[Roll Your Own Life] The Books That Hooked Me (Part 8)

JOHN DIES AT THE END - DAVID WONG

Onto part eight of my series of blogposts about the books that had an impact on my life.

David Wong's book, John Dies At The End, is a weird one in many ways, but the way I discovered it was a purely selfish one. Inspired by reading Chuck Palahniuk, I'd come to the stupid conclusion that I should give up on comic writing and RPG writing - I couldn't draw, so I should try to tell stories the traditional way and write a book. I didn't (and still don't) have a publisher for fiction, and I had a look online to see how the indies did it. After all, indie publishing was the way I went with comics...

One that really stood out was David Wong's web story. Published in instalments online, John Dies At The End had thousands upon thousands of readers, attracting the attention of publishers - which lead to the eventual book years later.

I read about this, and read the first handful of chapters online, and thought, "Hell, this is it! This is how I do it!"

Feeling full of renewed vigour, I started writing my awful fiction - The Case of Lost Possibilities - in instalments on a new blogsite (an offshoot of this one) and put up new bits every week. I figured, this was it - this was the way to attract the attention of publishers, show I can write fiction, and get my crazy-assed stories out into the world.

And you know what?

It didn't work.

I think the site had less than a dozen readers, and the story was a bit lame anyway. I liked elements of it, but I really should have had it all planned out beforehand. John Dies At The End always felt like it was being made up as it went along and I really enjoyed it, but I wasn't anywhere near the league of David Wong.

The book came out, and I was working at Ottakar's/Waterstones when it was released - I bought it first day it came in. I read it in a week, and loved it. It was crazy, strange, and sounded just like the weird s*** I would have written given half the chance.

It was the first book I read and got to the end, and then flicked straight back to the beginning and started the book again. That's how much I enjoyed it.

It has been very high on my "you must read this" recommendations list since then.

The movie adaptation is rather excellent too. Brilliant cast, great director (Don Coscarelli - director of Phantasm). It's well worth a watch. Just be warned, it's like watching The Lord of the Rings and the movie gets to Rivendell, then skips straight to Mordor. The movie's great, but to squeeze it all into 90mins it had to miss out a huge chunk in the middle.

Maybe one day they'll make it into a TV series, so they can continue into the crazy adventures of John and Dave in the sequel books...

The second book of John and Dave, This Book Is Full Of Spiders: Seriously, dude, don't touch it is just as crazy, and was recently followed by the third book, What The Hell Did I Just Read. All of them read like the sort of thing I would have written back when I was roleplaying a lot with the old game group in my tiny hometown of [undisclosed].

Very highly recommended.

Hell, just writing about them makes me want to reread them again. Or write a roleplaying game set in their universe...

Licensed to Play

I have a bit of a problem, and I know the cause. 

Like many tabletop gamers of my age, I started playing with the classics - Traveller first, then Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Runequest - before starting to run my own games when I bought Star Frontiers. Y'know, the old school classics.

I really started Traveller (and Star Frontiers) because I loved Star Wars. Of course, neither of these games are Star Wars - especially Traveller - but I needed my science fiction fix. And while I was never a huge fantasy fan in my youth, I loved the games of D&D and Runequest we played.

But along came the licensed games. Games that used similar rules to the classics, but were actually properties that I knew and loved from films and TV. We played FASA Star Trek and Doctor Who, TSR's Indiana Jones, West End Games' works of genius - Star Wars and Ghostbusters. It was in licensed games that I found my real love. Maybe it's my lack of imagination, but I had less trouble mentally visualising a Rodian walking into a dimly lit cantina, or the inside of the TARDIS than I could a Scout/Courier in Traveller, or Castle Greyhawk. 

Cover for a Ghostbusters scenario I wrote
to submit to WEG back in the late 80's.

It's no surprise really that my favourite RPGs of all time are all licensed properties - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Eden), James Bond (Victory Games), Star Wars (WEG) and Ghostbusters (WEG).

