Welcome to the Pleasure Dome - Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1984)
"Oh, Frankie."
Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a weird one for me. Some of their music was jaw droppingly brilliant - made all the more epic by a lot of post production by legendary producer Trevor Horn. And yet, some of their music was just snippets of cover versions, or whole tracks of them sitting around talking trying to be cool "lads".
My first exposure to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, again, was a trip to see relatives in London. Staying with my grandparents, my uncle who had introduced me to The Boomtown Rats was watching British Channel 4 music programme "The Tube" especially as FGTH was going to be on. He said, "You have to watch this."
It was probably because he was trying to be all controversial as Relax had been banned by the BBC and The Tube was going to reshow the music video for Relax that they'd filmed. It was good, but I wasn't totally convinced.
And then along came Two Tribes. With its controversial video, epic sound, and legendary number of remixes, Two Tribes would become a bit of an obsession of mine. I bought as many remixes as I could find, and when the album came out I was one of the first in line.
Listening to it now, it's not a brilliant double album - but it is a brilliant single album. Take out all the mucking about and weird tracks and you have a solid and amazing work of epic production and mammoth sounds.
I bought the 12" for The Power of Love, but my interest was already starting to wane - though my obsession with Frankie Goes to Hollywood (along with Holly Johnson's cartoon haircut on the cover of the album that looked like mine - back when I had hair - as well as the weird link with my middle name) lead to the creation of my nickname that was given to me in the 6th form at school and has stuck ever since - Frankie.
I have a distinct memory of buying Rage Hard, the first track from their follow up album on 12" from Sydney Scarborough's in Hull, and discovering I had two copies of it in the sleeve. Being the sadly honest person I am, I went back and returned one of them (much to the disgust of some of my mates). That 12" (the Tour of the 12") is a brilliant novelty version of the record, teaching you how a 12" remix works with a voice over.
Strangely, that was the end of my FGTH purchases. I liked Warriors of the Wasteland, but never bought it, or the album Liverpool... and by that time, the band itself imploded and I moved on to other things. Sorry Lads!
Ah, The Police. I'm a big fan of The Police, but got into their music relatively late. I'd heard their singles, liked them, but never really bought any of their albums. I have a distinct memory of one of my sisters buying one (I think it was Regatta de Blanc) and saying that she'd taken it back to the store the following day as it had lots of swearing in it.
Again, it was visit involving relatives that exposed me to some new music. I was staying in London with my uncle and aunt, and staying in their front sitting room on a portable bed arrangement. In the room was the family's stereo and their record collection, and I remember buying some blank cassettes while I was there so I could copy some albums while I was there to listen to properly when I got home. One of those albums was Ghost in the Machine (another one with some swearing in it, sorry sis) and I was mesmerised by some of the weirder, etherial tracks at the end (Secret Journey, Omegaman, Darkness).
Then came their next album, and Synchronicity II was released as a single. Here was a track that was about mundanity (you know I like that, after my entry on The Boomtown Rats last time), interspersed with the weirdness of a strange Cthulhoid creature surfacing from a loch and lurking towards an unsuspecting home. How freakin' cool is that? Synchronicity II was my favourite track of everything for a very long time.
Other great tracks on Synchronicity include the weird Mother, and the melancholy King of Pain. Great album where the big hit single, Every Breath You Take, is possibly my least favourite (mostly as it's really creepy and stalky).
I started with the Greatest Hits album (Every Breath You Take - The Singles) and quickly progressed on to the Message in a Box complete recordings set. Still fab now.
The Boomtown Rats - The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979)
Continuing my look at twenty albums that had a major impact on my life, we come to 1979's "The Fine Art of Surfacing" by The Boomtown Rats. Everybody and their dog had heard of the Rats by this time, being famous for dethroning John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John's Grease song from the top of the charts with Rat Trap years before. By the time I Don't Like Mondays hit the charts, the schoolyards were filled with kids talking about what the song was really about. It's a sad state of affairs that these incidents have become more and more commonplace... but let's not get into that.
I was introduced to the album by my uncle (I think that's right) Ian. He was a couple of years older than me and we only really saw each other once or twice a year. He lived with my maternal grandfather, and "aunt" (who was actually my step-grandmother?) in east London. Ian introduced me to some great music that influenced me as a kid - one being Frankie Goes to Hollywood (we'll come to that later) and the other was this album. He bought it on cassette while visiting my parents "up north" and we listened to it when he first got it. On first listen it was cool, but I distinctly remember the weirdness of some of the tracks - Having My Picture Taken is really quirky, and not the usual topic of music at the time, and both Nothing Happened Today and When The Night Comes are about mundane life, being bored with work, and not the standard love songs that really dominated.
