Solstice Greetings and the End of 2020

 

This year freakin' sucked. It's traditional to do a blogpost at the end of the year to discuss what has happened over the last twelve months, and to be honest, it's going to be hard. 

It started badly, losing my beloved cat Marla in January. She really was the most important thing in our lives, and losing her so suddenly hit me really hard, and I'm still not (and probably never will be) over it. 

Then we had a bad case of the flu, I blacked out, and just a month after we'd recovered from that, the rest of the world went to hell as the pandemic swept across the globe. With governments lead by floppy-haired pillocks who wouldn't know common sense if it smacked them in the face, it got out of control. As I write this, the strain in the UK has mutated into an even more contagious disease that threatens to dominate the country. The rest of the world has put us in isolation and our green and pleasant land has become the next Children of Men. 

While we try to survive the last days of 2020, looking back there were some good moments. They were few, but they were there. My wife launched her awesome Etsy shop, where her hand-crafted and upcycled goth coolness has been really busy in the build up to Halloween and Christmas. 

Lockdown (1 and 2, with a 3rd on the horizon) meant I got to stay home and hide. In between therapy sessions for my worry and stress, I managed to finish off a massive project that'll possibly be announced sometime close to the Doctor Who New Year Special - Revolution of the Daleks (hmmm, I wonder what it could be?). 

I also managed to finish off an adventure for EN's Awfully Cheerful Engine, which will hopefully launch next year.

And, thanks to Stoo and 300+ Kickstarter backers, WILD has been funded and will see print around Easter next year too! Just have to finish off those extra bits that were unlocked as stretch goals. Thank you to everyone who backed it or shared it!

We just have to hope there's a next year. The way this year has treated us, there's still the chance of a zombie apocalypse or rogue asteroid to really finish of a really crappy year.

So, I'm signing off for the rest of the year. I'm hiding in my bunker (when I'm not stuck at the dayjob). 

Stay safe everyone. 

[Roll Your Own Life] The Games That Shaped Me (Part 2)

Ghostbusters - West End Games (1986)

Next up on the games that had a massive impact on me is another one of my favourite games of all time. Ghostbusters.

I was obsessed with Ghostbusters (the movie that is) and I desperately wanted to be Venkman when I grew up, so hearing that there was a roleplaying game? I was sold before I'd even looked at the back of the box.

The only disappointment for my youthful brain was the lack of character sheet. Looking back now I see it was a revolutionary work of genius, but despite the character sheet problem (that I remedied with some homegrown efforts) I could tell even then that the game was something special.

I mean, look at the thing - it was a work of perfect simplicity. It didn't need to be full colour, it didn't need anything except that logo on the front, and some dice. And one of those had the logo on it as well.

The thing about it was how quick and simple it was. The rules were possibly the most minimal thing I'd ever seen. And it introduced "Brownie Points", something that I'd never encountered before, allowing the players to fudge rolls, to tweak the outcomes and to generally make the story funnier, better and cooler.

The start of the Rules Chapter from
The Ghostbusters RPG
with thanks to www.gbfans.com

And story was what it was all about. No longer was it a simple dungeon crawl, it was about telling a cool (and funny) story. There were investigation elements, working out who the ghost was, what its typical behaviour was like, and then there was the fun of blasting the place to pieces with Proton Packs. And there was no dying. Buildings could be destroyed (and frequently did) and your characters would stagger out of the rubble in their underwear with a Wile E. Coyote dazed look on their faces.

There were adventures published in the Ghostmaster's rulebook, and what was a revelation, dozens of Story Hooks. Short adventure ideas that could be expanded to complete adventures. Brilliant.

We played Ghostbusters continually, I zipped through all of the Story Hooks in record time. We had some of the most bonkers characters (Coop's character of note was Mr. Oook, an orangutan with a Proton Pack) and some of the craziest adventures ever (I do remember the published adventure "Hot Rods of the Gods" was particularly wacky!).

Of course, without adventures (we'd gone through all the ones published) I had to design my own. And so I did something I hadn't considered before. I contacted the publisher...

A little self portrait I did at the height of
my Ghostbusters writing in 1987

I wrote a letter to West End Games and gushed about how cool and funny their game was, and they kindly supplied me the necessary release forms for budding authors. I saw this as a huge "Go For It!" sign, and promptly set to work.

The problem I had was that my life revolved around gaming and watching movies. So a lot of what I started writing was parodying movies in some way. Also, this was at a time that may seem alien to some... it was B.I. - Before Internet.

Writing was a laborious task involving a huge electric typewriter (not electronic, just electric) that had fans and stuff built in to keep it from overheating. It was about the size of a Volkswagen and when you needed to change the ink ribbon, the front lifted up like the hood of said car. Everything was typed up (double spaced), corrections made with those little Tippex Correction Strips, and then it was all photocopied and posted as a huge mass of A4 paper by airmail to New York to be read by those cool guys at West End Games.

So, what nonsense was I turning out?

The cover I did for Spooky Science.
This is a black and white photocopy
from 1986

I wrote two big adventures. The first was called "Spooky Science", a parody of Call of Cthulhu, Indiana Jones and Weird Science. 45,000 words of bizarreness where an automated computer system attached to the containment grid goes mad, a fitness cult open a portal to unleash their god, Yogurt-Soggoth, onto an unsuspecting New York, and the Ghostbusters have to escape from the Temple of Yogurt in an epic chase involving shopping trollies. I seem to remember the finale involving New York being flooded in yogurt, and the Ghostbusters arrive on the scene on wet-bikes.

Flicking through the photocopies of the manuscript that I'd recently uncovered, it isn't baaaad...  it's just filled with typos, and it's a little derivative. Mulu Pram, the high priest of Yogurt-Soggoth was an obvious rip-off, but it was a bit of a laugh, and a satirical dig at the fitness craze that was big at the time. I blame Olivia Newton-John. Hell, we all loved Olivia Newton-John at that time.

