Roll Your Own Life (8) - Ghostwriting for the USA

First of all, may I just say thank you to everyone who offered their condolences and their offers of support after last week's blog post. I'm coping as best I can with plenty of writing distraction, but it's going to be a hard couple of weeks ahead, so this'll be a rather large post to tide you over until my return.

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

Onto happier thoughts, but still just as nostalgic, I left the history of my gaming with the decision to contact West End Games about writing for their awesome roleplaying game, Ghostbusters (see "Roll Your Own Life 6"). I was obsessed with the film, and loved the game. This was back in the time when VHS tapes of movies came out to rent before they were available to buy, and my copy of Ghostbusters was a new rental copy that my local video store let me purchase by paying them a little every week until I'd paid the mammoth £85 price tag.

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 the 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...

Roll Your Own Life (7) - Family Values

Sorry I missed a blog post last week, when you read this one everything will become clear.

I wanted to take some time out of the usual chronology of my life in gaming to talk about family. My parents were always very supportive of my gaming habits - in fact, when it comes to "The Eight", I think most of our parents were incredibly happy that we were playing D&D or gaming. I suppose that when you're raising a teenager it is reassuring to know that we were simply at each other's houses, sitting around a table with cups of tea, stretching our minds with games of fantasy rather than hanging around on the streets, drinking and shouting at cars, or whatever the typical teenagers in a small coastal town do when there's nothing better to occupy their time.

Our mums were fantastic. Usually, in the middle of a game they'd pop their heads around the door to check we were okay and to take requests for cups of tea, cake or biscuits.

When I left school and signed on for a year, spending almost every waking hour hunched over an electric typewriter writing scenarios to try and get published with West End Games (more on that in a future blogpost), I never had any hassles about getting "out there" to get a job. They may have grumbled to each other, but I didn't have any hassles to my face at least - maybe they were just happy that I wasn't being a lay-about and was being creative.

Me, Mum and Dad at my graduation, 1995

As time passed, and I went to art college, they were proud that I'd continued to feed my creative drives, and although the comic publishing empire I tried to forge failed after a year, when I started writing RPGs again, they continued to be encouraging. As each book came out they attentively looked for my name in the credits. To them, it wasn't a game-book. It was a book. Their son had been published, and I'd heard tales of my dad showing one or two of them off to the unsuspecting townsfolk in my hometown.

My dad died just a week after I signed the contracts to work on the four books that would be the new edition of Conspiracy X. He never knew about it, as he was asleep for the last week after a long battle with cancer. As you can imagine, I was devastated at his passing. The core Conspiracy X 2.0 rulebook is dedicated to him. I spent almost every second of my time working on ConX as a way of dealing with the loss - I did the most unhealthy thing you can do I suppose, I just worked through it, focusing my attention on the world of Conspiracy X, the aliens, the conspiracies, the paranormal, because if I thought too hard about the real world, the harsh truth of losing my dad would hit home and I'd become a mess.

But I kept going. Mum was an inspiration. She was determined and stubborn, and kept going through every hardship. She was paralysed in the legs by polio at the age of 7, and met my dad (who was a medic in WWII) when he was assigned as her physiotherapist when she'd grown up. She could walk (with assistance) until after my dad died, then, despite being wheelchair-bound, she still continued to be one of the most positive and cheery people you could meet.

Me and Mum, at my Dad's 70th in 1992

Mum continued to be supportive of my work - both the day-job in the bookstore and the writing RPG books. When I started work on Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, she was very excited, although she never watched the new series (not after Jon Pertwee left), just the tales my meetings with the BBC and travelling to Cardiff made her proud. I'm sure half of the time she was convinced I was actually writing the series itself, but a reminder every so often about "those games we used to play in the back room with the guys?" and she'd know what I was doing.

She was taken ill while I was at the screening/press conference for The Avengers (link to my blog post about it), so I've been taking every opportunity to travel back to visit. Even then, she was more concerned about me spending money to travel and taking time off of work to see her than in her own health.

Mum died last Friday, peacefully in the company of my sisters and me. I'm getting through it by doing what I did before - writing. Though even writing those last couple of sentences were hard. If it wasn't for the support of my amazing wife, my family, the Eight, and some very good friends, I think I'd still be a gibbering mess. At the moment, if I distract myself well enough I can get on with the day, but things still hit home when I least expect it and I just want to throw up, fall asleep or both in a desperate attempt to cope.

So, that's why I haven't been online for a while, and may not be as active on here as I was before, at least for the time being.

However, before I wrap up this post, I have a little request for you. When you've finished reading this, do me a little favour - if you're lucky enough to have your parents still with you, just give them a call. Tell them you love them. If you're not in this lucky position, but have someone close to you - family, spouse or dear friend - give them a hug and tell them how much you appreciate them.

Thank you.

The Resolution Will Be Televised?

"Bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse,

Assail him, impale him, with monster-truck force."

- Cake "The Distance"

I know, this is a bit of a shock, an update that isn't looking back to the dim and distant past! Instead, we look to the present, and the future. It's been a while since I've updated regarding what is actually happening, instead of being reflective and pondering over nostalgic memories. So, what's been going on?

