Roll Your Own Life (18) - As One Door Closes

I mentioned a couple of “Roll Your Own Life” entries ago that I used to publish comics. I had my own company, set up by The Prince’s Youth Business Trust, and the couple of titles I did (Missing and D’Israeli’s “Consequences”) were shipped internationally. But all was not great with the comics. 

Mostly, because my main comic (Missing) was a bit rough in the artwork, though I still liked the story, but when your main distributor says you’re just not worth carrying, it’s time to close the business. So I did. I officially shut the business down and gave up. But before I finally flick that switch, let’s rewind a little to before I moved to the south coast and ended up in the cinema.

The local video rental store was only a five minute walk away (well, ten coming back, it was a bloody steep hill) and we rented a lot of movies. This was before the wonders of the streaming interwebs and stuff. As we’d frequented the place a lot, we got chatty with Jason, the guy who used to work in the video store. We’d chat when we went in, and we discovered we had very similar interests, and became good friends. We even went to his wedding last year. [We seem to have this knack of becoming friends with people we meet in shops – the manager of our friendly local comic store became such good friends he was actually best man at our wedding!]

Cover for the 1st Edition
Conspiracy X

Anyway, Jason at the video store knew I was a huge X-Files fan, and knowing I was a roleplayer said that I should check out a roleplaying game called Conspiracy X. I’d not really heard of it, but he loaned me the core rules and I was hooked. Loved the game, thought the game setting was possibly one of the coolest things I’d ever read. It was so well designed and tapped into real events that the whole thing could have been a government leak to spread disinformation, or to prepare the public for the revelation of their dealings with aliens.

I was still publishing comics, so I did some internet research and discovered that Conspiracy X was now published by Eden Studios (rather than New Millennium Entertainment as the edition I borrowed had been) and I thought I’d drop them a line about doing a comic based on the game. Nothing big budget, just a little black and white indie like I normally published, but following the adventures of a Cell as they encountered the weird, the alien and the corrupted.

The Eden guys were as positive and supportive as you could expect, but before I knew it I was relocating to the other side of the country, closing the comics business down and I didn’t really give it much more thought. 

While there, I picked up All Flesh Must Be Eaten and WitchCraft, not really twigging that it was all Eden Studios again until I looked at the adverts in the back of the book. Then, we relocated back this side of the country, Debs taking a new and different job in graphic design, and I looked around desperate for work. I was sat at home while Debs was working, with no comics business and nothing to do except look for a job, when I thought about Eden Studios and my old dream of writing roleplaying games. 

I didn’t have a gaming group, but I was still buying games. I read rulebooks like there was no tomorrow, but Unisystem just seemed to be what I wanted from a game system. I thought I’d drop the guys at Eden a line to see if they were looking for writers, reminding them who I was, how I’d talked to them before about comics and stuff. 

All Flesh Must Be Eaten (2nd Edition)

Rather than the expected response of “Thanks, but no thanks,” they suggested that I wrote something for them to prove I could write a game book, show that I knew the system, and to give them an idea of my writing style (if I even have one). I saw this as a “Hell yes!” and promptly started work on writing my first book for Eden.

I don’t think they were really expecting a supplement – I think they were just expecting a few thousand words, but I just didn’t know how to take a hint. I wrote a supplement for All Flesh Must Be Eaten that allowed you to play the game as survival horror, but without the zombies – to take the game out of the zombie genre, and into the realm of the slasher movie, under the working title of "Summercamp Stalkers and Unstoppable Evil". 

Rightly so, it wouldn’t see print. A lot of it represented rules from WitchCraft for ghosts and spirits, and writing a rules supplement for a game about zombies that didn’t have zombies in it was about as stupid as writing a supplement for Star Wars that was about being clerical workers on the Death Star doing mundane work and never getting involved in any fighting. But, I liked slasher films, and thought it would be interesting to have some of the zombie traits applied to a single enemy, and create a few more.

