I Was Interviewed at Appendix N Happy Meal

This Dracula nonsense started really early

I was interviewed over at Appendix N Happy Meal, check it out if you want to know all about my misspent youth.

I Was Interviewed by a Ghoul!

Click here to read The Dark Mysteries of Professor Jack, an interview with yours truly by the lovely Mlle. Ghoul. I natter on about the Gothic, horror movies, mix tapes, and role-playing games, as I generally. Come and face the dire consequences of my world-shattering wisdom!








Speaking of Mlle. Ghoul, the Occult Activity book that she and Becky Munich put together (and which I contributed to) got featured on io9! Check it out. Sadly, the book is already sold out.

To speak again of the Ghoul, take a look at this fashionable ensemble she created inspired by my Krevborna campaign setting. It's not every game world that gets a haute couture nod.

An Interview with Sean Bircher

Regency vampires, steampunk in Asia, duet rpgs...let's ask Sean Bircher about it. Also check out his blog, Wine & Savages.

Q: I know you mostly as a Savage Worlds guy. What is it about that system that keeps you coming back for more?

Savage Worlds gives me everything I need to run games the way I like to run them -- which is with a minimum of preparation.

We all know the most interesting opponents are NPCs, not monsters. Dragons are cool, but they're not nearly as challenging as an evil wizard or corrupt nobleman. I've played a lot of D&D 5e recently. I love that system, but even with the new official rules saying NPCs can be designed as monsters instead of obeying character class rules, it still takes too much work to build an NPC from scratch (especially if you're worrying about Challenge Rating).

Savage Worlds was designed for experienced gamers with limited amounts of time, so it throws some conventional game design concepts out the window. NPCs in Savage Worlds are deliberately not built using the same character construction and advancement rules used for player characters. The limited granularity of the d4 to d12 range in attributes and skills and the relatively compact list of Edges and Powers (equivalent to D&D's feats and spells) means that I can improvise an NPC's stats in moments. And it doesn't even break the system because Savage Worlds is so fast and loose to begin with.

It took me half an hour to build an oathbreaker paladin for my wife's fey knight to fight in 5e. I could have improvised him on the spot in Savage Worlds.

Q: Speaking of Savage Worlds: out of all the rpgs I'm interested in, Savage Worlds has, by far, the nicest online community I've encountered. That said, the most fractious I've seen that community get has been over the recent changes to how the Shaken condition works. I'm curious, which do you prefer: the new or older way of handling Shaken characters? Why?

Funny enough, all that time playing D&D 5e means I haven't really seen the new Shaken rules in action. It seems like such a minor change -- a Shaken character can now shake off the Shaken condition and still act on its turn if it scores a single success on a Spirit roll instead of having to get a success and raise -- but it's a huge change to a system with so little granularity.

The change certainly makes fighting vampires harder. An attack that isn't one of their weaknesses (like holy water or a stake in the heart) can only Shake a vampire. Under the old rules, a group of vampire hunters could hope to keep an undead opponent from attacking back by hammering it with melee attacks until somebody got in a decapitating blow or stab to the heart; chances were good that the vampire would succeed on its Spirit roll but not so good that it would get a raise. The new rules give the vampire a much, much better chance of fighting back every round.

Which I guess means I like the new rules better. 

Q: There are quite a few rpg adventures or settings that are riffs on either the Early Modern or Victorian periods, but on your blog you've posted some very compelling gaming ideas centered on the Regency period. What is it about that era that interests you, what do you see as gameable about it, and why is there so little of it in gaming right now?

The Regency is such an odd time period. It's so easy to think of it as mannered and staid if all you know is Pride and Prejudice, but it was a time of social upheaval and rapid modernization. Jane Austen's career is itself a manifestation of that upheaval; it was suddenly possible for a novelist to make a career out of writing about the middle class and middle class values instead of the nobility. Throw in the wild behavior of the Romantic poets, working class protests like the Luddites, and Napoleon freakin' Bonaparte and you've got as fascinating an era as mankind has ever experienced. Heck, it's when Frankenstein was written!

