Three Doors

There's a really cool track on the VAST album (Visual Audio Sensory Theater) called "Three Doors". It has been circling my head a lot these last few days, as I really do feel like I'm trying to pick a direction.

WILD

If you've been following my blog for any length of time you know I've been working for many years on WILD, an RPG of Dreamsharing. Open, untethered, and born from my love of Inception, Dreamscape, Paprika and The Matrix. I've been working on it off and on while doing other projects and its always bubbling away at the back of my mind, like a constantly spinning top locked away in a safe, in a house, in the city of my subconscious.

But I keep suffering from doubt, and also hearing tales of how horrible our hobby can be. Ignorant, vocal men, mostly. Threatening creators, posting abuse online. I'm sick of it.

I tried to voice some positivity years ago by creating RPGaDAY, trying to get people talking about the positive aspects of gaming. But I'm so ashamed of the abuse and discrimination in my hobby.

WILD Fiction

The door next to working on WILD is to concentrate on the fiction. For a NaNoWriMo many moons ago I wrote the first book of a trilogy, set in the WILD universe. A teenage school-leaver finds herself trapped in a nightmare she cannot wake from, while her father tries to create what will eventually become the dreamshare technology of the game to try to guide her back to the waking world. It was bizarre, a little personal, and weird thinking as my lead character - an eighteen year old girl facing the pressures of leaving school, going to university, her strained relationships with her parents and the betrayals of her friends.

Once again, doubt has reared its ugly head. Can I write fiction? Would anyone want to read it? What's the point?

And behind door number 3?

Something else?

My desire to write the Harry Potter RPG has never subsided. I know it's a mostly fruitless exercise, but there's that part of me that knows it's a good thing. It could be great for kids and adults alike, getting kids using their imaginations rather than staring at a screen. But while things seem to be more likely now than ever before, with the Fantastic Beasts - Cases from the Wizarding World game on iOS, as well as the forthcoming Harry Potter miniatures game, I'm still just a dreamer. A lone writer with no financial backing or big company to put the money where my mouth is.

I know how it could work, how it wouldn't even really be an RPG, and part of me just wants to write a good chunk of it, and digitally print a couple of copies to really show off what I have in mind. Send copies to WB and JK Rowling. But even then, I'm just me.

Besides, I'm sure there are already others out there who are working on it.

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So at the moment, I'm standing there, like the guy in the stock photo above. Looking at the doors.

I had a birthday recently, and there's a big one coming up next year. Part of me is just thinking "You're too old for this crap" and there's another part of me shouting "Get it done! Do something before the next birthday. You have a year. Get off your ass!"

Well, I'm off my ass. I'm just lost looking for the right door.

Standby For Rejection!

...anything can happen in the next 31 days...

August is a crazy month. There's all the excitement of Gen Con Indy happening at the beginning of the month, when the new games are announced, and just about every game designer (except me) on the planet descends upon Indianapolis.

There's also #RPGaDAY2015, where I've tried to get the internet talking in a positive way about roleplaying... this blog, and my Youtube channel, will be filled with my daily posts corresponding with the questions from the image...

On top of all that, the boss from my dayjob is on holiday, so I'll be pulling extra hours and long shifts to cover.

And finally, because I'm completely insane, I'm going to submit my novel to a publisher...

Never done it before, so it'll be a new experience for me, and I'm prepared for rejection. While I've written loads of RPG books, and worked on many RPG titles, I've never had any fiction published, nor really attempted any long form fiction. I am expecting the "please, never send this to us again" response, and the "please, never write fiction".

The novel is based on the background for the WILD RPG, something I NaNoWriMo'd a few years ago, and I've been rewriting, reworking and editing since. We'll see... I'm not really expecting a positive response.

Meanwhile, it's just a couple of days before #RPGaDAY2015 starts... so I'll post again then.

Until then, stay multiclassy!!

#RPGaDAY - Day 10: Favourite Tie-In Novel / Game Fiction

I know a lot of people find the fiction in game books to be irritating, but without actually feeling the setting I can't get to grips with what I'm supposed to be playing. I find the fiction essential, as it gives me more of a feel for the environment than a load of rules text can.

When I was trying to keep my head in the right frame of mind for writing Conspiracy X 2.0, I found the best series of novels (short of reading the X-Files novels again) was the Dark*Matter novels.