It meant that you could basically run Friday 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or even Scream, as adventures. I’d even worked out how to do Phantasm (one of my faves), but the problem was that the players needed to be “in on the fun” and willing to split up, and do stupid things. And above all, they should not get too annoyed when their character is killed off half way through the adventure. This is why I added the spirit rules from WitchCraft so even dead characters could try to assist in a “use the Force” way when there were very few player characters left alive. Probably would work as convention games, when the max length of the game would be about an hour, but a whole evening spent sitting around after your character went and investigated the noise in the basement? Not fun for that player.

Terra Primate Core Rulebook

There was a scenario in the book too, set in an old cinema based on the creepy and abandoned bits of the Odeon where I used to work, as a cursed film inspired a supernatural killer to attack the few people invited to an exclusive screening. 

You never know, something may come of it one day. Maybe I’ll strip it down to a 32 page PDF as a freebie or something. But, it proved to Eden that I could write, and before you know it I was asked to work on their new single book RPG – Terra Primate.

--

Conspiracy X 2nd Edition

DW:AITAS 2nd Ed

The rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve helped out on more Eden titles than I can remember, before finally returning to that game that really got me back into game writing – Conspiracy X. And, since then, I’ve gone on to write for other people and design and develop the game system (and write a lot of the core book) for the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG for Cubicle 7.

Which kinda brings me up to date. As I'm writing for these companies, I'm not going to go into any great detail - you don't want to know all the secrets of the universe do you? However, it won't be my final "Roll Your Own Life" retrospective, I've plenty of gaps to fill in and I'll look at specific classic games from my youth as well as my first convention experiences and more.

Anyway, I shouldn't be writing this! I've a game to write! 

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

What's so WILD about it? (part 2)

I'd been having some problems writing WILD, my RPG of dreamsharing. I have the system, I know how to write the slightly different take on character generation, and I had the way the game works written, but I'd come to a grinding halt when it came to the second chapter. The Setting.

I knew what I wanted for the setting, and the events that created the dreamshare device that is used in the game (after all, that was all written as a short novel for NaNoWriMo last year). It was really how to put the information across to the players of the game.

The world isn't so different to begin with. Think Inception.

Still from Inception (c) Warner Bros

The dreamshare device was created by a big tech company whose "Steve Jobs / Bill Gates" had a family tragedy that lead to the device's creation.

I had a couple of ways of approaching it. I could do a normal history, starting with the beginning of dream research, through Freud and Jung, to the discovery of REM sleep, adding in fictionalised bits about Soviet psi-research during the Cold War, how the tech went onto the black market, and so on.

Or, I could do it as a journal of the device's creation, presenting chunks of the fiction I'd written before from his point of view. But that lead to another problem - the guy was the designer of so much new tech, developer of computer Apps, that having him write a physical journal with notes and drawings would be tricky.

I was so hung up with this chapter, I'd come to a grinding halt. Stupid, I know...

But last week, I had an epiphany. A moment of clarity. I suddenly knew how to do chapter two. It just needed to introduce the players to the concept of dreamshare and how the tech worked. The history behind it can be revealed later for the GM.

And that was it. I was writing again. The chapter is done in its new style. Neither normal history or fictionalised fluff. It's something very different... that's all I can say.

Now, I'm back on Chapter Three. The character generation chapter. It's about half done, so I'd best get on with it while I'm on a roll.

Proper blogpost to come soon!!!

Expecto Extremis

Well, it's been a while since my last post - the last three weeks have been intense to say the least...

Mid-April marks not only my birthday, but also my wife's birthday and our wedding anniversary, so we always try to get a week off together to celebrate. This year was no exception, and we did lots of cool stuff...

On my birthday we went to see Trance, the most recent film by Danny Boyle. I must admit, I'm not a huge Boyle fan, but the trailer intrigued me and the talk of it being the new Inception really made me keen to see it.

