Roll Your Own Life (17) - Just Keep Gaming, Just Keep Gaming...

A little out of sequence again, but I really wanted to talk about marathon gaming. Not gaming involving 1980’s Snickers, or the precursor to Halo. I mean gaming for incredibly long sessions.

Our little gaming group in our youth used to game a lot. I mean, at least three or four times a week. Sundays were the big day for gaming - we’d start in the afternoon, break for the traditional Sunday roast at our own homes, then reconvene for a follow up session in the evening (finishing in good time ready for school the following day). During the school holidays, we’d do similar sessions only almost every day of the week. Day and evening would be either a long and involved game, or a mix and match of two different games, split by the much needed food break.

So involved we were, we decided to push the boundaries of gaming endurance, and we thought we’d see just how far we could take it. But, of course, we’d do it for a good cause. We’d marathon roleplay for charity.

This must have been in the mid 80’s (I’m guessing 1987 at the latest). I have a vague recollection of it being at the end of the summer term at school, so we’d have some time to recover during the holidays. It was before the internet, and before we knew about how to donate to charities outside of our local area, but one of “The Eight” (Mole)’s parents was active with the local church and we came to an arrangement with them.

Strange, considering this was probably right in the middle of the “roleplayers are all satanists” nonsense from the time. However, we decided that we’d raise money to help repair the church roof, and the church kindly let us use one of the church halls, normally used for jumble sales or Sunday School, to play the games for the extended period.

We weren’t entirely sure how long we’d need to play to warrant it being worthwhile, so we looked at the Guinness Book of Records. We couldn’t find anything in there about the world record for roleplaying. Not surprising really. I don’t think anyone had really sat down to set the record initially anyway. We looked at the official marathon rules, how you had five minutes break per hour, and we saw that there were some records for board games or something that seemed to be around 48-72 hours. 

Rubbish! We thought. We could do better than that. We already gamed more than that in a week (when we weren’t at school) so we set ourselves the ridiculous target of ninety hours. Yes. 90. Non stop. Marathon roleplaying. We figured we’d not really trained for this, but we thought if we saved up the five minutes per hour into worthwhile chunks, we could get an hour’s worth of sleep here and there.

We couldn’t imagine playing the same game for 90 hours, so we each prepared a scenario, and decided we’d take it in turns gamemastering, and we’d do lots of different games – so we didn’t go completely mad. I remember we played two or three different sessions of D&D, a couple of Star Frontiers, maybe a Call of Cthulhu, and I have this vague recollection of Gamma World being in there somewhere… I may be wrong, I may be thinking of Traveller or Space Opera or something. 

Sponsor forms were made, we got our families and the few friends we had that weren’t already gaming in the marathon to sponsor us, and prepared for the madness to come. Starting at Noon on the Sunday, non-stop gaming through to Noon on the Thursday. How hard could it be?

The actual marathon itself is a bit of a blur really for me – it was many, MANY years ago. I have a number of recollections of it though.

I have a distinct memory of pain. Something we’d not really considered was the physical strain of sitting gaming for such a long period of time. Our legs started to cramp up, and we found that we’d have to take turns walking around the table (or around the room) for a bit until the blood started flowing again.

We also discovered that sleep deprivation brings about some incredibly crazy hallucinations. Sitting up for that length of time in a strange place (the church hall) lead to some weird sights. What started as strange movements glimpsed out of the corner of the eye had evolved by the end of the marathon to almost complete belief that the place was haunted, and we were being watched constantly throughout the game.

The press came and interviewed us in the middle of it all, and seemed to be moderately confused by what we were doing. I guess that’s nothing new really when it comes to the regular press and strange hobbies like roleplaying – though I do remember him mentioning the reputation Dungeons & Dragons had with devil worship and us being in a church hall, raising money for the church roof. He’d obviously done a little research, just not very much, or anything remotely positive.

Drunks, staggering home from the pub in the early hours visited us a few times during the night. Being a little, quiet seaside town, these were your typical old guys in flat caps, wandering in because they’d seen the light on. “What you doin’ in here then?” they’d slur. We tried to explain, but they’d just stagger about and we’d look worried. After the first night’s worth of visitors, we decided to lock the church hall doors over night for the rest of the game.

By the second or third day, the games had really degenerated. I have no idea what we’d accomplished in the games, even though they were part of our on-going campaigns. I remember they had mostly dissolved down to the old classic “Open the door, kill the monster, take the treasure.” If it was more complicated than that, we’d get confused. All we seemed to be capable of after the first 48 hours was rolling dice, working out damage, and reducing hit-points. God help us if we came across a trap, or an encounter with a local villager. If we kept it to a basic dungeon crawl, we could focus, and actually enjoy the game rather than becoming confused and losing interest. 

We had one of Milo’s camp beds set up in the corner of the room where we could try to recover and get a little sleep (if we’d accumulated enough time). And we managed to get through a vast amount of junk food and take away (delivered to us by our ever vigilant families). By day four, we were so tired we just kept going until we’d accumulated enough “rest” time that we could all finish early and go home to sleep. We packed up, I called my dad from the local phone box and he came to drive me home. I remember it was just after breakfast on the Thursday morning that I collapsed into my bed, and didn’t wake again until the Friday morning. Just in time to get the local town newspaper to see a photo of our grinning (and tired) faces from the interview so many hours before.

Clipping from the town paper. Full names have been removed to protect
the innocent. (L-R: Mole, Pete (front), Milo, Alex, Bragi, Me and Crud (front))
Excuse the bad nicknames!

We’d managed it. We may have broken official Guinness rules a few times, and there was no impartial adjudicator to keep watch on us, but we’d done it. We’d gamed technically for 90 hours continually, and raised money for a charity. In our own eyes we were the Gods of the gaming world. Even if our gaming world was only the size of East Yorkshire.

Six of Eight

...and half a dozen of the other.

It had been a while since I'd returned up to my home town. The last time was a brief day there and back to bear witness to my mum's ashes being interred at their final resting place, but I thought I'd head back, see my sisters and catch up with some of my old gaming friends.

After an excellent time catching up with my sisters, reminiscing about old times, I headed through to one of the larger towns to meet with six of The Eight, my old roleplaying group.

While chatting to my sisters, one of them asked what the plans were for the evening. One even asked if we'd be playing Dungeons and Dragons. I guess most people would be offended and say "Nooo, not any more!", but in my case I just cursed - if we'd only thought about it, given them more warning, we COULD have been playing D&D for the evening. Just like old times... How stupid of me for not suggesting it.

However, the original plan was going to be get some pop in, and biscuits, and have a good catch up and talk about how life was treating us. At least, that was the original plan.

The plan quickly changed, and soon we were heading to the pub. A pub I'd not been in for over twenty years. One with a particularly apt name considering our D&D roots - The Green Dragon.

Us in the Green Dragon (click to embiggen!)
(L-R: Bragi, JR, Milo, Coop, Fordy, me)

So here we are, in The Green Dragon, Bragi, JR, Milo, Coop, Fordy, and myself (excuse using the nicknames, they're designed to protect the innocent). Many beers were quaffed, food was devoured, and I tried to keep up with their drinking matching them with pints of cola (a really bad idea in most cases).

As the evening progressed, as always, gaming came up in conversation again. 

Fordy pointed out (much as my lovely wife and I had discussed last year) that gaming seems to produce stronger bonds of friendship than any other we'd had. He agreed that it was almost like the comrade-re that is found on the battlefield, when soldiers bond in times of war. It is just that our times of war were marching through dungeons and battling orcs and goblins rather than any real threat.

We chatted about games, and again, Fordy pointed out something we'd not really considered about our old gaming. While we played a lot of roleplaying games as kids, we never really roleplayed. At least, not until later in life. Our characters were just glorified versions of ourselves, a way to escape reality and to do something more interesting with our lives, rather than just go to school, or look for work. These versions of us did cool things, like battling monsters, or fighting off alien invaders. They didn't really stretch our abilities to try to be someone else entirely. It wasn't until we'd matured a bit, and usually in later games apart from The Eight that we sampled the scope of roleplaying games, and how we didn't have to just be us. How we could be anything else. Do something different. Play at being someone new.

Fordy suggested that the only one of us who actually tried to be anything different was Mole. Mole's characters were slightly frustrating as they were usually sneaky, backstabbing, anti-heroes who may just as well sell the whole group out or kill them in their sleep than blindly following the plot of the adventure. While at the time we may have dismissed it as "Oh, it's just Mole trying to kill me again," he was the one who wanted to try something different. Mole's not a sneaky person. He certainly didn't want to kill us in our sleep. But he stretched the scope of the game, and we were too blind to see it at the time.

While you may be on the other side of the planet, Mole, hats off to you (if I was wearing a hat, at least) for trying to show us what this roleplaying stuff was all about.

More beer was consumed, the evil looking concoction called a Jaeger-bomb was revealed, and I kept drinking my colas. The conversation turned to "What was your best gaming experience, as a GM and as a player?"

As the sober one, I sat and listened. It was fascinating to hear these tales of the old games, and what made them so special. I just should have videoed the whole thing, it would have made a great (if slightly drunken) vid-blog. Conversation turned to something else (probably motorbikes or cars or something) before I had answered. So, a little later than everyone else, here's my answer. 

