CBR+PNK Designer Spotlight: Jota Pe Corvuja

Runners! Enjoy another designer spotlight for CBR+PNK: OVERLOAD. Today we're interviewing the designer of Akuma: Labyrinth of the Mind, Jota Pe Corvuja!

Akuma is a crawl into the scariest dungeon of them all - THE HUMAN MIND! Specifically, the mind of a subject named AKUMA who is being 'conditioned' to become a mindless killing machine...

We sat down with Jota to learn more about Akuma and their journey as a designer.

1. What inspired your Pamphlets?

Akira, Inception, Inside Out and the idea of saving a friend from an awful fate. Not a obvious combination but it came to me when I was thinking of what I could make for the CBR+PNK Jam and had this idea of “what if you could save Tetsuo from becoming a monster?” and asking myself how the runners would do that. Inception came to mind when I was workshopping how the target of the run was becoming a monster, it had to me some mind altering tech and the runners had to stop it.

Inside Out came from working out how the mind would work as game mechanics. There you have it, a CBR+PNK run: The runners would need to hack into the mind of someone, a close friend, to save them from becoming a emotionless killing machine by navigating their memories and activating their vanishing emotions.

2. Describe your Pamphlet in three words, then explain why you chose them.

Emotional Memory Journey.

I wanted the run to play with emotions and memories, two subjects that always fascinated me. To do that I needed to decide how they would work in the run, I wanted the emotions to affect the runners as well as the memories so very early I realized they would need to be conditions like harm and themes that I could use to give flavour to the world of the mind, like the dangers that appear in the run. The memories took a while to get into shape, I wanted to feel like a journey into someone’s life but I also wanted to give the players and gms the freedom to create how that life would had been lived, and that worked well with what I researched about memories being plastic and mutable. So I made a dungeon crawl with brief prompts of what each memory could be as the rooms of the dungeon and gave the players a way to create, change and erase memories and tie them to emotions.

3. What’s a design element - either as part of your Pamphlet or otherwise - that you’re particularly proud of?

One thing I love in CBR+PNK was how Emanoel managed to fit a whole game into two pamphlets, and with the coolest design at that. I was used to big rule books for ttrpgs and Emanoel’s game showed me another way and inspired me to create my own games.

As for my work, I am quite fond of the emotion-based mechanics and worldbuilding. I had a lot of ideas of how to explore the concept and did my best to put them all into the pamphlet and in the end it worked quite well.

4. Do you have any advice for someone designing their first TTRPG or module?    

I think the hook is the most important part, the thing that you will use to pitch other people into trying it out at the table, it can be a mechanic or a story element, whatever you think is the most exciting thing about it. After you have that you have to decide how big is what you want to make and stick to that, I recommend starting small with something like a pamphlet. The fun part is exploring what you can do with the hook in the space you have.

5. What’s your signature drink in the CBR+PNK universe—and what’s in it?             

The ApaThonic. Which, believe it or not, has no tonic in it. Its equal parts of absinthe and guarana soft drink with a dash of risperidone served in an injection needle straight to the vein.

6. Where can people find you?  

@jotapecorvuja (Instagram)

@jotapecorvuja.bsky.social‬ (Bluesky)

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Thanks Jota! Don''t forget, CBR+PNK: OVERLOAD runs through the month of June 2025!