We were not disappointed. It's one of those movies that (a) you really want to watch again to see the first half knowing what happens at the end, and (b) you can't really talk about without spoiling the whole film. But, you get the gist of it from the trailer. James McAvoy's character helps Vincent Cassel's gang to steal a painting, suffers a head injury and can't remember where he's hidden the painting. They hire a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) to help him remember, but there's always going to be more to it than that. His memories have been altered, and we recap events as he slowly uncovers what actually happened, each time filling more and more detail.

It was an excellent movie, and I'd highly recommend seeing it if you get chance. We'll certainly be picking up the BluRay when it comes out. The soundtrack is fantastic too, an excellent bit of background music to write to!

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The huge model of Hogwarts at the WB Studio Tour

To celebrate my wife's birthday (and our wedding anniversary) we did what all dedicated Harry Potter fans should do - we went to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour at Leavesden. The actual studios where they filmed the Harry Potter movies have been turned into an exhibition where you can walk around the sets, see the actual props from the movies, and experience the movie magic first-hand.

From the amazing entry to the Great Hall in Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, through the massive studio tour, to the vast and dangerous shop, the whole experience is absolutely amazing. They tell you on the website that you can expect the tour to last about three hours, but after five and a half hours of looking around we still felt like we could have spent longer.

Okay, so it helps if you're massive Harry Potter fans like we are (I must admit, I thought more people would have dressed up for it, but my wife and our friend Alix seemed to be the only ones in Hogwarts school uniform on the day) but I honestly can't recommend the experience enough.

Me about to go into the Headmaster's Office.

Debs (left) and Alix (right) at Honeydukes!

Diagon Alley! So amazing!

The model of Hogwarts. Those are people in the front! It's HUGE!

When we finally left, we all decided we had to go back. We're already planning a return trip it was THAT cool. 

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The day after that excitement, we returned to London to attend the preview screening of Iron Man 3 at the Odeon Leicester Square. The preview screening was introduced by the writer/director (Shane Black) and co-writer (Drew Pearce), who were keen to see their two years' worth of hard work to finally get shown on the big screen in front of an eager audience. 

Of course, as expected, the film was excellent. You can read my reviews both for Forces of Geek and for the UK's SyFy Channel site. 

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And then, after all that, it was back to the day-job for a lovely 10-day stretch... 

Tomorrow is my first day off for a bit, so I'm going to sleep, recover, and then get back on the horse. I've been so slack with the writing recently, so distracted by the little things, I'm determined to get back to it. 

Anyway, I'm going to hit the sack. It's research for the game, honest!

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

Then "WALLOP!" Our Turn To Do Some Wiping Out!

As part of my birthday prezzies this week from my lovely wife, I was treated to an evening of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of The Worlds. Something I've always been intrigued with seeing as a live production but we've never managed to make it to any of the actual concerts.

Thanks to the recent trend in showing theatre productions in cinemas, last year we managed to see the rather cool production of Frankenstein with the legendary casting of both Sherlocks, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. An amazing bit of acting by all involved (when we saw it, Cumberbatch was Victor, Miller was the creature), and I'm stunned it hasn't been released on DVD yet.

After the success of seeing that in the cinema, we were intrigued to see that they were showing a recording of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds in cinemas.

Jeff Wayne conducts War of the Worlds live on stage

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I'd always loved that album. I have distinct memories of the record, dating right back to primary school. It was part of the school's routine that each class had to host and sometimes "perform" the school assemblies. I remember distinctly that we hosted one demonstrating basic first aid and after the assembly I had to fake passing out in the crowd to see if the rest of the children had taken in the information... they just really ignored me...

Anyway, I have a memory of standing in assembly and one of the other classes was putting on their presentation and while we were waiting for the talking to start and for all of the classes to arrive, they were playing The Eve of the War. I'd never heard anything like it before, and I was fascinated. I asked the others in my class what it was, and one of my friends (though I use the term lightly as he did make part of my school life miserable) identified the record as he had it.