"Frankie, you're no different from any of the rest, They've nailed you to your table and they've chained you to your desk."
And then the album had weird secret tracks at the end of each side that I'd not experienced before. The end of side one finishes with a repeating laugh track with "Stop laughing, that's not funny" repeated over it (very creepy)... and side two ends with a sign off for the Rats leaving the Ensign Record label - "That concludes episode 3..."
Months went by and a friend at school in my class was obsessed with Adam and the Ants and asked if ever I saw any magazine articles about the Ants I should save them for her, which I did. She asked what music I was into, and I knew the sort of magazines she read wouldn't cover the weird synth-instrumental stuff I was listening to (Oldfield, Jarre, etc.) so I thought back to that album and said The Boomtown Rats are alright... She surprised me with a mass of clippings from music press about them.
When my birthday was approaching, I was asked what I wanted and I asked for the newest Rats album - Mondo Bongo - which one of my sisters kindly bought for me and proceeded to make me play in front of my parents. Luckily they weren't listening too hard (first record I owned that had "shit" as a lyric), and I quickly progressed on to buying The Fine Art of Surfacing on vinyl.
I bought Surfacing, Mondo Bongo, and V Deep again a few years ago on CD and they still hold up really well. Great albums, all of them.
Continuing my Roll Your Own Life bit of nostalgia, looking at twenty albums that had the biggest impact on my life, we come to the second one - Mike Oldfield's Crises.
It was about this time that I started tabletop gaming, and the friends I played D&D with all had a great influence on me with my music choices. It was my first exposure to cool instrumental artists such as Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis. Even weird and high-concept albums like The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony (what a title)...
It was also my first exposure to Mike Oldfield. I'd heard bits of Tubular Bells when it was on the news and documentaries, and I was fascinated that someone could record a whole album alone playing all the instruments. However, I think it was Coop who introduced me to Crises. Hell, what an album. Everyone remembers Moonlight Shadow as the big single, while Oldfield was trying to get some bigger commercial success - but it was the A Side, the twenty-minute long title track that I was most drawn to. There were loads of cool elements to it - the whole opening in epic, and echoes Tubular Bells a little before you get the vocals bit about six minutes in. Then it changes to the "Watcher in the Tower" bit (about eight minutes in) that always went down a storm with the D&D group, and then builds to this massive musical extravaganza towards the end of the track.
Still cool today.
Side B was filled with individual tracks to be more commercial, leading with Moonlight Shadow (though bear in mind, in the US sides A & B were flipped and an extra track, Mistake, was added), and a handful of other tracks that were pretty cool. I know Shadow on the Wall, Oldfield's branch out into slightly heavier music, was a bit of a fave.
I still have very fond memories of listening to this, and Five Miles Out.
First of all, thank you to everyone for your kind words over the loss of our beloved cat, Marla.
It's been tough these last nearly seven weeks, and it's been hard to concentrate on anything without memories coming flooding in. I've been away from social media, and away from most things except the day-job and staring into space. However, things have slowly been progressing with WILD, and there's some really exciting news on the horizon...
But, I need to get back to writing.
A few days ago, I was tagged in one of those Facebook things where you post something each day and tag a friend to get them involved. (Thanks Milo!). This one was twenty albums that defined you, shaped you as a person, and had a major impact on your life.
I started to do it on Facebook, but I didn't feel like torturing other people by tagging them, but then I thought about it - Why am I just posting a picture of an album on Facebook? There's no backstory - no reason for why that album had an impact. I started working out my list (not an easy task) and I'm finding it a great distraction from grief - and also, if I write a little about the posts and I can see it as a warm up exercise for actually doing some proper writing on what I should be working on.
Someone I worked with in a different dayjob used to get up at 6am to write a short story - some flash fiction - each morning. I'm not getting up that early (though I'm usual up for 7am) but this may get me back into the habit of throwing words down on the computer.
So here we go. A new part of my autobiographical series of posts I call "Roll Your Own Life" - it may not be daily, but I'll try to do 20...