Conspiracy X

First of all, the Kickstarter for the 4th book in the Conspiracy X 2.0 line (The Conspiracies Sourcebook) finished with an overwhelming success. I was absolutely stunned and blown away by the response. While that Kickstarter was finishing, I frantically proofed George's excellent layout and setting of The Paranormal Sourcebook, the 3rd book in the line, and it has now gone off to print.

The Paranormal Sourcebook is available now on DriveThruRPG here and a fine addition to any Unisystem fan's library it is too.

The Kickstarter for The Conspiracies Sourcebook was so successful, it unlocked the chance for production to start on Extinction, the official sequel to Conspiracy X, a possible future of the ConX universe where the aliens have invaded and humanity must fight back. Think Falling Skies, or V meets the high tech near future of something like Total Recall or Halo. It's gonna be awesome. 

The first promo art for the forthcoming game - Extinction

Most of it is already written by the god of Unisystem himself, CJ Carella, I just need to bash it into shape and plug in the game system. Tricky, but doable. Should be very, VERY cool. I've made a start already, just need more hours in the day!

WILD RPG (Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming)

Things with WILD have been a little on the back-burner with Conspiracy X and Extinction coming to the fore. I'm still working on it, and recently a large chunk of the "meta-plot" or backstory of the setting has fallen into place. The system is just about sorted, the setting is there, I just need to get writing more of it. I've made a start on that too, it's early days yet, but I'm hoping it's going to be cool. 

Been discussing interesting new avenues for it as well, interactive character sheets and animated/interactive eBook versions of the rules... but again, it's early days.

Videos

It's been a while since I parted ways with Cheesemint (or Cheesemint Productions Ltd as they are now), yet both my wife and myself have had comments congratulating us on becoming a Limited Company. So, just to set the record straight, Debs and I are no longer involved in Cheesemint's endeavors, and haven't been for a while. I'm still proud of what we accomplished with Unlocked. Matt and Adam made that climatic episode more amazing than I could have ever dreamed, and there's more drama, comedy, action and geek references in the 90mins of that webseries than the whole series of The Big Bang Theory. And the end credits of episode one is still one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.

But that's the past! This is about the present and the future! Unlocked has been rebooted, and Debs and I have moved onto other things.

However, I have a camera. 

I've been reluctant to free it from its case, and have been for some time. I don't know. It just feels odd. I've considered selling it, it'd certainly help go towards buying a computer that is from this century - one that actually works with Facebook, or Youtube. But part of me is concerned that I waffle a bit much on here to be interesting and that a little video here and there would spice things up a little. Not too often though, after all, it is a little time-consuming - one of the reasons why I left the webseries production thing behind in the first place.

It wouldn't be anything too complicated. Sure, I had this idea for a webseries called "Players" which was about 30-somethings who met every week to play RPGs. You saw them dressed in the outfits of their characters and talking both in and out of character but in the setting of the game, so they could discuss girlfriend problems or issues at the office while battling orc armies. It would have been like Friends meets the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. But that was over a year ago, and I think I've lost my motivation for that.

I was thinking about something simple - just a video every now and then about RPGs, maybe taking a closer look at a particular game, as a supplement to the text blog here. The first one I was thinking about was covering the original Ghostbusters RPG to tie into the retrospective I'm going through at the moment. Maybe once WILD is actually playable I'd film some of the actual play. I dunno...  what do you think? Should I bother?

The future is in your hands.

Anyway, I'll return to my nostalgia trip next week, continuing the tale of the Ghostbusters RPG and how it shaped my gaming future.

Until then, stay multi-classy.

Roll Your Own Life (6) - Who ya gonna call?

Part of a page of The Travellers
from Issue 55 of White Dwarf

Before I go onto the continuing story of my sad little existence, I do have a couple of things I want to share with you. Last week's post about The Travellers, the old comic strip that ran in White Dwarf in the UK, back before it just printed stuff about Warhammer - the comic that inspired the Wormbusters? Well, it turns out that a lot of it is online on Scribd.

The Travellers was a work of comedy wonder, mostly because you could read it, then go back and read all of the little jokes in the background - I'll always remember the ship taking off and the shot looked like the bit in Star Wars IV when the Millennium Falcon takes off from Mos Eisley, and you get another ship nearby and someone shouting "Don't bother to indicate, I'm psionic!" Fantastic.

However, that wasn't the only find that John pointed out to me. In that very issue is an advert that Milo posted in the classifieds looking to recruit new members...

The Classified Section of White Dwarf issue 55

I must admit, I'd forgotten that as a group we were initially called "The Rheinrhehm Travellers". Why "Rheinrhehm?" There seems to be a myth behind it starting in Digby's house, taking the name from a bottle of wine. Of course the name changed over time. We discussed being called "See You Next Wednesday" after John Landis' in-joke, and the fact that we used to meet on Wednesdays (and Thursdays, and Fridays, and Sundays, and...) but in the end, we're just "The Eight".

So... back to the story...