My best gaming experience as a player:

Probably Marines Odyssey. Odyssey was a home created system that Pete designed, which felt a bit like a faster version of BRP (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu). Pete ran many games of different genres using that system, but for me, the Colonial Marines game we played, based upon the setting from Alien/Aliens was possibly the best. I wrote a blog post about it a little while back. 

Using the same system, and set in the same universe, we did another SF game with a bunch of pre-gen characters that Pete provided. It felt a bit like a murder mystery in space, with a crashed ship, a hole in the ground, and someone picking off the characters one by one. In my head it looks like LV421 meets Pitch Black (during the eclipses) and it was gripping. Mostly because about half way through the game, Pete started handing me notes under the table. The thing that was taking out the characters was me. My character was the villain, and I'd started writing notes discretely back, reveling in this new-found villaindom to think up new and interesting ways to kill off the rest of the group and to make it look like an accident. This was possibly the closest I came to really "roleplaying" with the old group, and it opened my eyes to the potential of the games that could be run, when I was just making crap up as I went along in my GM'd games. 

My best gaming experience as a GameMaster:

That would have to be Mage. Or at least the Mage: The Ascension game I was running that became Kult. While I don't think I'd progressed much as a GM (I was still making huge chunks up as I went along), I think it was purely down to the players I had at the time. Stoo, Edge, Tetch and Debs made a great team who created real characters who were such individuals, so independently minded, that I hardly had to do anything. They'd start the game, they knew what their characters would want to be doing, and they'd go and do it. It was almost freeform storytelling. Debs' character was an evil little self-centred Goth, while Edge's hippy chick character died early on but continued on as a ghost. It was thrilling, exciting, and every session was a surprise. I'd warn them at the beginning of each session "I don't really have anything prepared" but by the end we were hanging on each other's every word, waiting so see what madness and horrors would come next. Awesome stuff.

Anyway, that was my brief journey back home. 

Maybe next time I'm back I'll try to get a game going.

Funnily enough, tonight I was supposed to be at a game - my first in nearly two years - but it has had to be delayed until next week. It'll be an odd experience getting back into the swing of it all again, maybe just what my game-writing needs.

Until next time, stay multiclassy!!

There's "Old School" and then there's OLD School

Okay, sent the way-back machine to a series of posts pretty early on in the "Roll Your Own Life" series of posts, when I started talking about the old gaming group from my little home-town.

After that initial game of Traveller, I found myself in one of the two/three AD&D groups that existed (or at least, that we knew about) in the town, before the groups started to merge, mix and shift about. Old school D&D was where it was at, and those first months of gaming was really the hard-core original games - AD&D, Traveller and Runequest.

The group I used to play with, originally called the Rheinrhehm Travellers, became affectionately known as "The Eight" (despite the fact that there were rarely occasions when eight of us were present). We also used to visit the local pub (The Alexandra) usually at 8pm - a practice known as "Alex at Eight", so it really was eights all around.

Where am I going with this? Well, one of The Eight used to DM one of the other groups when I first started gaming. Pete used to DM ours, while Milo ran his group on the other side of the town. I've known Milo since the dawn of time, probably since I was about five years old, and he DM'd in a very different way to Pete. Pete's game involved 1st-9th level characters, my 9th level Paladin never levelled up in all those years of play. The games were cool, strategic and subtle.

Milo's games were the complete opposite. They were just as cool, but in their main game it was almost as if Deities and Demigods was the Player's Handbook. Characters were frequently triple multiclass, usually level 10-30 in each, and strode across the battlefields (and planes of existence) like the heroes of  legend.

Both games were very different, both used the same rules, and both were just as cool.

Something I've had problems with since the newer versions of D&D seems to be the focus on tactical wargaming. I know this is where D&D originated, but the use of miniatures and a battle map seems to be a little limiting to me. I love the way that RPGs can fire the imagination, how you can do anything, and having a little plastic dude (that looks mostly like all of the other heroes in other people's games) sitting on a dungeon map takes me out of the moment. I somehow think that with all this battle-map and minis, the idea that you could run the game with such powerful and god-like characters is probably frowned upon.

While I own 3.0, 3.5 (the deluxe versions) and 4th edition (and will probably buy 5th), I've only really played it once - a far cry from the three times a week we used to play original AD&D back in the 80's. Maybe the potential's there to do the big and the epic, and to play purely in the imagination. Unfortunately, I don't have a D&D group to experience this. Maybe one day. Hopefully, I'll have a bash at 5th Ed when it comes out. I'd like to see if it still captures my imagination like 1st edition used to.

I was very pleased to hear that Milo, my old DM and constant friend to this day, has not turned his back on his old 1st Edition roots, and his illustrations have graced the cover of the latest issue of "&" Magazine, a fanzine for players of 1st Edition D&D. You can download the latest issue here. (Milo did the cover of issue 4).