The Music That Shaped Me (part 1) - From the Tea-rooms of Mars (1981)
I'm really not doing these in any sort of chronological order, just as they come to me, so please bear with me.
Up to this point, I guess my music tastes were really whatever my parents listened to, or the Star Wars soundtracks, but electronic music was starting to fascinate me and I remember seeing Landscape on Top of the Pops playing Einstein-A-Go-Go and thinking it was different, nerdy, and really cool. I also remember the lead guy from Landscape, Richard James Burgess, being interviewed on Tomorrow's World about drum synthesisers.
I hadn't really bought a lot of music before this. I had some soundtracks, some ELO, the odd single here and there, but I remember getting this album and loving it. The opening track European Man had the most epic opening for an album I'd ever heard before, and could imagine it being the opening titles to a movie.
And then there was the second single from the album, Norman Bates. At the time, I'd never even heard of Psycho, but my mother was a big fan of Hitchcock movies and related the story of Psycho to me so I understood the record. And next time it was on TV, I was sure to watch.
The other stand out track for the album was a really odd one called The Doll's House. I have no idea what it's about - a weird instrumental thing with echoing voices, creepy noises and a drum beat over the top. I listened to it repeatedly trying to fathom out what was going on, but still have no idea.
Certainly worth checking out if you like early 80's electronica.
Four Weeks on since we lost Marla and I'm still finding it hard.
I'm not sure if people realised how much she meant to me, my constant writing companion and loyal friend. I'm not ashamed to admit that thinking of her brings tears, and when I'm not distracted by mindless crap on TV, stupid games, or reading, my thoughts go back to her.
Marla always helped me with my writing and game design.
I should be distracting myself by writing. But actually concentrating on the writing leaves me open to thinking too much and the lure of distracting my brain again comes in.
I have written, I don't want to let people down, but it is a struggle. I'm going to try to do some more now...
I've been quiet again, avoiding the internet for a couple of weeks. Two weeks ago we lost our cat, Marla. She'd been my constant companion for nearly fourteen years, and I have to confess I'm finding it hard at the moment.
I've been trying to keep my mind occupied - when it's not my thoughts go back to her - but my attention span isn't great. When I was writing, she'd be curled up on my lap with her head upside-down. Watching TV would be the same. I still wake at 2:30am every morning, the time she'd wake me for food.
We miss her dearly, and constantly expect her to come wandering into the room at any time.
I need to get back into writing - I don't want to let my publisher down. When my father died I buried myself in Conspiracy X rewrites and system changes that became Conspiracy X 2.0, and I know that it's not the healthiest of ways of dealing with these things.
Last year I wrote the obligatory "Hey, it's a new year" blogpost looking back at the previous year and everything I'd hope to do in the coming year of 2019. It came up on my Facebook feed today saying "You wrote this post last year" and I opened it, reread it, and thought - "Wow, it's almost like nothing happened..."
So this year, I present last year's New Year post again - with a few modifications in red so you can see any differences.
To quote Talking Heads - "Same as it ever was..."
I was going to call this blogpost something like "It's the end of the year as we know it" or something suitably New Year-y, but it's been an odd one and it's probably best to just get on with the new one...
The last year has felt like one big holding pattern. Circling, endlessly, waiting for something exciting to happen. For that phone call. That email. For someone to come along and say "Hey, I like your ideas. You need to work on that, rather than wasting your days in retail. Here's a handful of cash. Make your dreams a reality."
Of course, it never really happens like that. You have to reach out and grab opportunity by the gronk-nuks.
I had my share of waiting last year. That holding pattern of self doubt. Convinced that after my last professional writing stint that I'd never get a publishing contract again. Convinced that all of my ideas are nonsense.
But I mustn't give up. I can't give up. There have been times last year when I seriously thought I should just pack in the writing and resign myself to my fate - one of retail, customer service and the hell I deserve for my past mistakes. But I can't do that. I've been trying to get into game writing since the late 1980s, got my first published game product on the shelves in 2002, won awards for game design and writing. It's what I want to do. Or something like it.
With Dragonmeet looming at the end of last year, I decided that I needed to sell myself. I needed to prove to someone, as well as myself, that I could do it and that my own project was worth taking a chance on. So I decided I'd produce a small sample - a pitch document, just as we had with Doctor Who over ten years ago - to show my wares and my ideas.