I'd already mentioned that I was rubbish at plots. The games I'd GM'd boiled down to "10,000 Sathar have landed on a planet, what do you do?" - cue a series of explosions, and Bragi the walking battleship wades in with guns blazing...

Cover of the Ghostbusters RPG
"Training Manual" (or Player's Handbook)
with thanks to www.gbfans.com 

That all changed with possibly the most influential game I'd ever played - Ghostbusters. I was obsessed with Ghostbusters (the movie that is) and I've already mentioned that 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, West End Games...

Roll Your Own Life (5) - Story? What Story?

So, Star Frontiers. That was where things really took off for me. Free of the shackles of fantasy, and after being obsessed with Star Wars since it first came out, this was a great chance to fuel my need for more space opera.

I don't remember much of the initial party, it was probably the same craziness that always accompanies the first game - everyone wants to try a different race to see what they're like, even the six legged insect dudes or the sentient lumps of putty.

Milo was taken by Star Frontiers as well, running his own game with a group of Dralasites (the walking putty) who were part of a rock group causing chaos around the galaxy, calling themselves the Dark Judges. But my game was lacking something. A story.

I really never had any idea about plots. D&D was simple - go into the dungeon, kill nasties, steal their stuff. That was all RPGing was to me back then. Soon, Star Frontiers was little more than an excuse for the characters to don ridiculously oversized powered armour (yes, there's a "u", I'm British!) wading into impossible amounts of Sathars and kicking alien butt.

While this wasn't inspiring game-play, it did inspire other things. I'd started doodling caricatures of the players, adapting events in the game into little comic strips. Soon, we'd started playing these characters of ourselves within the game, building a bizarre mythology of "The Eight". The movie Ghostbusters had just hit the cinemas and I'd gained a new obsession (yes, I wanted to be Venkman when I grew up), and these cartoon versions of ourselves became the "Wormbusters" - dedicated to stamping out those pesky lizards wherever they appeared.

Me, years after all of the Wormbusters goings on, but the
same GM chair in my old backroom.
(1989 - about to run Star Wars) 

Libelously ripping off storylines from Howard the Duck and the amazing comic strip The Travellers that originally appeared in the UK's White Dwarf magazine, the adventures of the Wormbusters became a desperate attempt to gain attention from my school classmates as they demanded not only to see the next episode, but also to make cameo appearances in the strips.

Before you ask, yes - I do still have all of Wormbusters. Why? I dunno... it wasn't very good, my artwork was awful, and very little of it was original, but it was a little piece of history that evolved into bigger things - the characters became darker, more serious and contemporary. Milo started writing huge novels of their military and vigilante exploits, Pete wrote epic comic scripts and I started taking the drawing of comics more seriously.

But in both of these cases, I didn't have much input with stories. I was just plain rubbish at writing them, and my gaming remained in that state until I discovered what could possibly be called the first of the "story" games (at least in my opinion) - Ghostbusters - A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game. 


More on the awesome Ghostbusters RPG and how it inspired me to write RPGs next time...

Roll Your Own Life (4) - Zebulon's Guide to Gamemastering

Despite the merging of several gaming groups, the prospect of playing in three to five games a week wasn't enough for me. I've been told on a few occasions that I'm an over-controlling, domineering, bossy git... I dunno, maybe they're right. But when I was a teenager, I wanted to be in control. I wanted to Gamemaster.

It was a bit of a shock to me to discover that there were other games out there. When I started gaming there really was just the big three out there - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (because Basic was just for kids), Traveller and Runequest. There was a bit of a rule the groups had which made perfect sense - if you were a player in AD&D you didn't bring a Monster Manual or Dungeon Master's Guide with you to the game. It stopped all that nasty meta-gaming where the DM announced something like:

"You open the door and find that you're in the main Orc guardroom. Three Orcs turn to see you and stand."

First thing that would happen is the players would open their Monster Manuals and look up their HP and it'd become a boring wargame. Restricting the player's book access made the game much more exciting, and gave the DM more control. We could, however, each have our own Player's Handbook. (Later this would expand to include the various expansions such as Unearthed Arcana, and bizarre books that seldom saw use such as the Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guide.)

Where I grew up, there was nowhere to buy these game books. It was almost like a cult that required some secret knowledge to join, and the town had no way of getting hold of these books. All of the gamers in the town had requested copies of these books at the local library, and they did their best to acquire them - postcards would come through the door six months later to say that they'd managed to get a single copy of the DMG that would be fought over by a dozen or so of us.

The nearest place to buy the game books (again, the secret society initiation trials continued) was in the nearest big city. Hull.

Even that was a task of legend. 

A ninety minute bus journey into the city used up a fair amount of pocket money, and used up a fair amount of your Saturday. Precious gaming time! The bus had a nasty habit of taking the most scenic route possible as well, starting at our town and working out in random directions, sometimes going in the complete opposite way to get to Hull. My father always said that the roads were built by council workers who always had to have their backs to the wind, which explained why it was one of the bounciest, twisting, life-threatening journeys you could take.