The most gameable element -- if you're going to ignore the Napoleonic Wars -- is probably the tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The latter half of the 18th century was all about how science and rationality would pave the way to a better future, and instead Britain lost the American colonies and the French aristocracy lost their heads. Society as a whole was freaked out and then the king went mad and the worst monarch ever took over. In response, a bunch of young punks dropped out of society and started doing drugs and having sex and that freaked people out even more. The tragedy and weirdness -- the madness -- that surrounded the Romantics is a through line to a great horror setting.

Or you could go the opposite route and just play Regency romance games with your significant other.

It's probably those Regency romances (which I personally enjoy very much) that turn off most gamers. They misread Jane Austen -- seeing only fancy costumes and repressed feelings -- and don't appreciate the social and economic turmoil that underlies her heroines' lives. They don't dig deeper and read about the Prince Regent's decadence; they don't associate the Vila Diodati with the same time period as Sense and Sensibility.

Fantasy and horror fiction about the Regency has been on the rise. There's satirical works like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and lighthearted fare like Teresa Medeiros' The Vampire Who Loved Me, but there's also deeper, darker books like David Liss' The Twelfth Enchantment and (of course) Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Mary Robinette Kowal has her alternate history Glamourist Histories series and Galen Beckett has his fantasy world Mrs. Quent series. There's a lot to draw on if you know where to look. With Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on the BBC and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies finally coming to theaters, I think we can expect we'll see more Regency-inspired gaming in the next two years. 

Q: Speaking of eras that don't get enough love, I'm really looking forward to seeing more The King is Dead stuff from you. Can you give us a brief sales pitch on what that is all about? What are the key elements I should tell my players about to get them to demand that I run it for them?

The King is Dead is about revolution in a Gothic 18th century that never was. A literally bloodsucking oligarchy rules Malleus -- an island nation on the verge of astonishing advances in science and learning -- and humankind is finally rising up to overthrow its oppressors. Throw Black Sails, Outlander, and Turn into a blender with Brotherhood of the Wolf and Hammer's Karnstein Trilogy and you've got The King is Dead.

Characters in The King is Dead are the desperate and disenfranchised, uniting together to take down foes more powerful than any of them alone. Everyone plays a member of one of several secret societies sworn to destroy the vampires. Some societies are parallels to real-life societies like the Bavarian Illuminati and the Scottish Jacobites, while others are crazy concepts like the Captain Kronos-like vampire hunters of the Bloodstained Blade or the Wold Newton-inspired mutants of the Starlight Children. These societies offer material benefits in the guerrilla campaign to destroy the aristocracy like lending characters money, collaborating on scientific research, and even fielding armies. As your character advances, you also get to increase the power and influence of your secret society -- which in turns helps shape the future of Malleus

The opposition is horrifying. The vampires and their allies run the gamut from Renfield-like sycophants to daywalking Dhampirs to Nosferatu-like horrid corpses. The most powerful are protean monsters inspired by the hyperviolence of Kohta Hirano's Hellsing. Werewolves and liches lurk in the wilderness, uneasy allies or enemies to the heroes. The grim, sublime landscape of Malleus itself seems to battle you. There's even a mechanic for Dark Secrets that can turn allies into enemies with the draw of a card.

The King is Dead is distilled Gothic madness: decadence, secrets, revolt against society, and vampires.

Q: You do quite a bit of “duet gaming” with your wife, Robin. Can you explain what that is, as well as any considerations that go into prepping that kind of game as opposed to the more traditional “gaming group” style of play?

Duet gaming is one player and one GM. “Duet gaming” is a term I picked up from RPGnet’s Duets column (which I’ve never finished reading). Functionally, it means the same as what some people call “single-player games” or “solo play,” but implicitly “duet gaming” suggests a closer relationship – either personally or collaboratively – between the player and GM. This might take the form of switching player/GM roles, collaborative worldbuilding, or just asking the player what she’d like to have happen next in the campaign.

With Robin and me, I quite simply do not prep. I tried that during our first few years and it never worked. I’d plot out sweeping, epic story arcs and grand romances, but all of that planning killed the momentum. It just felt forced and dry; because we knew what was supposed to happen, it made getting there dull. Improvisation keeps me guessing just as much as she does; it keeps the passion alive.