I produced a forty page book - half of it a "pitch" summarising the concepts and ideas of WILD, the RPG I've been working on for years. The other half a sample of one of the chapters, to give a feel for the text, and how I'd envisioned it being laid out.
With the excellent service of a digital printer (www.inkylittlefingers.co.uk) this book was printed, in black and white, with a hardback, full colour cover.
The printed "pitch" document for WILD - 20x20cm, with a very rough illustration on the cover
The printers did a fantastic job of it, with even the images they flagged on the document (the tiny jpgs of the covers of some of the books I'd worked on) coming out brilliantly...
The "Pitch" half of the document summarises who I am, and the concepts of the game.
But seeing the actual pages I'd been working on, with the ink-splat designs I'd had in mind, was brilliant. Great inspiration to keep going and to keep working on my dream project...
Playing with the text, little details like repeated lines, ink splats and blurs. This is what I had in mind...
Awesome. And despite me sending the files off to the printers with just ten days to Dragonmeet, they delivered with days to spare. Three whole copies of the WILD pitch. THREE. Talk about limited edition!
Dragonmeet was cool. Busy and exciting. Huge as well. So much bigger than last time I'd gone. I'd only been there a matter of minutes before Dom from Cubicle 7 dragged me off to a secluded location to record a podcast for "Wibbly Wobbly Dicey Wicey" - a Podcast dedicated to Doctor Who roleplaying. That was great fun - I'll post a link to the podcast when it is published.
I showed the pitch off, and hopefully there will be some news about the future of WILD soon. But I don't want to jinx it. I'm just going to keep plugging away at it. Writing the pitch document has revealed some areas I want to rewrite and redesign, which I'll start work on in the next few days.
[2020] After that, there was a huge silence. Nothing. Nada. Last year's Dragonmeet I went again with a cool WILD T-shirt and hoped it would spark some sort of interest from the big publishers I talked to the previous year, in a "Hey, remember me, we talked about that game last year?" but nothing... With no major publishers interested it looks like WILD may be going the smaller, indie route in 2020. I just need to get back to it.
After Dragonmeet it was a most definite return to the holding pattern - unable to work on anything except the dayjob and madness that is working in retail over the festive period. With just a couple of days before the kids go back to school, things will return to a slower, calmer pace and I can reassign some energies to working on the writing, and what I want to get done this year.
Most blogposts posted to the interwebs on the first of a year is all about the writer expressing their hopes and dreams for the coming year.
I hope to write more - get more written for WILD, unless something bigger and cooler comes along that would actually pay...
I hope to escape the day job - but I know this is unlikely. Gotta pay those bills!
[2020] - 2019 saw a couple of big job interviews that would have meant I could finally escape the hellscape of retail, but while it looked hopeful for a while, even they fell by the wayside. I'm going to be stuck in retail until I die aren't I?
I hope to escape the city - I'm a country boy at heart.
With that, I'll close the blog with a track from my wife's favourite band of the last year. [2020] and this year. She's barely listened to anything else, but "Leave the City" still remains incredibly apt...
May 2020 bring you everything you hope. May it be kind to you, bring you prosperity and good health, and bring your dreams to life.
It's been over a week already, and I haven't written up what happened at Dragonmeet. That's pretty shoddy...
Dragonmeet was good - though I do feel that I'm not really cut out for the social side of things. I met so many people I know there, mostly fellow game designers, publishers, bloggers, reviewers and generally cool people that I've come to know over the years, and as always struggled to find anything cool to say. I'm really not a social animal as they say.
Was interviewed for the second time by the Wibbly-Wobbly Dicey-Wicey podcast - a podcast dedicated to the Doctor Who RPG, though I'm yet to hear any of their podcasts (or find them online except for a facebook page). I just wish I had some news about the Dr Who RPG. I did the rules for the new edition, and the rest is in Cubicle 7's hands...
Wore that cool t-shirt I had printed for WILD, and had a few people ask "Where can I buy it?" and even had a comment of "You talk about it all the time, I thought it had come out?" This made me wonder if I have been talking about it too much..?
Last year's pitch document didn't result in any pick-up, so it looks like I'm taking another approach - teaming up with Stoo at WeEvolve publishing, who made the cool Aegean RPG we've been playing. Plans are afoot for a smaller intro-book to see if we can get interest building for a larger, full scale WILD release further down the line. It's early days yet, but looking promising. I just need to write a cut-down version of the game, with a solo/co-op adventure that ties into the bigger world.