On the subject of incredibly retro gaming, I was alerted to this website PlaGMaDA which is compiling player and GM created maps and drawings from old school RPGs. I must admit, most of the maps and illustrations on the site really take me back to those old days of gaming.

The old days when you didn't need a computer to play. When your friends were in the same room as you. When you used your mind and imagination to create worlds, not just wander around a computer generated environment shooting people.

Okay, I'll stop being all nostalgic and get back to work. Until next time, stay multiclassy!!

What's so WILD about it? (Part 1)

I'd been ignoring WILD for a little while, looking at other projects that I've been working on, or should have been working on. It was only recently that I really thought that I should get back to the game, write a bit more about it.

I printed out all that I'd written so far and filed it in a neat and portable binder so I could read through it on my lunch hours at my stupid day job. As I mentioned briefly last post, strangely I felt that there was simultaneously both more and less than I thought I'd written for the game. Part of me was convinced I'd hardly even started, while other parts of me thought I'd written more. Ho well.

Anyway, this got me thinking about the game, and how little I've actually explained about it to the outside world. So here goes - without giving the game away (so to speak), here's a brief explanation of what has been dominating my gaming thoughts for the past year or so.

I guess it all started with Inception. I love that film. I came out of the first screening in a daze and I think I ended up seeing it a couple of times more, especially when the local cinema installed their Imax screen and Hans Zimmer's score literally made your trousers vibrate with bass tones... However, the more I watched the film and thought about it, the more I noticed didn't work. It doesn't make me like the film any less, it's just that the rules of the universe that Nolan has created for the film are not adhered to. On top of that, it didn't really explore the bizarreness of dreams - everyone's subconscious seemed to be rather mundane. Maybe this was a side effect of going into the minds of people who ran energy businesses...

Then came SuckerPunch. I hated that film. I came out of it thinking it was one of the most visually stunning movies I'd seen in a long time, but the plot, the rules, the storytelling all sucked big-time. But it kept nagging at me, and I saw it again, and again, and the more I looked into the film, the more I appreciated it and liked it. It's not a work of genius, it's not a revolutionary movie, but it showed a little more of what could be experienced inside the mind and the unconscious.

Much like Inception, the rules of the film were broken, and both films could be viewed as having one of the laziest storytelling get-out clauses ever... "And then I woke up, it was all a dream."

In my head, the perfect movie would be a mash up of the two. The real world would be one where the technology existed to allow dreamshare - it could be used for therapy, recreation, training and espionage. It wouldn't be common, the tech would be expensive, though some devices would canibalise the tech for dodgy underground uses, like the Squids in Strangedays.

The realms of the unconscious would depend upon the dreamer. The rules they mention in Inception wouldn't work, everything would rely on the dreamer whose dream you were going into. And the scope of these dreams would depend upon the imagination of that dreamer. Going into the dreams of an office clerk may be a little more mundane than a fantasy author, but the potential for ANYTHING would be there. The big difference between the dreams of the two examples would be if you tried to change anything while you were in there. Summoning a dragon in the office clerk's dream would probably result in him realising he was dreaming, and start to wake. Changes could be made, but they'd have to be researched, and done carefully with some subjects.

Then there's the randomness of dreams. You may think you're in control, and in some cases the dreamer is, but a lot of the time the dream can escalate and run away in its own weird and random direction.

So that was the basics of WILD. I know a couple of people who thought the name meant that the game was a pulp adventure game of safaris and stuff. WILD is an acronym - Wake Initiated Lucid Dreaming.

So that was the concept. An RPG where you could experience anything, even the impossible.

I just needed a game system and a backstory.

More on those later...

Lights, Camera, Inaction

Just a few updates this week, as I'm still trying to get back up to speed with the various projects. Let's have a look at what's been going on!

AUTOCRATIK

I haven't really touched the video camera for over a year. It was a nice one, on offer online, that I bought when we were convinced we were going to take over the world - be the new "The Guild" and make us the next big thing. When I left, I hadn't had the heart to even take the camera out of the case. I thought about selling it, I'd thought about new ideas for webseries comedies that involved tabletop gamers, but I just didn't manage it. The camera stayed in its case, the script for the pilot episode came to a grinding halt, just sitting on the harddrive...

Then I started thinking about the games. How I was concerned that people were reluctant to purchase some games because they couldn't see what was inside the boxes. After all, the 11th Doctor Core Set for the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG is awesome - I was blown away by the presentation and the quality of it, and I thought about making an unboxing video so you could see what it's like.

But there was that video camera, just sitting there. And who wants to sit through five to ten mins of some boring bald guy opening stuff?