Once in Hull, the only place to get games was a place called the Kingston Gallery. From the front it was an unassuming picture framers and gallery. I remember the first time going there with Cooper, my ever trusty companion throughout 90% of my schoolyears. We looked at the place, disbelieving the stories of game books that lurked within. But, in true Douglas Adams bureaucratic way, the real information you needed was up a narrow staircase that looked like you were venturing into the framer's bedroom, behind a locked door, and having to be escorted by the one member of staff keeping an eye on the framing business. Instead of a bedroom there was an open room with a counter, and a wall filled with rulebooks. Spinners held the smaller titles, like the many Traveller "little black books" and minis on blister-packs. It was like Nirvana. This was my place of worship. A dealer for my gaming addiction. Books, and books, and books and books of it!

It was here that I discovered there was more to gaming than AD&D, Traveller and Runequest. It was here that Cooper and I discovered that TSR had a number of other games out. It was here that I discovered Star Frontiers.

Star Frontiers was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Just the cover of it... wow. I mean look at it. Traveller was a plain black cover, this had a crashed spaceship, a cool guy with shades and an awesome gun, a hot girl, and what was that winged monkey thing? I had to buy this!! I could play science fiction and I could GM. Everything was in it, dice, counters, maps, two books, and...  a wax crayon! Amazing.

It had everything I could want to play cool sci-fi. I could run Star Wars...  it would be cooler than Star Wars, it had Sathars that could be shot in their millions, strange rubber dudes, and big bugs. Only thing you couldn't do with it?

Leave the planet...

That would require another quest into Hull for Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks! 

 (Although Cooper now has my Star Frontiers collection, I still have those dice. My first D10s...  It wouldn't be until I reconvened with the other gamers that I would discover what the wax crayon was for...)

Roll Your Own Life (3) - A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...

I started with Traveller - around at JR's, someone I knew from school who was in a different House, invited by our mutual friend, Crud. You'll have to forgive the nicknames - they weren't great, they weren't always flattering, but it's how we knew each other. Hell, there were four in the group with the same first name, we needed nicknames just to keep things straight!

I don't remember how old I was, but it was before I moved house because to me, the trek to JR's may as well have been to Mordor. It was the other end of the sleepy little seaside town, right to the very edges of civilisation. It's only about 10 minutes walk really, but to my childlike, Hobbit-legs it seemed like forever. 

I can remember it must have been before I moved as I have a distinct memory of trying to create a new RPG based on TRON the moment I saw it at the cinema - so I must have started gaming around 1981-ish. (My first attempt at creating my own RPG, the TRON RPG started with the thing that I equated was most necessary to run a game - a map. I started designing the game grid on graph paper... and that's about as far as I got.)

There was a second Traveller session, where I created a character that I have no memory of - I don't really remember any of my Traveller characters, they all seem to be ex-Navy in their 50's who died the first time someone pulled a gun. However, after the second Traveller game I was invited to the new group's other game, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

Some of The Eight, circa mid 90's at one of our many reunions.

I have to admit, this was all new to me, and most of these people were unknown to me except in passing at school, but there were three active RPG groups in the town that we knew of. I was blissfully unaware of the third group until I started chatting with my fellow gamers this week to refresh my memory for these posts. Anyway, there were three groups - one was the group I'd joined, and you'll have to forgive me if I get this wrong - (JR, Pete, Jinx (who didn't hang around long after I'd joined) and Crud), another was running on the other side of town (Milo, John, Campbell, Norm, Gladys), while a third had splintered off from the first group - they quickly discovered things like home-brew and girls and stuff, while we remained (mostly) dedicated to the gaming cause. While the two main gaming groups were geographically disparate, there was some interchangeability between the members as some of us (Bragi will agree with me on this) discovered we needed more gaming than one group could provide. Why just go to one game a couple of times a week when you could be in two groups and game up to five nights a week? Awesome.

Anyway, I digress...

Pete ran AD&D at his place on the kitchen table with the largest, most epic DM's screen you'll ever see. It was 3ft tall, and possibly 4ft wide with a single fold in the middle. Made out of something like chip-board or kevlar or something, it was the biggest and most over-the-top screen I've ever seen in all my years of gaming. I think there were charts and tables and stuff taped to the inside but no one ever saw around it. It was the screen of doom. 

It towered over the table casting its shadow like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, driving us poor gamers into a killing frenzy. All orcs must be destroyed.

It appeared that Crud had come up with an epic mission, to actually see the map that Pete was using to DM, and began chiselling away at the side of the screen with the metal nib of a propelling pencil. By the time I'd started playing with the group, the successful hole had been filled with what must have been an entire tube of Araldite epoxy resin that had solidified into a strangely organic sculpture that Giger would have been proud of.

Pete's voice boomed from behind the screen and I remained fascinated as strange 10' measurements were translated by Jinx carefully onto squared paper and the map of the dungeon was unveiled before us.