My addiction to licensed games followed me as I ventured into the realms of writing RPGs. My first attempts at writing supplements were submitting scenarios for Ghostbusters to West End Games (though heavily influenced by Back to the Future, Weird Science, and Moonlighting). When I started talking to the lovely people at Eden Studios, who really gave me my break in game writing, it was because I'd picked up Conspiracy X (which, in my head, was as close as I could get to an X-Files RPG), All Flesh Must Be Eaten (which owed a lot to Romero's classic zombie movies) and Witchcraft (whose awesome cover just made me think of The Craft).

Ironically, though I'd submitted some suggestions for supplements for All Flesh Must Be Eaten (one heavily influenced by my love of 80's horror movies, called "Summercamp Stalkers and Unstoppable Evil", and another which was basically Aliens only with zombies), when Eden silenced my nagging it was by letting me work on their Planet of the Apes RPG (in all but name) - Terra Primate.

Then it was a slippery slope. I worked on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG (which was a dream come true knowing my love of Buffy), and Army of Darkness (groovy).

Then after talking to Angus and Dom at Cubicle 7, and Chris (who would later go on to create the publishing juggernaut Modiphius) we started pitching to the BBC to create a new Doctor Who RPG.

Cover for the original pitch to the BBC to produce
the Doctor Who RPG.

I was in my element. Pitching to the BBC, writing a licensed game, making sure it felt like the series. It was licensed gaming at its purest. I was an addict, and I'd found the purest drug. Doctor Who was a blast to work on. An absolute joy. Getting to read the scripts for Matt Smith's first series months before they aired, sitting in BBC Worldwide's offices with a portable hard drive to pick cool images we could use in the books. If I smiled any wider the top of my head would have come off.

Then I got distracted. I wrote and helped film a nerd comedy webseries. I'm still happy with my scriptwriting, and I still think it's funny, but I turned down game writing work for that, which I regret. I should have stayed on target. 

Luckily, I had my own project - WILD. I figured, after feeling a bit scarred by the film-making experience that I'd do whatever the hell I wanted and it would just be me. Autocratik was reborn. Hence the name.

But that drug - the pull of the licensed game - it keeps calling to me.

I managed to get aboard with Modiphius for their amazing and glorious Star Trek Adventures, helping to shape the game - from the skills, to the publishing schedule, to the very name of the game. That was fantastic. But, working seven days a week (dayjob and dreamjob) was exhausting and I had to step back from the control panel.

So, I'm back to writing WILD. And while it fills my urge for an RPG that incorporates many of my favourite things - Inception, Elm St, Twin Peaks, and more - that addiction is still nagging away at the back of my head.

Sample layout for a proposed Licensed to Kill RPG (c)2012
Text by me, layout by Will Brooks

I still really want to do a James Bond RPG. I loved the original game, and can see how it would work modernised and updated to the new movies. In my head I can see the supplements, the game, everything...

Sample layout for a proposed Harry Potter RPG (c)2012
Text by me, layout by Will Brooks

I still really want to do a Harry Potter RPG. I love Harry Potter and I think an RPG would be great - not only for gamers, but for fans of the wizarding world yet to break into gaming. It'd be great for kids, and get them using their imaginations. It could do for tabletop gaming what the original books did for kids book publishing. Well, maybe not. But it would be a heck of a lot of fun. Yes, I've written about it on this blog, many, many times before...

Mock Stranger Things RPG cover -
I mean, it's just begging to be a game
isn't it?

I still think an official Stranger Things RPG would be awesome. Yeah, I know Tales from the Loop is genius and kinda filled that void (though it's more tech than paranormal). It still amazes me that someone hasn't done a game, especially as the series uses Dungeons and Dragons as a main plot element! You could do all sorts of paranormal investigation and uncovering government plots. It'd be great!

Yes, I get twitchy and mock up the covers for RPGs
that don't exist but I wish did...

I still think an RPG of Lev Grossman's The Magicians would be cool. If Potter is impossible, how about the cool and (more adult) take on the magical place of education? Brakebills is just the beginning, with sourcebooks for Hedge Magic, Fillory, etc... It's diverse, cool, edgy, and doesn't take itself too seriously. And you could go really dark, or burst into a musical number. Awesome!

Cover for mocked up Twin Peaks RPG
I did for a bit of fun.

I still think there could be a Twin Peaks RPG. Multi-levelled with a basic game of small town intrigue and murder mystery, before expanding into the weird and surreal Lynchian realms. 