This week I felt determined to have a go, but first I needed to work on some titles. Rather than cheat and use stock footage, I wanted everything to be original. Music, titles, everything. So I bought some red fabric, and bingo - red flag.

Well, it's a start. The "Green Screen" effect on iMovie isn't great, so it cut the gold trim off of the logo, and I couldn't flip the "K", but it's a start. For a first attempt I'm happy with it. So, I need to perfect the superimposition of the logo, change the title test, and come up with some music. Something military, like Prokofiev... Soviet sounding... 

--

On the downside, when I loaded up iMovie for the first time in months, an older upload from my phone appeared. I forgot I'd shot a video of myself, a guided tour of my mum's house, about two weeks before she died last year, as a reminder of what it was like. 

WILD

It's been a little while since I looked at WILD. The madness of Christmas working in retail had delayed a lot of work on it, so I thought I'd print out what I had done so far to remind myself where I was. It's strange how it can look like there's both more and less than I'd expected of it. I really should get back to it.

I should also reread the WILD novel I did for NaNoWriMo, and do a second draft... 

CONSPIRACY X

However, I have been proofing the fourth book of Conspiracy X (the Conspiracies Sourcebook). A mammoth read, and a huge book when it hits the printers. Should be awesome.

OTHER PROJECTS

Besides that, there are other things I've been working on - pitches, proposals, and other assignments. I can't talk about those, but you never know. Strange things may be afoot at the Circle K. (No, it's not a Bill and Ted license).

--

Well, that's about it. I'll do something a bit more interesting next week, honest.

Until then, stay multi-classy!!

Roll Your Own Life (16) - There can be only one!

I'm getting a little ahead of myself with bringing up Conspiracy X. Let's rewind a bit to 1999.

We moved to Bournemouth. Wasn't a great idea, but it was one of those "If you don't try it, you'll never know and regret it the rest of your life" decisions. My lovely wife had an excellent job offer doing layout and design for cool video game magazines, and the move to the other side of the country seemed like a good idea.

We met some awesome people who we're still in touch with, and some awesome people we've lost contact with as well... but we just didn't really get on with the city. We knew it was a bad sign when the local council were encouraging people to come to the place by equating it with Ibiza.

Odeon Bournemouth

I got a job at the Odeon, and while it wasn't brilliant pay, the job was fun. I worked in the box office, on the food stand, and ushering in an ancient building that once saw the Beatles perform on stage, before being converted into a six screen cinema with an ominous collection of dark corridors, old dressing rooms and a deserted flat on the top floor that looked like something from The Blair Witch Project.

Initially, I was taken on to work just for the duration of the new Star Wars movie (Episode I: The Phantom Menace) as they knew it was going to be huge. I remember seeing it for the first time at the midnight test that the projectionist was doing to make sure the film worked and coming out at 2.30am feeling like I'd been punched in the gut. This is what they'd done to Star Wars? I loved Star Wars, and this was what they did to it?

The benefit of working at the cinema was getting to watch it many times, and after the eighth or ninth time I grew to love it. It's not a great film, but my favourite out of the prequels. I do find Episodes 2 and 3 almost painful to watch sometimes.

But the cinema also showed me films I would never have normally seen... Fight Club was certainly one of them. I had no interest in Fight Club. The posters just looked like a dull film about bare-knuckle boxing. Not my sort of thing. But ushering meant I got to see the first ten minutes... and I was hooked. I saw it as many times as I could, and read the book, and until Inception came along it was my all-time favourite movie.

However, the town lived up to its publicity, and I remember coming home after the midnight screenings of the Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre had emptied, in the cabs the Odeon had laid on for the staff. As we turned the corner, there were crowds of drunken revellers pouring out of a nightclub, swarming around a police riot van, rocking it and trying to tip it over like a mass of zombies.

That was one of the defining moments that told us we should move.

But that's not the reason for the post.

All Flesh Must Be Eaten, 1st Edition Core Rulebook

There was a cool comics/roleplaying games shop on one of the roundabouts that we passed every morning and evening on the way to and from our works. Going my Google's street view it doesn't seem to be there any more, which is a shame, but they had some really cool RPGs in there. While I didn't have a game group in Bournemouth, I did pop in every week or so to see if there was anything cool in there.

It was then that something caught my eye. A game book smaller than the others on the shelves, with a rather gross colour scheme that looked a bit like brains. The game was "All Flesh Must Be Eaten", and I picked it up purely out of a strange fascination with the cover more than anything else. Maybe it was the same thing that drove me to buy Kult all those years before...

All Flesh Must Be Eaten was cool. A really good, simple system (Unisystem) where one roll was used for everything. There was none of this "The rule for jumping is this, but you roll different dice for an attack or use a different formula for using magic". Unisystem - one rule for everything. The problem was, I didn't have a gaming group, and I didn't think they wanted to play zombie survival horror.