AD&D was completely unlike Traveller to me. I hadn't really read much fantasy as a kid, but I'd been given an existing character - Ivanhoe. He was a 9th level Paladin, complete with armour and +5 holy avenger. He'd been in the group for years, levelled up from a starting character, and had been passed from one player to the next when they'd become bored with the prospect of being a goody-goody. To me he was the ideal character. It would shape my gaming for years to come, and despite some dabbling with rather rubbish barbarians (thanks to Unearthed Arcana) or inept thieves, I always returned to playing Paladins. In fact, I kinda played paladins in other games as well... Star Frontiers? Paladin. Runequest? Paladin. 

Of course, this would finally change with one of the most memorable games of our gaming history - Odyssey. But we'll come onto that later.

[With thanks to Milo for the photo]

Roll Your Own Life (2) - Like a Virgin

Like Pulp said, "Do you remember the first time?" They always say that you can, and they're right. I remember my first time... I can't remember how old I was, but I was still at school (secondary school as they called it in my day, though they probably call it High School now, so they can be like the ones the kids see on TV) and it was a Saturday. A friend of mine (we'll just call him Crud, not the nicest of nicknames but it wasn't because he was cruddy, he just liked the word and used it a lot - and it kinda stuck as a name) suggested we head over to a buddy of his' place. Crud had planned on going to JR's for a game, so I was invited to tag along. I had no idea what was going on...

Wait, you thought this was going to be about sex didn't you? Nooooooo, this is about Traveller. My first game. 

I must admit, I don't remember a great deal about the game except where it was, and that I was engrossed - which was surprising considering I had no idea what was going on really, and I didn't even have my own character. I suppose I did what every gamer does at their first game, especially one where you've joined a game in progress - I kept mostly quiet, rolled when necessary, and just tried to take it all in.

But it was enough to get me hooked. And I must have behaved myself as I got myself invited back to a second Traveller game where I spent most of it rolling up (or rather mustering out) a new character.

It was a big deal not only because I'd started roleplaying, but also because I was expanding my circle of friends. I wasn't a popular kid - chubby, funny looking, picked on, teased, bullied, yes. But not popular. I had a best friend (and if Stephen King was writing this he'd say that we were both perfect candidates for "IT"'s Loser's Club) and we spent every weekend together playing video games (ZX Spectrum, or Atari VCS). My circle of friends expanded to a couple of other kids, mostly those who had moved into the area and were assigned to me to "show them around" because I was obviously "reliable". This was great because not only were they great friends as well, but it wouldn't be long before all of us, friends old and new, would be engaging in the epic roleplaying adventures that stretched before us.

This new gaming group were mostly people I didn't normally associate with - they were in a different "house" (yes, we had houses, just like Harry Potter). Suddenly my circle of friends had grown from three to eight (sometimes more), but we gamed, and we gamed A LOT. Four to five times a week, evenings and weekends. We were "The Eight", friends I've known and kept for over thirty years. Friends I'll hopefully introduce to you over the coming weeks.

Roll Your Own Life (1) - Introduction

Things have been a little crazy over the last couple of months. My mother has been in hospital for the best part of two months, and I've been trekking up-country to visit at every opportunity I've had.

Spending time at my old house brings back a lot of memories, and this is just part of the reason for this series of blog posts.

The second reason started with an innocent photo. It was Origins 2012 just a couple of weeks ago, and Dom (my publisher at Cubicle 7) went to represent the Cubicle 7, especially as they were up for a number of awards including two nominations for RPG of the Year, and a nomination (and a win!) for Best RPG Supplement. Dom posted on the Cubicle 7 Facebook page a little photo of him with Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day, who were taking in the sites at the convention. I'd been fans of both of them for ages, Felicia Day inspiring the whole webseries thing I was involved in for a while, and Wil Wheaton has become an icon of all things good and gamey (you really should check out his amazing webseries TableTop on the Geek and Sundry Youtube channel if you haven't already).

Seeing that photo reminded me of something I'd been meaning to do for long time - to read Wil Wheaton's autobiography (which is the best way to describe it) "Just a Geek". I'm about half way through, breezing through in a matter of hours, and it's inspired me to reflect on things myself a little as well.

Finally, the last reason for starting to write these little blog-posts is my amazing wife. She had a theory about how the friends you have through roleplaying gaming share a camaraderie that could be equated to being in a war. Your friends and yourself have been through epic battles, intense situations and some moments of levity that will remain with you. I meet up with the friends I had at school and the conversations can often become filled with tales of our games, what happened, and what we did wrong almost as if we were really there and experienced the adventures ourselves.

So while I've been trying to work on WILD (and I think the system is completely fathomed now, and the back-story is coming together nicely - and is so epic it could lead to some form of fiction...), trying to concentrate on things like that can be hard. But all this reflection and nostalgia has inspired me to chronicle my life, seen through the eyes of a gamer.

Gaming has been a big part of my life. It formed my circle of friends at school, friends I've known and kept in touch with for over thirty years. It got me my first job (normal job that is, working for the County Council), it's sort of how I met my wife, and gaming was a hobby that became a dream job writing them.