The "Dead London" image from the LP booklet. Always held a
morbid fascination with me as a kid.

It was immediately on my birthday requests. I think it was the only thing I asked for that year, and was my main birthday present. Two glorious LPs worth of it, with a book with all of the lyrics and pages of awesome artwork. Mum didn't understand why I would want such a thing, she couldn't see why I'd want a record of someone telling me the story of War of the Worlds. Of course, the moment she heard it, she realised - it became one of her favourite albums ever.

I had a poster magazine as well. Remember those? I still have loads of poster magazines (probably worth nothing now as the posters took their turns decorating my bedroom walls) from various movies, from the first Star Wars, through Tron, Indiana Jones, and Ghostbusters... But I remember I had the second issue of the War of the Worlds poster magazine. I loved that magazine, as it had blueprints for the Fighting Machine. Typically, I took it to school one day, and it was gone.

Blueprints of the Fighting Machine from the poster magazine.

Wherever you are, I'd like it back (even though it's almost 30 years later...)

Anyway, that album was always one of my prized possessions. Not worth anything except sentimental value, I do still have that double album. I have it on CD now as well, and still listen to it. It's still fantastic.

-

The production we saw was the "Next Generation", with slightly more drums and new artists. Liam Neeson showed that even as a hologram he has immense stage presence. Jason Donovan was absolutely amazing as the Parson Nathaniel, and Ricky Wilson did a great job as the Artilleryman, recapturing part of the David Essex-ness about it while still making the role his own.

The whole stage production was rather excellent, and is due to be released on DVD/BluRay in November.

Diceni

Sunday 7th April saw a new event in Norwich aimed mostly at gamers in the region - Diceni.

Just a handful of the many gaming tables at Diceni 2013 in Norwich

Hosted at The Forum in Norwich, the event has been in planning for months with the sole purpose of spreading the word of gaming and hoping to recruit some new players to the hobbies.

From what I could see, the only downside to the event was that it took place while I was at work! Damn-it! However, there was a brief opportunity to have a look around just as the event was starting, and even just twenty minutes after opening the event was already humming with activity, gaming and excitement.

Sentinel head! And more courtesy of the Artyfakes stand!

I managed to get a few photos taken before I had to head off to work, which I've posted here, but on the whole it was an excellent first convention. Not only were there plenty of stands for traders, and tables for gaming, there were cosplayers, tanks, a Dalek and lots of other activities going on.

Lots of cool stuff from Warlord Games too!

Just have to say it's fantastic to get some gaming stuff like this going on in Norwich, and I really hope that next year Diceni returns. My only suggestions for building upon the convention would be (a) more roleplaying (but, as an RPG designer, I guess I'm a little biased), and (b) maybe aim for the Saturday a week earlier in the year... you never know, that may collide with the second International TableTop Day and Diceni would be able to tie in!

Above all, I'd just like to offer my congratulations to the team behind Diceni. A fantastic event, that should hopefully grow and grow. May there be many, many more.

Check out Diceni on Facebook here, or on their homepage, to see more pics of the event and hear about future conventions.

"They're all going to laugh at you..."

[This blog-post was originally written to feature a promotion for the remake of Stephen King's Carrie. Since the promotional videos are no longer online, these have been cut to get straight to the story of how I first started reading Stephen King, to meeting the legend himself...]

I’ve always been a big fan of Stephen King. This really does go back to my youth. In the past, before the internet and the masses of video games out there, there wasn’t really a lot to do except watch TV, go to the cinema, and in my case, play Dungeons & Dragons. I used to read, but my reading really consisted of my weekly subscription at the local newsagents to a comic (which started with Look-In, progressed onto the UK Spider-man reprints “Super Spider-man and the Titans” and then onto the comic that everyone had to read every week – 2000AD). 