While AFMBE was cool, I was drawn to the artwork in the back in the adverts. It was CJ Carella's WitchCraft. A gorgeous piece of artwork that meant I had to go back to that game shop and order WitchCraft the following week.

WitchCraft, 2nd Edition cover.

WitchCraft was awesome. Still is, and it wasn't long before I decided Unisystem would be my system of choice now, and promptly started converting those Kult characters (formerly World of Darkness characters) over to WitchCraft.

I'll stop rambling about my time in Bournemouth and continue the history at another time. Meanwhile, you can see just what I was so enthralled about by downloading the WitchCraft core rulebook here, legally, for free! Give it a look if you haven't before. It's rather fab.

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

Dicing with Distraction

Yes, I confess, I failed to do a blog post last week. AND, I've been failing to do the promised "Daily Sketch" posts... in fact, I've been failing to do the sketches themselves. But there's a good reason for most of this.

The lack of Blog Post last week was mostly the day-job getting in the way. Boss visits, that sort of thing. The usual that goes on with the mundanity of the day-job.

On top of that, I've been reading through the final layout proof of the 4th Corebook for Conspiracy X 2.0 - the Conspiracies Sourcebook. It's a huge tome, filled with a LOT of information, and a lot of it is in print for the very first time, so it's taking a while to read through. I'm determined to have it finished this week though, one way or another.

The Conspiracies Sourcebook presents for the first time, a lot of new background and detail about Area 51, reveals the origins of Aegis and the NDD, and has a lot of cool stuff that takes the game in new directions, as well as building the setting up for the inevitable alien invasion that'll feature in Conspiracy X's sister game, Extinction.

In addition to this, I've been working my way through the original files for Extinction, trying to work out what's needed to bash it into shape.

When I haven't been working on that, I've been looking into game systems and planning for other possible games, as well as still working on WILD, so I haven't been completely resting on my laurels.

Saying that though, it is January. The weather has been miserable. I don't mean the snow, I like snow. I mean the ice and sludge and cold that comes afterwards. The ice has made the daily trek to the day-job hell on earth, and I've left the iPad at home for fear of slipping on the untreated pavements and landing on it. Hence the lack of "Daily Sketches". None of those lunchbreak iPad doodles that I promised...

And January is naturally depressing. Everyone's broke after the festival of excess. If you had any time off over the festive season, you've been returned to the horrors of mundanity (luckily, being in crappy ol' retail means I don't have any time off over Christmas, so it's not so much of a shock being at work in January). And the bills on the credit cards are starting to come in... I find myself staring at the nonsense of Facebook, waiting for something interesting to happen rather than actually motivate myself.

Which is stupid really. WILD is such a personal project, and I should be really enthused. The other stuff I'm working on is really cool. I dunno. Maybe it's just real life whispering in my ears while I sleep, telling me how it's all going to go wrong, how I should remember how horrible last year was, and how I really shouldn't bother trying.

Well, negativity. To paraphrase George RR Martin's "A Game of Thrones" - There is only one thing we say to negativity - "not today".

The new use for an old Gem Dispenser - DICE!

While I've been trying to motivate myself, the lovely wife had an incredibly geeky idea. A "gem dispenser" was being thrown out by a shop, and she jumped a the chance to bring it home. Initially, she wondered what to do with it, and then we both came to the same conclusion. DICE.

Over the years we've accumulated a lot of dice, and we have our favourites that we keep handy... but what of all the other ones? The slightly older ones? The D20's that we don't use as we usually play Unisystem, WoD or ATS? Well, they seem to look rather cool in the dispenser, and if anyone needs any dice when they come around to play, it'll be just £1 for a random selection! Just need more dice now to fill it!

While looking through my old dice to fill the dispenser, I found a real relic. My first ever D20. An old fleshy-brown, plain effort with the numbers highlighted with a wax crayon. The corners were heavily worn and a bit peely, but there was something about it that brought back hundreds of memories. Of sitting around a table at Pete's, playing AD&D, as that 9th level Paladin who never seemed to advance, armed with my +5 Holy Avenger, staggering around in full plate armour. Ah, those were the days.

My first D20, preserved in its own
little display case.
(Yes, those are signed Gillian Anderson photos)

Wifey decided that such a relic from my past should have pride of place. It shouldn't be shoved into the dispenser along with the other dice, it should be displayed. So, with one of the empty dice boxes and a straw, the old D20 now has pride of place on the new bookshelves, strangely in front of my leather-bound D&D 3.5 Rulebooks that I've never played (and no, I still haven't tried 4th Ed yet... I may just wait until 5th).