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Bonus points for Slytherin if you can spot the TWO movie references in the opening few seconds of the video...

What the Hell am I doing?

I'm having one of those months where I'm questioning everything I'm doing. Whether this is my writing, drawing, or even the day-job, I just keep coming back to wondering if I'm doing the right thing.

For the last month, the day-job has taken up 90% of my waking time (as usual), with my lunch hours being spent hiding in the public library or coffee shops working on the second draft of the WILD novel that I completed as part of NaNoWriMo a couple of Novembers ago.

I'd been reading novels before going to sleep, books that had dreams as subject, and I've been mostly frustrated that they're not what I've been looking for. First up was Dream London by Tony Ballantyne. It was certainly cool, well written and very dreamlike. There were some particularly cool moments involving people strangely queuing up to look at the bottom of a hole like some tourist attraction. Looking through the strange manhole size hole at the bottom of this pit the viewer can see another landscape far below, as if looking through a gap in the clouds, a hole in reality to another world below. All in all, very smart, but I just didn't like the lead character - he was an archaic "Flashman-esque" womanising scoundrel, and not what I'd want from a lead character.

The next on my reading list was the "Wake" series by Lisa McMann - (Wake / Fade / Gone). Sure, it's a teen fiction title, but never let that put you off of a good book! This one featured a teenage girl, Janie, who is pulled into other people's dreams if they fall asleep in close proximity. This makes things tricky when you're in high school and people keep falling asleep in class. She learns to use her ability to help people overcome their recurring nightmares, and starts working for the police department, going into the dreams of suspects to see if they're guilty of crimes.

The first of the trilogy was good (Wake), the second okay (Fade) which focussed on the unsavoury topic of trying to expose a sexual predator in school, whereas the third (Gone) is quite depressing as Janie discovers the side effects of her ability and must make a choice between using it, or living a shortened life in seclusion.

I've heard that they've optioned the Wake series as a movie, starring Miley Cyrus, which sounds like an awful choice - Wake would work pretty well as a supernatural police procedural TV series, maybe not as a movie, but I wait to be proven wrong.

But neither of these filled the desire for Inception. I guess that's all I really wanted from a book as Inception part 2. Maybe I should just try reading Paprika again. That's kinda why I wanted to write the novel (sorry, novels) that form WILD's backstory. I wanted to explore the reasons why Carter created the dreamshare device, and the emotional progression as he learns to communicate with his comatose daughter, and puts family before the billion-dollar tech company he spent his life building.

Just creating the plot, and the backstory has helped form the universe of the game, and has inspired the images on the WILD Tarot that has become an integral part of the game system.

However, the more I think about the book, and the second draft, the more I question my abilities in writing fiction - I mean, I've dabbled in fiction before but I'm a game designer. I write like bloomin' stereo instructions.

The other options would be to take the story (which I have mostly plotted out in my head) and script it as a comic (which would be okay if only I could actually draw worth a damn) or as a script for TV (who would even look at it, it's not like I can show off my screenwriting skills, especially no one can see my previous screenwriting work).

Maybe I should just get back to the game?

I thought about what needs to be done for it, and it's not horrific, but it's still a long way off. It really is a labour of love. I guess what I need to do is go through everything I've done and start working out what needs changing and writing.

Part of the roughs of the cover image for WILD. (c) Autocratik 2014

I even thought about getting the cover sorted - paying for it to be done. This way I'd have to get the game finished, otherwise I'd have wasted my money paying a professional artist to produce a cover. I have a very definite idea of what I want the cover to look like, so it'll probably be rubbish. I wanted it to be a flip cover for front and back, with the images merging in the middle at the spine - dreamers joined in a shared world. I tried to draw a version of the idea myself, but then I remembered I can't draw... Maybe soon...

So there you have it, that's my current state - so many ideas, no time to actually do it.

Let's break it down -

Things I want to do with WILD:

• Finish writing the game
• Pretty artwork - David Despau meets Windsor McCay
• Cool layout - if House of Leaves was an RPG book, that'd be it... Like 2nd Ed KULT.
• Build a prop version of the ALICE headset and the Dreamshare Device.
• Make a video trailer for the game, fake company infomercials for the product as well.
• Finish the novels, all three of them. 
• Graphic novels?

If only I had the time... And that's before I even think about the ideas I've had for how a Harry Potter RPG would work...