That's another thing that made me think. I had a nice chat with the awesome Jason Durall, line manager for Runequest and Conan, and all 'round excellent chap. Talking about WILD he asked, "So what do you do?" and I was stumped. It was that problem with creating a huge and playable world. What do you actually do?
It's fine saying "You can play oneironauts using dreamshare technology to investigate night terrors," or "You can play agents hacking into other people's dreams to steal secrets," or "Investigating paranormal events that occur when dream archetypes escape the dreamrealms and force their way into our reality," but it doesn't really pin it down.
I was feeling a bit despondent about it really - just the whole lack of being able to describe it - when I went back to watching the playthrough videos for Death Stranding.
Death Stranding on the PS4
Okay, so I don't own a PS4, and I've been intrigued by the visuals of Death Stranding enough to actually watch playthrough videos. The game is like a massive movie with chunks of walking between cities thrown in between scenes, but it's been playing happily in the background while I've been writing. When the true plot was finally revealed - what the BTs were, the concept of Beaches, and one of the plans to connect them - I suddenly had a realisation. If WILD was a video game, it would be compared to Death Stranding.
But how did Hideo Kojima pitch Death Stranding? I guess he didn't have to, with the game being developed by Kojima Productions, and Kojima having such a reputation with a string of amazing games behind him. But can you imagine him going to Sony and saying - "I want to make a game where you are a courier connecting the cities in a post-apocalypse world." It sounds even simpler than "You're a therapist going into the dreams of those haunted by nightmares."
I just wish, sometimes I had the financial backing (and just a fraction of the imagination) of Hideo Kojima. Mindblowing stuff, man.
Just thinking about that, and the freedom Hideo Kojima has to do whatever is in his mind, gave me the motivation to get back to it. To go back to writing that darn game, and try to get it out there.
Thank you.
--
Anyway, going back to the title image, it's getting close to the festive season. I work in retail, and it is already madness in the streets. I'm exhausted all the time, and just can't wait for Christmas to be over so I can recover and get back to some semblance of normalcy. I say it every year, and I'll say it again - LAST CHRISTMAS IN RETAIL. I just hope this time it'll be true.
Until the new year, have a good festive season, whatever you celebrate. Be excellent to each other, and don't just dream it... be it.
It's less than a week until Dragonmeet in London. As I mentioned last post, this time last year I was frantically getting the pitch for my RPG, WILD, printed up and ready to give to a couple of publishers to see if they'd like to collaborate on a potential Kickstarter in the near future.
As I also mentioned last post, there was some interest but it has gone very quiet about it over the months and I need that drive - that "THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN" to keep me working on it. I've redesigned the game system, tested it, and it's going great. I just need that "THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN" to keep me motivated to get it finished.
Anyway - there are plans, and solutions. But we'll see.
The main reason for this post is Dragonmeet. It's this Saturday (30th November) at the Novotel Hotel in London. I hope to be there for a lot of the day, and take in the seminars that Cubicle 7 and Modiphius have planned in the afternoon, but the trains are being awkward (coach replacements for part of it - uggg). I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it goes okay.
If you see me there - you can spot me easily, I'll be the bald guy wearing the black WILD t-shirt (see the photo at the top) - say hi! Remind me who you are if I look confused - I do talk to a lot of people online and rarely see them face to face, so I may be forgetful.
Say hello. Happy to talk about anything, so if you need a quick filler on your podcast or anything, just ask.
Above all, if you're going to Dragonmeet - have fun and stay safe.
It's WILD Wednesday again, and first a little update.
This time last year I was building up to Dragonmeet. My idea was to print a pitch book that I could take with me to the convention and show to prospective publishers to show what I had in mind, to see if I could convince someone to help with a Kickstarter or other such launch. To put some money into the project to pay for some cool artwork (always a major selling point) and to help with the business end of the game's development and publication.
While my art skills are not great, I thought the book itself came out pretty well.
Within the book's pages was a summary of what the game setting was like, how I hoped the game would work, and how I envisioned the line developing and progressing - supplements and additional books, etc.
I also provided a sample from one of the chapters (character creation) so you could see how the book was structured, and how it was worded - explaining everything with parallel narratives.
Some of the sample text from within the pitch book
I thought it looked cool, and I talked to a couple of people about it at Dragonmeet. Some parties were interested, but we'll see if anything comes from that.