I still think there should be a new Indiana Jones RPG. I loved the original TSR game, and with a new Indy movie coming, the time is right...

Mock up cover for John Dies at the End RPG
Original Artwork by Vincent Chong for the
limited Cemetery Dance edition of the book.

Hell, recently I've even started thinking that the novel series (and movie) John Dies at the End could be an RPG. Cthulhu-like paranormal investigations with more jokes, dimension hopping and weirdness. It'd be like a gross new version of the Ghostbusters RPG with more dick-jokes.

To the many people in the industry I bug, or have bugged in the past - I'm sorry to be such a pain. I hope, one day, to work with you all again. I'm sorry, but I've tasted the purest licensing fix there is, and that hunger to taste that joy again keeps rising in me. I can hope, but sometimes I need to remember not to bug people too much and get on with WILD.

There's a Right way, and a Wong way...

Bloggery time again. I need to look back and see where I got up to with my nostalgic retrospective of my gaming history, but in the meantime I've been catching up on reading. Something that I haven't really been doing recently due to NaNoWriMo.

Not that I've been reading much recently anyway. I'd been rereading House of Leaves, mostly because it is both incredibly spooky, and it's got some seriously cool typography and design. That was until I picked up David Wong's sequel to one of my favourite books.

John Dies at the End -
David Wong
(Titan Books)

I've already sung the praises of Wong's "John Dies at the End", and I finally managed to convince my wife to read it. JDATE is an odd one - it started as a blog, David Wong writing it for the internet, and then managed to get such a following for the strange occult adventures of David Wong and his slacker friend John, that it eventually became a small press book. When the legendary director of Phantasm (which I love!) Don Coscarelli showed interest and the book became a movie (going to be released in very soon VoD and limited theatrical run), the bigger book publishers took note and "John Dies at the End" hit the mainstream shelves.

The book itself is bonkers. It really does seem like Wong made the whole thing up as he went along, compiling three distinct stories into one crazy, meandering stream of consciousness that is incredibly addictive and I loved every moment of it.

The problem I had was that it felt like something I would have written. The tone, the bizarre nature of it all, it just felt like Wong had managed to plug into my brain and syphon my own strange ramblings and channel them into his book.

John Dies at the End
Film Poster edition

I read JDATE in about a week, and was left wondering what to read next. I ended up starting to read it again straight away, which is pretty odd. I never really re-read books. I've only really re-read a handful of books - "Falling Out of Cars" by Jeff Noon (my go-to read whenever I need inspiration, it's like my comfort blanket. I know, an odd choice), "Dune" by Frank Herbert (just because it's ace), "The Gunslinger" by Stephen King (mostly because I kept rereading the early ones every time a new Dark Tower book came out), and recently "House of Leaves" by Mark Danielewski.

It wasn't long after the trailer for the movie hit the internet that a sequel to the book was officially announced. It came out just before NaNoWriMo, and I launched myself into David and John's world again. I didn't do as the usual reviewers, I took my time, and enjoyed it. When NaNo started in November, I calmed down the reading because I was worried that my writing style would become... I don't know... more... "Wong" than my own style. Thankfully, NaNo has finished and I was able to finish the book this morning.

The sequel, "This book is full of spiders (seriously dude, don't touch it!)" really does what it says on the tin. It is full of spiders. Evil, parasitic, alien spiders that bore into your head, take over your brain, and turn you into a violent zombie (for want of a better word). Unlike JDATE, "Spiders" is really just one big story, as John, David and Amy find themselves at the core of the "outbreak" and the imminent destruction of their hometown of "Undisclosed". The same strange plot elements (especially the opening sequence with the strange military box and the last minute reveal of its contents) are there, but this is a more structured and coherent story.

The use of the bizarre alien drug "Soy Sauce", introduced in JDATE, is really cool, though the nature of the story having to rely on 2nd hand accounts when you're not following Wong does make it a little odd in places - but when you get to the end and read how the book was supposedly put together it makes sense.

I picked up the book on the day of release, and the first printing had a lot of typos, and three of the pages were in the wrong order, so hopefully that'll be rectified by the time you purchase it. And you should. It's still awesome, and together with John Dies at the End, they easily make my fave reads of the year!