I'm calling these posts "Roll Your Own Life" - it comes from playing AD&D a lot as a kid/teen, and our DMs (whether this was Pete, Milo or Bragi - names that will make sense in future posts*) had a tendency of shouting "Roll Your Own Death" and throwing a D20 at us when it was Saving Throw time. Just seemed to make sense to call these posts "Roll Your Own Life" - almost like those choose your own adventure books...

[*I've since been informed that "Roll Your Own Death" came from Bragi... Pete had the tendency of throwing a very large eraser at us when our hitpoints were running out, meaning it was nearing time to roll a new character!]

Some Assembly Required

Been a hectic couple of weeks. By now, you'll probably not only have seen my review of Avengers Assemble that was kindly hosted by those cool guys at Forces of Geek, but by now you've probably seen the movie (if you haven't yet, don't worry, my review isn't too spoilery at all - but the video I'm going to embed below is...). However, there's a tale to tell regarding the Avengers...

It was a strange sequence of events that came about thanks to my blogging for the UK SyFy Channel website. I'd done a series of features and reviews for their site, and due to this I was invited by the incredibly cool press company behind The Avengers movie to go to a screening of the film and to attend the UK Press Conference. However, the SyFy Channel's site hasn't been working with the bloggers for a while, so I called upon those excellent dudes at Forces of Geek and asked if they'd like me to review the film for them. Thankfully, the US has to wait an extra week before the Avengers opens there, so a review from a British reviewer is a particularly early scoop for them, and they said yes.

As I mentioned, I did the review, but the Press Conference? Now that was a surreal experience. I'd never really gone into the posher areas of London before, let alone Claridges Hotel, possibly one of the poshest and fanciest of five star hotels in the capital. I'd arrived early, so I lurked around outside while Rolls Royces dropped off and picked up people in suits, wondering if I really belonged here... Inside, the Marvel publicity department had booked the Ballroom, and decked the place out with the huge Avengers display as a backdrop.

Now comes the couple of downsides - one, I couldn't film or take photos at the event once it had started. Professional photographers were there to take pics and the publicity department would release them to the reviewers later. The other downside is that I couldn't audio record the event as my phone had died the previous night. Typically, I'd turned it off for the advance screening of the movie, and it just refused to come back on. On a particularly major night when friends and family needed to contact me as well...

That being said, I took a couple of photos before it started, mostly of the cool backdrop and table they'd set up for the stars. One of the advantages of getting in early? - Sitting on the 3rd row, just a matter of feet away from the stars of the movie.

I also took a pic of me there, just to prove I'd gone.

Edith Bowman, Radio 1 presenter, was in charge of the proceedings and came out first, letting us "press" know the rules of the conference. Then came the stars. I won't go into detail about what was said at the conference, as the whole thing can be seen on the Youtube video (produced by Digital Spy) embedded below - WARNING: THERE ARE MAJOR SPOILERS IN THIS VIDEO)



[As a side note, at 0:22sec there's a camera pan to view the answer to the first question, and the camera whizzes over to the right. There's a tall guy in a white shirt on the second row, I'm sat one row back and off screen to the right. Just out of shot. Don't worry, spoilers start about 15mins in...]

Very strange being in the same room as these people. They're all horribly attractive. Robert Downey Jr is just Tony Stark. As you can see in the video, he's just Tony Stark all the time. Scarlett Johannson is rather purdy, and Jeremy Renner was very jetlagged. Cobie Smulders (who plays Maria Hill in Avengers) is gorgeous in person... you can see why these people are actors, and why they didn't cast uggo the ugly as I'm known in some circles.

Anyway, that's about it for the conference. It was very cool. Didn't last too long, but being about 15ft away from these people was possibly the ultimate end to the trip to London to see the excellent movie. (Seriously, go see the movie, read my review!)

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On a more serious note, the blog posts here may be less frequent over the coming weeks for a couple of reasons. 1) Blogger is no longer supported by my ancient Mac. It's just a mass of crap on screen and I can't actually make new posts or format them in any way, and 2) had a bit of a family crisis which obviously takes priority. I'll post here as and when I can...

Until then, stay multi-classy.

The Gift of the Gaming

It's been a little while again since my last post, but it's been a busy few weeks. This last week saw not only my birthday, but also my wife's birthday and our wedding anniversary. Gifts were given, and my wife being the complete star that she is, knew exactly the sort of thing I like... GAMES!

We took a trip into London, and visited three suppliers of RPGs in one day! Besides the game section of Forbidden Planet, we checked out a couple of the biggest FLGSs in the capital. First on the agenda was Leisure Games. Resisting the urge to purchase the rather epic Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, I gained the rather cool Cold City RPG.

Haven't had chance to read it yet, but I've heard great things about both Cold City and Hot War. Though typically, I didn't realise it was a partner publication with Cubicle 7 until after I left the store. Looking forward to reading it!

While at Leisure Games, the wife managed to find a very cool set of blank dice. Chessex make this rather cool little set which is essential to the design work I've been pondering for WILD.


I'd been thinking about incorporating some form of "Wild Die" to add a bit of a "critical" element to the dice rolls in the game. I was initially thinking of something odd, so I ordered some of the more bizarre dice that don't usually get used in RPGs (D14's, D16's, D24's), and even looked into getting some custom made irregular dice (snub cubes, that sort of thing), but cost is always an element. So I started thinking about using D12's, with 2 or 3 sides coloured differently. May not even make it into the game, but it's something I'm playing with at the moment.

Next stop was the very cool store Orc's Nest, another FLGS, only with two floors of goodies squirreled away in there. First time I'd ever been in there, and they really do have a lot of cool stuff.

On top of Forbidden Planet, it was good to see all three of the big RPG suppliers in London all stocking the Doctor Who RPG, and it was even cooler to see that Orc's Nest had Conspiracy X 2.0.


In addition to Cold City, the wife bought me the excellent Mouse Guard RPG. We've been fans of Mouse Guard for a while, but I'd never checked out the RPG before. Based on The Burning Wheel RPG, there are some really nice elements to the game play in there - seasonal and environmental factors, the Nature of a Mouse and how "mousey" or "human" you are, and the use of Traits. Really good read. And the added bonus is that it was signed by the creator of Mouse Guard himself! Bonus!! And such a nice little hardback format too - square and compact. The sort of proportions I was thinking for WILD...

Final cool purchase of the week was a complete surprise. The eagerly awaited Marvel Heroic Roleplaying core rulebook. I'd bought the PDF the moment it came out, but I knew there was going to be a delay getting the "in print" version over here in the UK due to licensing, but it appeared! Excellent! Possibly would have preferred there to be a hardcover, but that's just me. My computer is so old it struggled a bit with the PDF so now I can really explore its intricacies and see what all the discussion has been about.

That's given me plenty to read for the time being - I think a hardcopy of Leverage RPG is going to be the next purchase, as the PDF I bought is so slow on the ancient computer, but in the meantime there was a particularly excellent delivery from Eden Studios this week - the Kickstarter copies of Conspiracy X 2.0: The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook arrived, along with my author copies, and the T-shirts.

For those of you who didn't Kickstart Conspiracy X, the Extraterrestrials Sourcebook is hitting distributors this week in the US and Europe, so please badger your local FLGS to get it in. And reassure them that the Conspiracy X 2.0 Core Rulebook is still in print to complement it. *hint, hint*

The Irony is not lost on me...

How typical is it that I'm supposed to be writing about Dreaming, and the worlds of Dreaming, and I can't sleep? Bloody typical. So instead, I'll sit up at 1am, try to fight off this head cold that I've probably gained from my day job (being the hive of public germs that it is), and sit with the cat upon me, writing my latest thoughts and updates.

WILD is progressing, albeit slowly. Not wanting to give too much away, I've made a radical deletion of a lot of the rules used in Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space and it is going a little more interpretational and freeform. It'll suit the game more than being too fixed in the heavy rules.

I've also decided to try to incorporate some random inspiration and interpretation story elements that'll give the GM plenty to draw upon when ideas are drying up, but also to add that weird random element that dreams sometimes have - giving the potential of the whole "Oh, I didn't realise my front door was connected to my old school classroom," effect. Trust me, it'll make sense in the end.

My poor unsuspecting test subjects (AKA, playtesters) have just about generated characters. Most have gone for older characters, which is a surprise, and the latest to be created was assisted along with the new Trait creation rules, for the whole new Traits set. It may be a little while until I'm confident enough to GM the game, I'll need to bash the test scenario into shape first...

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Anyway, while I wrote today I watched another inspirational film to add to the list. This time, Parasomnia. A low budget horror movie from 2008 that was created and directed by William Malone, the chap who did the excellent Dark Castle remake of "House on Haunted Hill". Lacking studio backing, this really was a labour of love, with just enough budget to lure Jeffrey Coombs in to help.

The tale follows the story of a young girl, Laura Baxter, who's a parasomniac - meaning she sleeps most of her life, waking only for a fraction of the day and can fall asleep with very little warning. She's being haunted in her dreams by a crazy, hypnotising serial killer, Byron Volpe, in an adjacent room in a psych ward. So, when Danny falls for the sleeping beauty and steals her away from the ward, the serial killer attempts to recapture her, both in the waking world, and in the dream realms.

It's not bad, it feels like a straight to DVD movie, and it tackles some ideas that have inspired stuff for the game, but it's not sure if it wants to be A Nightmare on Elm Street or something different.

Well, the cat has just gouged chunks out of my legs, so I shall go to bed (after applying antiseptic) and hope for inspirational dreams.

Which reminds me - if anyone wants to suggest movies, TV series, books or even music about Dreams, that may inspire or help with the writing of WILD, please let me know in the comments!

Pleasant dreams...

Podcasting and Probabilities

It's been a little while since I've talked about gaming, my last post being mostly about a dream-like movie. Not a whole lot has happened with the game, but I did have a bit of a moment of clarity and I may (emphasis on MAY) have focused on a system. Nothing major, it's just the core mechanic that I want to get down - there are loads of permutations, and bizarreness to build around it.

If you imagine that the basic mechanic of Doctor Who is Stat+Skill+2D6=beat a difficulty, it's how that mechanic is implemented that makes the difference to the feel of the game. But without a core mechanic, it's hard to write the bits that go around it.

Sitting and cashing up at the day-job, the realisation came to me, and I had to stop and write it down on a scrap of paper. Then the next stop was (a) typing it all up so my notes made sense, (b) sounding it out to the genius gamers that I've been brainstorming with to get their feedback and (c) work out some probabilities to see if it's fair and works.


We'll see. It may all change and go a different route. When not thinking about the core mechanic, we had an excellent discussion about how the game can be used. And I have to admit, some ideas that came out of that surprised even me! I thought I'd worked out the many possibilities of WILD, but the scope is even more immense and bizarre than I thought.

I'll post more as and when it happens.

Meanwhile, I'm on the interwebs a bit more - I recently did a podcast with the cool guys at CarnageCast - (You can download and listen to it HERE). The podcast is a great chat about my work on Conspiracy X 2.0 and the game's recent revival thanks to Kickstarter. Give it a listen, hopefully I won't say "er" or "erm" too much during it.

Until next post! Sweet dreams!

The Nobody that Nobody has seen...

Before I start ranting about how amazing the film Mr. Nobody is, I should make something clear first - I had no idea what this film was like before I watched it. Okay, I confess, the wife and I are big fans of Thirty Seconds to Mars, and my wife had become a little obsessed with cool frontman Jared Leto, picking up some of his lesser known films. Sure, everyone's seen Fight Club and Requiem for a Dream, but we'd heard he'd made this odd reflective movie just before he started on his 300+ gig tour for Mars, and I thought I'd get it for wifey for Christmas/Yule last year.

With nothing much on TV a couple of nights ago, we popped the Blu-Ray into the player with very little expectations, only to witness the stunning, multi-layered, reality hopping genius that is one of the best films I've seen for a while.




Mr. Nobody is a hard film to describe. Initially, it's a story of the last mortal - Nemo Nobody. At the age of 118, Nemo is the last human whose life hasn't been prolonged with medical advancement to a state of immortality. In his final days, he's interviewed about his life and Nemo tells the tale...


As he tells the tale, we see his life play out - but here's where it gets wacky. Starting with the hardest decision of his young life, choosing when his parents split whether to go with his mother to the States, or to remain with his father, he decides that every decision shouldn't be an either/or - it should be both. Why choose one or the other, when you should be able to choose both paths?




From here we see Nemo's multiple existences - the life in the States with his mother, and the girl of his dreams, Anna, as well as his life in the UK with his wife Elise, or his life with his wife Jean. These multiple lives splinter even further - we see Nemo die in a car accident, and not. We see him live with his incredibly disturbed wife Elise, and watch her die shortly after marriage in an explosion. We see him bored and married to Jean, and wander off letting his fate be decided by the flip of a coin.

We even see another reality where Nemo doesn't exist, a strange dreamlike reality where huge blocks of ocean are being lowered into holes in the sea. We see Nemo have a scooter accident and end up in a coma, and we see another possible future where he travels in suspended animation to Mars.

Trying this all together is the narration of the ancient Nemo Nobody, and some rather cool "Open University"-esque bits with Jared Leto in his best tweed explaining the physics of the universe, the big bang, how time is perceived and the multiple realities caused by every decision.


Sometimes, when you're watching a film you're enjoying, you have that moment when you think "Man, this is absolutely genius". It's hard to pinpoint that moment in Mr. Nobody. The obvious moment would be the bit that hits home to us all - the 14 year old Nemo is sitting at the side of a lake, and Anna sits next to him. He tells her that he doesn't want to swim, as "swimming is for idiots", and she goes away despite his liking her. We see his life play out a little, and see that it was doomed to be spent far from Anna. He ponders, "why did I say that?" and we rewind to the same moment, where Nemo says that he can't swim, and Anna stays with him.

How many times have we pondered our decisions - just the smallest of things sometimes in our past, and wondered how life would have changed, how things would have been different, if we'd only said something different, done the right or better thing? It's some thing everyone can relate to.

Maybe the moment in the film that sold it for me was the awesome camera shot near the beginning of the film when we see Nemo wake, brush his teeth and walk off, but the camera shot watches the reflection then goes into the mirror and follows the reflected world, where words are reversed, people move backwards, or do they?


Or was it the moment when the helicopters are airlifting in blocks of the sea? I remember looking over to the wife and she looked at me with a knowing glance - knowing that at that very scene I was loving every minute of the film.

The film is a complex but rewarding watch - at 2 1/2 hours, it's not a short experience, but the great thing about it, is the explanation of the whole film. There's always that fear, getting near to the end of a mind-bending film like this, that you get the pay-off, and it sucks. I started to worry when the word "Architect" was used, but... I really had nothing to worry about.

I won't spoil it for you, but the reason behind the whole film works perfectly, and it all makes sense. It's a dream of a film, with dream-like images that will remain in your subconscious for years to come. I'm already eager to rewatch the film, and I hope you take the opportunity to give this unseen gem a try.