When it came to books, I really didn’t read an awful lot as a kid. I used to get the novelisations of movies I’d been to see, so that I could relive the movie again and again. I could skip to the cool part, and while I was reading Lucas’ novelisation of Star Wars, I could picture the X-Wings over the surface of the Death Star, and the extra stuff about Biggs was like the deleted scenes of the Eighties…

Even then, I didn’t have much time for reading. That was until most of the gaming group vanished off to University and I found myself bored and unemployed, trying to write scenarios for Ghostbusters.

We didn’t have a great bookshop in my hometown. It used to be part corner shop, part card shop, and part bookshop all crammed into a room about the size of Harry Potter’s cupboard under the stairs. But they also sold vinyl records (yes, LPs and 12” singles) so I used to pop in there when there was something I was after, and they’d order it for me. But there was one book in there that unnerved me. It used to taunt me while the old lady that used to run the place rummaged through the delivery for whatever obscure Mike Oldfield or Jean Michel Jarre album I’d asked them to get in for me. The cover was of a drain with a pair of inhuman eyes staring out of the darkness. In the water, a lone paper boat drifted towards the void, while a red balloon floated to one side.

The book taunted me. It looked horrific. It was huge – longer than Lord of the Rings (which I’d tried to read when I was thirteen and gave up on – don’t worry, I’ve read it and loved it since, but that’s another story that involves Babylon 5). But something compelled me to get it. In the same way that the cover of Kult lured me into purchasing that game many, many years later.

That book, of course, was Stephen King’s “IT”.

I’d never read anything that long before, but there was something about the writing style that just pulled me in. It had everything I could ever imagine in a book. The lead characters – the Losers Club – appealed to me instantly, being one of those kids who wasn’t popular, suffered a little from bullying, and ended up with a group of like minded “nerds”. A group that formed bonds that would stay with us the rest of our lives. 

The villain of the piece, the IT of the title, appeared as the things these kids were afraid of. Bloody clowns. I hate clowns. What’s the point of them? And that mind-blowing ending that could never be captured on film, it just amazed me. A book that looked like a camp horror novel was far from it. It was brilliantly written, with characters you cared about. I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of them. My record buying habit was replaced as I purchased most of Stephen King’s work up to that point. I blasted through Carrie in a week, faced heartbreak and returning evil in Pet Sematary, lapped up every moment in Christine, and survived Captain Trips in The Stand.

I watched the movies as well, bought the soundtracks of a couple, but as with all things, real life gets in the way. I got a job, which lead to art college, and moving away from home.

Luckily, my future wife was a big fan of Stephen King as well, and when we both ended up working at the same huge bookstore, Ottakar’s, we rekindled our love of King’s work. We caught up with his works and devoured the titles of his second renaissance – Insomnia, and Rose Madder especially, before Debs convinced me to give The Dark Tower a try and loaned me The Gunslinger.

When Lisey’s Story was about to be published in 2006, the publishers hosted an evening talk in London in association with one of the major newspapers, and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to hear him talk in person. But as an added bonus, booksellers from around the country were invited to a private book launch in an old masonic temple behind the Strand in London the following day. We, of course, leapt at the chance.

King takes to the stage to sing with
Alabama 3. (Sorry about the
grainy photo)

The publishers of King in the UK have always been incredibly good to us, and our regular sales rep from Hodder came over to see us in the strange environment. There were complimentary drinks, nibbles and copies of the book, while Alabama 3 played on a strange stage to the rear of the building. The rep explained that Stephen King had been signing all day at some supermarket somewhere, and was exhausted and may not make much of an appearance, but he insisted that he’d try to get us to meet the man himself somehow. Then to make the evening even more surreal, Stephen King appeared in the venue, and took to the stage, joining Alabama 3 and singing along to a couple of songs. 

He apologised that he was worn out from a gruelling signing session and couldn’t stay, but the ever-wonderful rep from Hodder ushered us to where King would be exiting the building for the briefest of encounters. 

It’s at those moments that you realise that you don’t really know what to say.

What can you say to him? Do you ask how he is? Ask how he’s enjoying the UK? Something banal like that?