For example, I decided that unusually foolhardy orc raiding parties were attacking the elves of the Moonwood. I had no idea why they were doing that, but as Robin’s character talked things through with some NPCs, three options became apparent: it was just a coincidence, the orcs were testing the elves’ defenses for King Obould of Dark Arrow Keep, or the orcs were testing the elves’ defenses in defiance of King Obould. When Robin’s fey knight paladin arrived King Obould’s court as an ambassador to the orc-king, it quickly became apparent to me from playing Obould that these orcs were not his. Since a coincidence would be boring, this means some new foe is challenging both the elves and the orcs. I’m pretty sure this challenger is going to be a hobgoblin war leader, but he might turn out to be working for a mind flayer by the time we get to him.

Also, it turned out Obould had a sternly handsome, Worf-like son. Who knew?

This approach would not necessarily be needed for people who do not see each other every night, who don’t spend an average of two hours a night, four days of the week playing elfgames. One of the joys I feel when I run multi-player games is surprise at the unpredictable choices gaming groups bring to the table. You never know who is going to make the next horrible decision or awesome joke when you’ve got a table of four or five people together, but it’s easy to fall into a rut if it’s just the two of you. Literally not knowing what’s happening next keeps things lively for us.

Overall, the need to improvise makes Savage Worlds a great system for duets because – as I mentioned – I can make a new NPC in moments. We’ve actually been playing D&D 5e together for the last few months, though; it’s been a bit of a challenge because NPCs are harder to build, but the variety of antagonists available in the Monster Manual makes up for some of that. Plus, I just really want to have a campaign last until 20th level for once.

Q: You're also involved in the Steamscapes project as a writer on Steamscapes Asia. What are your top five steampunk influences, as well as the non-steampunk influences that inspired your work on Steamscapes Asia?

Eric Simon hired me much, much more for my familiarity with Japan than for my steampunk bona fides, but I think I can scrabble together at least five steampunk influences.

1) The top influence was certainly the original Steamscapes: North America, which fired my imagination by presenting an entire steampunk world built up from actual history – and engaging with that history, instead of just using it as a backdrop for the usual Victorian scientific romances.

2) My personal favorite steampunk work is the anime/video game franchise Sakura Taisen (AKA Sakura Wars), the story of an all-girl musical revue that also fights demons by piloting clunky-cute steam-powered mecha. I actually had to deliberately ignore Sakura Taisen as much as possible while writing my section of Steamscapes because Eric (who is also a Sakura Taisen fan) didn’t want mecha.

3) After that comes the first two The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. I gave up on Alan Moore during the “Century” arc, but the first two mini-series were awesome.

4) Jess Nevins’ Fantastic Victoriana, the ultimate guide to all the stuff everybody steals.

5) Screw it. I’m going to count George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman Papers. No, they’re not actually steampunk. Yes, they’re about a real bastard of a protagonist. Yes, Fraser himself became a bigger and bigger bastard as he aged. None of that changes the fact that The Flashman Papers taught me more about the Victorian globe than anything else I’ve ever read.

As for my non-steampunk influences, those are much easier to elucidate. I’m so lucky that I was hired to write about Japan because I was able to read a lot of manga and watch a lot of anime as legitimate research for the project. I read a lot of actual history books, but nothing can give you a better idea of what people feel about their own history than devouring their pop culture. There were a lot of series that I either didn’t finish (like Intrigue in the Bakumatsu) or maybe a single episode contributed an idea (such as Lupin III), but the following are the ones that contributed most to themes and tone.

1) Rurouni Kenshin was my biggest influence. Steamscapes might eschew wuxia-like magical martial arts, but the fact that Rurouni Kenshin is set only a few years later than Steamscapes’ timeline and that it’s chockablock full of references to genuine historical figures made it an invaluable window into how the Japanese perceive the Meiji Restoration. There are weird bits of history -- like the attempted purge of Buddhism by the Meiji government – that I wouldn’t know about if it wasn’t for Rurouni Kenshin.

2) Oh! Edo Rocket might actually count as steampunk, since it’s about a bunch of late Tokugawa peasants who build a fireworks-powered rocket to the moon, but it’s probably too ludicrously anachronistic. It’s another case of using pop culture to inform my research; