs, but doesn’t follow ongoing series. He was introduced to comics by a friend who had a radio show about comics. His friend took him to a comic shop that had a few Mexican indie comics. But he didn’t find Operación Bolívar until later. He didn’t read the series when it was serialized in the magazine El Gallito Inglés in the 90s, he didn’t see it until his friend bought a copy of the collected edition and lent it to Miguel. “It blew my mind when I found it and read it.” He was in his early 20s, 19 at the youngest. It made a big impression on him because it didn’t try to imitate popular American comics of the time. He originally wanted to do comics before he got into role playing games.

He got into RPGs with Dungeons and Dragons. He met more players in university and tried more games, including Call of Cthulhu and the White Wolf games. He didn’t discover indie RPG games until he had already started looking into making the Nahaul game. He originally tried to create his own system for Nahaul, but once he found Apocalypse World he realized it was the ideal system for what he wanted to do.

He emailed Clément about adapting Operación Bolívar, but didn’t hear back from him, but decided to forge onwards because Clément was pretty open to letting people work on things in his universe. He also started work on a comic book story set in Clément’s world. That did get Clément’s attention, and he finally got official permission to pursue an RPG adaptation. He never finished the comic. He’s been focused on the RPG world ever since — -he now makes his living as a graphic designer for Magpie Games.

Colonialism is an important theme in both the comics and the role playing game. The Nahual don’t know how to use their power because the Conquistadors cut the culture’s roots and their ties to the powers. So the angel-hunters know they have powers but have yet to find their full potential. Miguel describes Clément’s universe as an allegory of what Mexico is like: their indigenous traditions were cut-off and now they have “this weird mixture of stuff with good things and bad things.”

He started the game, with his own system in 2012, then found Apocalypse World in 2014. Much of his network of game designers and players was built on Google+, which was a bastion of tabletop role playing game discussion up til its demise in 2019. At first he tried to cram too many different possibilities into the game, but Magpie co-founder and Urban Shadows co-designer Mark Diaz Truman helped him refine his ideas into a more coherent game. For example, Truman encouraged him to consider the “holding environment” of the game, ie the fictional reasoning for the characters to stay together. In Dungeons and Dragons, the holding environment is often the dungeon itself and the danger that splitting up poses to individual characters. In urban fantasy, it’s hard to force the characters to stay together. In Nahual, the business the player characters own together acts as a holding environment, not in the sense that they can’t ever leave the business but in the sense that it gives a reason to stick together. Considering that issue helped Miguel narrow the focus of Nahual to angel hunting as opposed to other potential activities within Clément’s universe.

Miguel initially copied many ideas directly from Apocalypse World and Dungeon World but as he revised the game it took on more and more of its own character. An example of this is how character archetypes are determined by the animal they identify with, as opposed to a niche such as “fighter” or “medic.” In D&D terms, you can sort of think of each animal as a class, and character personalities are based on the animals. Jaguars are more aggressive and violent, for example, while monkeys are more playful and mischievous.

The Nahual Kickstarter campaign funded the creation of supplements for the game that Miguel is working on now, such as the ability to explore the world of characters who capture Diablos instead of angels.

Miguel did the layout for the Zorro role playing game from Gallant Knight Games. He was originally going to write some content for the game but didn’t have time. He did write some stuff on Mexico City for the publisher’s espionage game Cold Shadows as well as a post-apocalyptic setting included in Tiny Dungeons.

Miguel published Nahual in both English and Spanish at the same time, but he doesn’t think he will do that again. The market for English language games is much larger, so his original works will likely be in English. But he also hopes to translate other people’s indie games into Spanish and publish them in Mexico.

One project his company Smoking Mirror Games will publish soon is Ixalba, a Mesoamerica-inspired setting for Dungeons and Dragons 5E by Mario Ortegón. Miguel is also working on a new game called Xantolo and, at Magpie, he’s working on the Avatar: The Last Airbender RPG.

Game Miguel recommends Symbaroum from Free League.

At the time we recorded, Nahual was only available to Kickstarter backers, but it is now available through Magpie and through DriveThru RPG.