I talk about WILD a lot on this blog, so I figured I'd take some of the text from this pitch and place it in an easily accessible place. The buttons at the top of the page take you to my Facebook, Twitter, etc. There's a button for the Harry Potter pitch, and there's one for the WILD RPG. That takes you to a static page that I'll keep updating and expanding upon which is basically the text from the pitch book. I've put the setting information on there to start with, while I finish off the rules. Head over there and check it out if you like. I hope it gets you interested and keen to explore the WILD world a little deeper.
Who knows what this year's Dragonmeet will bring?
-
Meanwhile, my usual WILD Wednesday post is to look through the old Dev Diary that I've been carrying around for the last 7+ years.
We're still quite near the beginning, so a lot of this has changed, but it does seem like my love of square books was already showing only a few pages in. With the idea of a square book within a normal RPG sized box, which gives you space at the top for the cards/dice/etc. Of course, this is back when I was thinking of dice...
Opposite that are some early sketches of devices I'd seen in movies that read brainwaves. Looks like I was doodling the Squid device from the fantastic Strangedays movie. Ralph Fiennes was frakking amazing in that one.
Next few pages, I seem to have made some notes about Objects and Locations as Metaphors. Must remember that...
After a discussion of what happens to injuries over levels of dreaming, I made a few notes while sitting in the local library on my lunch hours. Looking at dream research and scribbling some bits about recording information from a sleeper using EEG, EOG and EMG.
This continues for a bit looking at the parts of the brain that are active during dreaming. This eventually lead to me changing how the tech looked to become a headband with elements that went behind the ears to stimulate the right parts of the frontal lobes, and the hippocampus at the core. Of course, I'm not a scientist so a lot of this is lost on me. If there are any neuroscientists out there who want to chip in, feel free.
Okay, that's enough waffling from me for a week. Until next time, dream big.
I thought, with it being Halloween week, I'd write about a movie that I've always thought was the biggest influence on my writing for the WILD RPG. No, not Inception, though that's the one that really got me writing the game itself...
No, I thought I'd write about a scary movie that completely opened my eyes to dreams as a game device - Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The UK Movie Poster, which was also the cover of the VHS I bought back in the 80s (I still have that somewhere)...
The only problem is, I started to look into Elm St... It was a long, long time ago, and I noticed that it came out the same year as another movie that was a huge influence on me as well... Dreamscape.
And now I can't remember which one I saw first.
So I'll credit them both with being the biggest influences on WILD.
There's a good chance I saw Dreamscape first as I was a massive Indiana Jones fan (Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first VHS tape I bought as it was one of the first VHS movies to come out at a retail level immediately - and I ended up buying Temple of Doom as a new Rental VHS which cost a fortune... saving, paying for it in advance instalments at my local video rental store... yes, I was that big an Indy nerd). Anyway, I was a big fan of Indiana Jones, and there was this movie coming out that had Kate Capshaw in it - the underrated Willie Scott from Temple of Doom. You could tell someone in the movie's marketing thought "you know, that actor from Indiana Jones is in this movie, let's market it like one of those films..."
Jump on that Indiana Jones bandwagon why don't you? The amazing Drew Struzan again. I miss movie posters like this...
Original UK VHS Cover
Dreamscape is far from being an Indiana Jones movie. Dennis Quaid plays Alex Gardner, a psychic who is brought into a research project to project himself into the dreams of others to try to help them overcome night terrors. He stumbles upon a plot by Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer), a government agent using his psychic agents to implant dreams of nuclear terror into the mind of the President, and aiming to assassinate him in his dreams. Gardner sets out to stop the plot, save the President, and aid the nuclear peace process.
Sure the special effects have dated a bit, but the plot's great. It was a revelation at the time for me, and I found the idea of going into other people's dreams fascinating.
If you haven't seen it, I'd definitely recommend checking it out.
Then, a matter of months later, the TV channels in the UK started running ads for A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The ads were really creepy, and had a lot of the iconic imagery that you expect from Elm St now - Johnny Depp getting swallowed by the bed, Amanda Wyss spinning around in the air, Freddy walking through the cell bars... I was very intrigued. I managed to rent the VHS the day it was released. I have a weird memory of watching it around at one of the game group's house, Milo's I think.
I was mesmerised. Genuinely scary, but when the line between dreaming and reality blurred - when Nancy falls asleep in class but class continues as a weird dreamscape... And the concept of grabbing something in the dream and waking, pulling it into the waking world... I loved it.