So, enough distractions. I've taken a couple of days away from the day-job this week to catch up. I'll finish the ConX proofing, see what I can do to Extinction, do a little WILD, and other gaming stuff, draw something hopefully, and get the year going, finally.

And, I'll try not to miss another blog post!

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

That Time We Were in "Legends of the Dark Knight"...

Last post I talked about comics, and my feeble attempt to get my little shoddy comic published. I mentioned briefly that there was a tale to tell when it comes to D'Israeli's work on Batman. Well, are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

So D'Israeli had done a lot of work with Ian Edginton in the past, and the pair teamed up again for a two part story in the epic Batman storyline "No Man's Land". Split over Legends of the Dark Knight 117, and Shadow of the Bat 85, it featured D'Israeli's awesome art as Bats battled the loons while Gotham was in ruins.

Anyway, in one of the issues (I think it's the end of Legends of the Dark Knight 117) there's a panel where the Penguin's ranting, and there are loads people around him, his goons, minions, general Gothamites. And D'Israeli needed inspiration for the crowd, and drew a load of people he knew in there. So, in the background of this scene, you'll find a particularly evil looking Debs, and me (back when I had hair).

Debs (in the front row of the crowd, next to the person who looks like Tyrion Lannister) and
Me (in the middle row at the back, with my old larger glasses and some hair!)

Which is particularly awesome! Immortalised in the world of Batman.

Unfortunately, when Christopher Nolan decided to add No Man's Land to Knightfall to make the third of his Bat-films "The Dark Knight Rises" we were not called in to be extras in the background. We certainly would have been happy to appear in it. Would have given me a chance to try to convince Nolan to do a second Inception movie.

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Meanwhile, I've been a bit slack with the "Daily Sketches". I'll post a load soon to catch up. Honest! However, I've a load of proofing to do, so back to work for me!

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

Roll Your Own Life (15) - Comic Sans

About time I got back to the history of my gaming life. This post diverges a little from the usual gaming stuff, but it's important as it lead to bigger things.

Howard the Duck
Issue 23 - Star Waaugh!

Ever since I was in school I loved drawing comics. I used to draw odd little adventures based on our gaming group as I mentioned before, chronicling our adventures in Star Frontiers, in a rather bad strip called Wormbusters. It wasn't great, and a lot of it drew heavily from what I'd been reading in Mad magazine or from a particularly ancient issue of Howard the Duck (the Star Wars parody issue... Yes, Family Guy, Howard beat you to it by about 30 years.). It was just something to draw while I was in the 6th form at school, and by incorporating as many people as I could from my classes, I had people clamouring to read it. It made a particularly unpopular kid at school remotely interesting for a brief period.

After school, I tried the RPG writing thing, but I still drew the odd comic strip here and there. I did a series of Wormbusters strips for the Hull Daily Mail (I don't think they ever used them though, but they did ask for them... It wasn't just me sending random crap to them, honest!) and I teamed up with Pete from the RPG group to produce a couple of comics that I may have mentioned before ("Drowning in Darkness" and "Ninja Secretaries from Beyond Dimension X") under the name Swampland Productions. Pete was the business and the writing, while I was the angst and the pencilling.

We advertised in Deadline magazine, got a little interest, and indie comics fanzine "Zum!" basically called me a "goth Herge", which I took as a huge compliment.

I thought this was the way to go, and as the day job at the council lead to my return to art college, I thought I'd focus on graphic novels and sequential art. However, comic art wasn't as favoured as it is now in the academic circles, so I didn't do the degree in Illustration as I'd planned - instead I did animation so that I could specialise in film storyboarding (I figured it was as close to comics as I could get). My degree film was like an animated comic strip, and my dissertation was comparing Frank Miller's A Dame to Kill For with classic film noir like Double Indemnity.

Comics had become everything. So much so that when I left art college, I applied to the Prince's Trust to start up my own comic publishing business - Autocratik Press. Surprisingly, they agreed and loaned me the money for my first print run for my comic "Missing".

Cover of Missing Issue 1,
Autocratik Press

"Missing" was basically a soap opera, set in a hotel at the border between Scotland and England, after England had become the 51st American State. It followed three or four plot lines about a suicidal girl escaping her abusive boyfriend, a group of surfing highwaymen who held up cars in the floodwaters, a gang who had kidnapped the daughter of the State senator, and other nonsense. It was trying really hard to be a new Twin Peaks in the near future. It did okay. My art was a bit sloppy, lettering was awful and done by hand, and after four issues my distribution said they'd given it a shot and it wasn't worth continuing, so I kinda gave up. It didn't make any money, but each issue paid for the next issue's print run, and I paid back the loan, but that was about it.