Or do you explain to him that he is really the reason I started reading books for pleasure? Without picking up that copy of IT I may never have ended up working in a bookstore (I still cite working for Ottakar’s as being one of the best “day job” experiences of my life).

The rep stopped King and his entourage briefly as they were making their way out of the building, and said that he just wanted him to meet some of the booksellers from Ottakar’s who were selling his books so enthusiastically. Stephen King stopped, and despite looking exhausted by the insanely long day he’d had, he shook our hands and said hello. 

Words were lost completely. It was as if I’d lost all power to communicate. I may have just made a meeping noise, but that’s about all I remember. Debs managed to thank him for all the hours of enjoyment we’d had from his books, though she always cringes at the thought as she opened her one line to Stephen King by calling him “dude”. 

I really don’t see that as a bad thing. He is a dude. The dude. He’s as Dude as Lebowski. He’s the grand dude of horror and suspense.

I like to think that in that brief moment, before he was whisked away (with the chocolate that Debs gave him) to rest and recover before yet another intense signing period, that just the smallest amount of particles from the hand of Stephen King himself remained on our shaken hands. And that somewhere, hidden at an atomic level, the smallest part of King’s writing ability has transferred itself to me. If it has, it is laying dormant somewhere, waiting to be activated, because I’m still churning out the same old crap as I ever was.

Blimey.

That was a bit more than I was expecting. Amazing how many memories just one trailer can conjure up. I guess, that’s the power of Stephen King. More power to you, dude.

PITCH: The Beatles RPG

The Beatles Roleplaying Game

Adventures with the Fab Four

Picture yourself on a boat on a river…

The music was just the beginning. The biggest band in the world may be best recognised for their influence on the world of music, but their adventures in between recording albums was just as legendary. Now you can experience their crazy adventures in The Beatles Roleplaying Game.

From their secret base, cunningly disguised as four terraced houses, the Fab Four embark on many madcap adventures around the world, avoiding packs of screaming girls and murderous cultists, while travelling to other lands and dimensions in their reality bending Yellow Submarine.

Within its pages you’ll find:

• A completely new game system (FAB) which allows you to do anything within the vast scope of Beatles Roleplaying incorporating four special FAB dice – with images of John, Paul, George and Ringo on the 6’s. Roll a Beatle and get additional bonuses! 
• Save the world by breaking into song. New game rules allow the power of music to change the outcome of encounters, and full advice (and a backing CD) will allow players to sing their way out of situations with additional effects for convincing harmonies!
• Three distinct eras of play to get you started – A Hard Days Night, Help! and Yellow Submarine. Each with in depth locations from Liverpool to Pepperland, and a host of NPCs from insane death cultists, Paul’s Granddad (he’s very clean), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to the Blue Meanies. 
• Full colour character sheets for the Fab Four, with the option for a fifth player on later campaigns. 
• Complete introductory adventure – Magical Mystery Tour.

Available in two versions (White on Black, and limited Black on White).

344page Hardcover
Written and Designed by: David F Chapman
For four Fab players and one Manager. 


This is, of course, not a real game. But, there's a level of hope there. While there is no RPG for The Beatles, and the logistics and costs of securing the rights for the Fab Four would mean such an RPG would be almost impossible (small independent RPG publisher approaches the biggest band in history and says "Hey, I'd like to make a little RPG about the band, based on the madcap adventures seen in the awesome films like Help! and Yellow Submarine"... not really much of a chance there), there's always that dream isn't there.

Yes, I think "The Beatles RPG" could work. Sure you'd be limited to a maximum of four players and a GM (Manager), but the scope of the game would be immense. Just watch Help! and imagine how insane an RPG would be in that universe. Then watch Yellow Submarine and tell me it wouldn't work. Or the opening cinematic to The Beatles: Rock Band and maybe some of the episodes of the old animated series from the sixties, and imagine the possibilities. 

It'd be fab.

Almost impossible, but fab.

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!