I mentioned before on this blog that I attempted to run A Nightmare on Elm Street as a Call of Cthulhu game for my unsuspecting players, but I don't know if it worked. I seem to remember it not going so well, once characters started dying...
Thirty-plus years later, and I'm still fascinated by dreams, and, along with Inception, these movies continue to be an inspiration for my game writing.
Last blog post I explained that I had a notebook filled with every note, inspiration and working-out I had since I started writing WILD, my RPG of dreamshare technology.
Seeing as the builders next door are using pneumatic drills to dig up concrete, my concentration for actually working on WILD is a bit fried, so I thought I'd continue my look at the old notes and see what I'd put.
My next couple of pages are a list of films, TV series and books that I considered inspiration for WILD. You'd probably recognise a lot of them as ones I mention frequently on this blog.
Inception, Suckerpunch, The Matrix, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, Dreamscape, Sleepwalkers (TV Series), Assassin's Creed, Cell, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mulholland Drive, Ink, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The City of Lost Children, eXistenZ, Life on Mars, Parasomnia, The Bridge (Banks), Awake (TV Series), Fringe, Lost, Vanilla Sky/Open Your Eyes, Paperhouse, Escape Into Night, Twin Peaks, House of Sleep...
I haven't gone back and added to this list in a while, and there have been a few I should add. Must do that.
On the next page, I have a list that just says - "To Look At:"
Under that, is "Dream Journals" - something I've done a bit of research into, especially considering the idea of solo gameplay in the WILD universe that involves journaling.
"Lucid Dreaming" - well, that kinda goes without saying, but this was early in the notes.
"False Awakenings" - done so many times in horror movies... "That was a horrible dream, ah, jump scare!"
"Eckankar" - a modern religion whose followers believe that the soul can leave the body and travel to other planes of reality.
"Interobjects" - the dream phenomena of encountering an object that is the merging of two objects but it's incomplete.
"Pre-lucid dreaming" - near lucid dreaming.
"Veridical Dreams" - prophetical dreams, or dreams that contain real events that the dreamer is unaware of.
After that is the page from the photo at the top. The Stages of Sleep (NonREM or NREM) through to REM.
I drew this weird doodle of what I thought the dreamrealms would look like, but it's nonsense. Just the doodles of an idle mind.
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That's enough of that for this entry I think. Don't want you getting bored.
CURRENT STATE OF PLAY
I mentioned before that I had a restructure of how the game works, and the game system itself, and I thought I was pretty happy with the way it was working out. I kinda came to a grinding halt actually writing it, trying to get it down on paper. I'd got the basics of it down, and I thought the best way to describe it was to give an example of the system in action.
The Matrix, obviously not WILD...
So I had a basic example of a hacker trying to get information out of a computer before the guards arrived, and started writing how the "roll" works - I put "roll" in quotes as it's actually a pretty simple card draw looking at some tarot cards.
Then I thought - why make up the results just to show what happens? Why not actually draw cards and type it up? Win or lose, it explains everything.
A couple of draws, and our hero had failed to get the information - three guards burst into the room and she was trapped. Another draw, and she'd kicked one through the office door, smashing the glass, and punched another in the face. Another draw, and she'd managed to knock the second guard out, but the third guard got a shot off, and she was injured from the hit. A third draw, and while she managed to dive to get the memory stick as the guard continued to fire at her, he clipped her in the shoulder and she crumpled to the floor. She was alive, but captured. The memory stick hidden for now...
The "rolls" were super quick, the whole scene resolved in a matter of minutes with action playing out in a smooth flow.
Excellent.
I'm happy with the way the game system works, I just need to try to structure the rules so they are (a) interesting, and (b) easy to refer to - though the rules are so simple you'll remember it pretty quickly.
Synchronicity has a knack of sneaking up on you and before you realise it, the universe has given you multiple signs that all point to the same thing.
First of all, I'm back to working on WILD. I'd had a bit of a break from it while I did some commissioned work on Doctor Who, but now I'm back to getting my head into the dreamrealms. Returning to it when I've had a break from it, I started to see ways to fix it, make it work better, and that involved tweaking the game system rather dramatically.