Promotional Postcard for Missing

More promotional
postcards for Missing

Page 90 of Missing
appeared in Issue 4

During this time I'd been going to comic conventions and chatting with some of the coolest indie comic creators around. Gary Spencer Millidge, Paul Grist, Paul Rainey, Martin Shipp, Marc Laming, Terry Wiley, David Moyes, and many more. It was a time when the UK indie comics scene was at its height, and creators were full of useful information to help each other out to get into the scene.

I wasn't going to give up. My art may have not been up to scratch, but I'd met someone who was awesome, and I offered to publish his new comic. D'Israeli had become a pretty recognisable name in the comics industry, inking Sandman, drawing Batman (there's a tale to tell there), and working for 2000AD (which he still does to this day). His work in Deadline (right next to our old Ninja Secretaries ad) on Timulo was a huge inspiration, and when he said he'd be happy to work together on publishing his next book "Consequences", I leapt at the chance.

D'Adventures of ISRAELI: Consequences
by Molly Eyre & D'Israeli

Part of his series "d'adventures of ISRAELI", it was amazing. Hit nuns, haddock, rocket launchers, everything. Genius.

I mean, just look at it. It's fantastic.

Below are some images from the comic that I put together for a promotional poster. The pics below are from the reverse filled with quotes from some of the big names in comics (Warren Ellis, Alan Grant, Andi Watson) all singing its praises. If you've never read a D'Israeli comic before, you're seriously missing out.

Click the pics, see them big!

Consequences Promotional Flyer page 1

Consequences Promotional
Flyer page 2

With a name like that, the distributors took note again, and I was almost back in business. Almost.

"Consequences" did okay, sold out and you can now find it in D'Israeli's complete Timulo collection "Timularo" here. But I'd just moved across the country, had no ideas, so I closed Autocratik Press down.

How does all this relate to gaming I hear you say? Well, a friend of mine called Jason knew I was a massive fan of The X-Files, and loaned me a copy of the Conspiracy X RPG. I read it and thought it would make an awesome comic, and set to contacting the producers of the game... Eden Studios...

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Missing, Issue 4

As a reward for sitting through this massive piece of nostalgia, I've a handful of copies of issue 4 of Missing still sitting in my loft. It's a standalone issue, the art's not great, but they're just sitting there. The staples are a little rusty, but if you'd like one, send me an email to dave@autocratik.com - and I'll tell you how to get one.

Basically, all I'm asking is you like my Facebook page, spread the word, and send me some stamps to cover postage. I'll email you the details. First come, first served, one each, and I'll even sign them if you like. I've even got some of the limited promo postcards, posters for "Consequences" and stuff like that.

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

Daily Sketch: Days 5 & 6

Didn't get chance to post yesterday as bogged down with assembling some flatpacked shelving. I had a thought about how these pictures may be diluting the basic cause of the blog, so I may keep doodling but post a week's worth in one post, so that the interesting posts (at least, I hope they're interesting) about gaming don't get lost in the mass of awful pictures...

Anyway, here's yesterday's pic...

Daily Sketch 5: Not the Bad Robot you were expecting.

 I don't know what I was doing, I just started doodling...

Daily Sketch 6: Self Portrait of me circa 1988.

And the other one is a pic of how I used to draw myself back in the 80's! Hence the hair and the lack of glasses!

Daily Sketch: Day 4

Daily Sketch, Day 4. No idea, just started doodling. Discovered that setting Sketchtime to magic marker, in light grey, and a fine point, is like drawing in pencil. Hmmm...

Daily Sketch, Day 4. Just some doodling

Daily Sketch: Day 3

Really couldn't think of anything to draw today, ended up doodling the scary doctor-spider thing in the book but trying to draw something that had deliberately weird stretchy limbs felt really odd. Not happy with this one either.

Daily Sketch, Day 3, evil spider-doctor-creature

Daily Sketch: Day 2

Daily sketch time again. Really struggling to come up with ideas of what to draw, so just doodling any old crap. And crap really is the key word here. What kind of proportions am I going for here?

Daily Sketch, Day 2, Some guy with a gun.

Daily Sketch: Day 1

Well, I promised I'd do it, so here goes. Daily Sketch, day one. I dunno what I was trying to do here, part of me wanted to start on the basics of one of the WILD Tarot cards, but I didn't get very far. I've found Sketchtime is good for doodles and working out what shape I want images, but nothing really beats pencil and paper for me. Maybe it's the huge stylus and lack of accuracy, or maybe it's just that I haven't really drawn anything for about ten years. 

Anyway, it's early days yet, maybe things will improve as the year goes on. So, yes... this is poop.

More tomorrow hopefully if I'm not buried under a mass of flat-packing and half assembled bookcases.

Daily Sketch No.1 - 1/1/2013 - WILD Card - The Pontifex