Anyway, I packaged it up, sent it off, then waited the expected three months for a reply from WEG.

I called New York, which in the days before Skype and Facetime was a costly and scary affair from the UK, and talked to someone at West End Games to confirm it had arrived okay. Then, a couple of months later, I received a reply. It was very positive, but explained that they'd already published a food-based adventure (with the first official scenario, Ghost Toasties) and I saw it as an encouragement to go ahead and write more.

The cover I'd supplied for Back to
Transylvania. Really, not good... (1987-8)

The second of the adventures I finished was "Back to Transylvania", a bizarre time travelling adventure where, through a freak accident in history, Dracula had started a vampire plague and the Ghostbusters had to travel back to 1859 in a time-travelling DeLorean to take on the dark master himself, to prevent the world becoming overrun by vampires.

Again, it drew heavily from Hammer movies, Back to the Future and even had a moment where the filming of the TV series Moonlighting was interrupted and Bruce Willis became a vampire (the scene that initially tips the Ghostbusters off that there's something strange in the neighbourhood).

The scenario also introduced new rules for having non-human Ghostbusters (mainly to include Scooby-Doo as a player-character) and a basic magic system.

Again, I photocopied it, and posted it off to New York, and eagerly awaited a response.

And again, I had a really nice response from the guys at West End. I'm sure it was Greg Costikyan who wrote to me (or it may have been Bill Slavicsek) to let me know what they thought. I have the letter somewhere (though it's in a pile of stuff that has moved since the "moving everything out of mum's house" thing happened), but I remember what it said even now, nearly 25 years later.

It said that "you can obviously write, but..." and then went on to explain that Bruce Willis and Scooby-Doo's owners may sue for using them in a comedy adventure like this. While I understood what they were saying, about not using real people or copyrighted characters, the key thing was that letter said I could write.

I'm sure it was Greg Costikyan (and if it wasn't I'm sorry, and this is directed at you) who wrote to me, and without that positive reply I would never have continued writing. I'd have just packed it in there and then, got a boring job in retail (this is called irony) or something, and given up. So whoever it was who wrote to me, thank you.

The cover to an adventure I didn't finish, based
on John Landis' fake movie title
"See You Next Wednesday" (1988)

Encouraged by this, I kept going, but I didn't get every far. I started work on a new scenario called "See You Next Doomsday" which was going to be a fairly basic zombies and "Evil Dead" inspired story, as I'd just seen Evil Dead II and the idea of a Sam Raimi style comedy-horror with the Ghostbusters sounded awesome to me. The title came from John Landis' "See You Next Wednesday", a non-existent movie that appeared in the background of a lot of Landis' films, which in turn inspired our RPG group's name.

I came to a grinding halt a handful of pages in, when I was inspired to do a different game... based upon the movie "A Nightmare on Elm Street" I ran a proper horror game (strangely, using the Indiana Jones RPG system from the original TSR game) which involved going into peoples' dreams and facing their night-terrors. It seemed to go down pretty well, so I thought about changing it and doing it a little more light-heartedly as a Ghostbusters scenario.

Again, taking its title from another John Landis movie, I started work on "Into the Nightmare", but real life interrupted, and I found myself a real job. It wouldn't be until many years later that I would go back to writing RPGs based on dreams...

Since then, I've been able to continue my obsession with Ghostbusters with a project I did for EN Publishing for their WOIN system. I thought I'd do my take on Ghostbusters with Spirits of Manhattan. Must admit, I loved going back to that comedic style of writing. Just great fun. Check it out - you too can drive around Manhattan in a converted Pope-mobile and face a giant building sized Edgar Allan Poe. 

[Disclaimer - Some of this post was originally featured on this blog back in 2012]

[Disclaimer 2 - My wish to bring the Ghostbusters RPG back with a new edition has not changed.]

That's the Spirit

Working cover for Spirits of Manhattan (EN Publishing)

Way back in January I posted that I'd submitted the manuscript for a completed project - one that I had great fun doing, and really surprised me in more ways than one. Well, it looks like that project has gone to layout and should be available in a couple of months or so. 

That project is "Ghostbreakers: Spirits of Manhattan" - the next in EN Publishing's WOIN Studios line. WOIN Studios are the producers of film and TV projects in another reality, and EN Publishing has managed to secure the licensing deal for some of their properties for publication in our world. 

Ghostbreakers: The Spirit of Manhattan lets you play the characters from the highly successful first movie in the Ghostbreakers series, or to create a new "franchise" of Ghostbreakers hoping to save the world from ghostly and demonic invaders. 

I won't go into any great detail, but I must admit this really surprised me. 70-80% of the book is an adventure - something I haven't really tackled for a long time, choosing more recently to concentrate on settings and systems. I wasn't sure if I could do it, but I got VERY into the swing, creating the setting, rationalising how it worked, as well as detailing the many, many sequels that followed this first "movie".

Cover for manuscript I wrote for WEG's
Ghostbusters RPG back in 1987

It was really going back to those first adventures I wrote when I was trying to get into roleplaying game writing way back in the late 1980s. The first game I tried writing for was West End Games' amazing and legendary Ghostbusters RPG - though the scenarios I'd submitted had parody elements inspired by Weird Science, Back to the Future and Evil Dead 2...

It was strange going back to that style of writing, but it was a blast. And above all, it was great to write something funny. After all, we all need a bit of a laugh at the moment.

It did make me think recently about doing something else with the numbers filed off. Something about magic schools and wizards maybe...

But I should concentrate on WILD and not get distracted unless another paid gig should come along? 

Until next time, remember this one piece of advice...