Second bit of synchronicity came from reading a handful of articles and listening to a couple of cool podcasts about game design and publishing. Most of them included a comment about keeping people interested in what you were working on by publishing a regular "Development Diary", so your potential audience and players could see how the game was progressing, the thoughts behind your design decisions and so on. And while I've been posting the odd update here and there about how WILD was progressing, these articles and podcasts lead me to think I wasn't doing it regularly enough.
And then, the third bit of synchronicity came on Sunday. It rained. I mean, it RAINED. It looked like the fight scene at the end of The Matrix Revolutions. It was hard to actually see through the rain. And, being the fool I am, was walking home from the dayjob in it. No raincoat, no umbrella. Just my suit jacket. And a hat... By the time I got home, my clothes were plastered to me. I hung my jacket up, and it dripped so much water I had to put newspaper under it. Two days later, and it was still wet, and will need a clean.
Inside that jacket, in the inside pocket, was my notebook. An A6 Moleskine-a-like made by popular stationery chain Rymans. This notebook as not left my side in many years. It is where I started formulating the ideas for WILD, making notes of how the game would work, how dreams work, key ideas of dream research, psychology, and inspiration from all sources.
It's like a backup of my brain - all the many ideas that I need to write down so I don't forget, they're all in there. And after the downpour - after my complete drenching - it was a little damp.
Luckily, it was just the black cover that was wet, and the pages were untouched. Lucky.
This reminded me of something I'd planned on doing for many moons - writing up some of my ideas and thoughts as a Developer Diary, so not only you could see how my brain got from "Wow, I should make a tabletop RPG of dreamshare technology" to where I am now, but also so I have a backup of what I've scribbled down, and can remind myself of ideas I noted down many years ago that I may have forgotten all about.
And so begins my Dev Diary posts. Hopefully, this will be fairly regular - and it'll get me writing and thinking more and more about WILD.
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Let's make a start, and look at the first page in the Dev Diary! This is really going back a bit. I have a distinct memory of coming out of the cinema after watching Inception and my head was full of ideas of dream sharing and why there wasn't a game that did that.
I was reminded of the game I ran in my late teens that was based on A Nightmare on Elm St, and how obsessed I was with the third movie - Dream Warriors - and how the characters all appeared in one dream to tackle the evil. And how I loved Dreamscape, and The Matrix, and how I really wanted to write a cool game that captured that feeling.
So I bought this notebook and started jotting down some ideas - each idea has a little box next to it to categorise it so I could keep track of which ones were [Game System] or [Setting], and so on.
A lot of these notes were made sitting in the library, opposite my dayjob, when I'm desperate to escape from the mundane work on my lunch hour and just think about what I'd rather be doing.
That first spread (and the pages that follow) are me randomly writing down ideas that I needed to remember: [Game System] Do dreams have a number of points for their stability? The more fantastic the elements in the dream, the more likely the dreamer will realise it is a dream and it will collapse, but is this just for people who are untrained and unaware that they are asleep? What about people who have gone in fully aware? [Note] How much of a dream is remembered upon waking? Some seem to be lost instantly, while others can always be recalled. [Why?] Why are dreams being explored? Is there a Collective Unconscious? Maybe not so much Sandman-esque dream-realms, but maybe more like Tron - where multiple dreamers, using the technology, have formed distinctive locations through repeated visits. [Note] Without the machines can you enter someone nearby's dream maybe through will, etc.? Maybe part of the plot would have to be getting the device onto a target without alarms. (Dreamscape) [Note] Powerful enough dreamers bringing objects out of the dream realms into reality. (Elm St, Paprika) [Note] Doing it without a device, only through meditation. Drugs don't work, produce impure results. [Game System] Maybe a dream has a number of Story Points? As the players use points to manipulate the dream to their own ends, they are used until the dream collapses. A dream within a dream uses a portion of this as well. Architect can increase and replenish a little, trying to hold the dream together until mission end. [Note] Actives need to be classified to be different from Projections - the "scenery" characters who are a figment of the dreamer's mind. Do these Projections act hostile against intruder Actives or is that too derivative? (Inception) [Game System] Injury and death in the dream, does it result in waking or continuing injury into the real world, or both? A threshold for injury? When hit or injured a character needs to make a roll to resist waking... lighter injuries are ignored, but more severe injuries are carried over into the real world. Fatal injuries have a chance of waking - or dying in the dream like the folklore says. [Scenes] Start in the middle of the action, never describe going to a location. Keep players on their toes.
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That's the first few pages. More next time, which hopefully will be less segmented!
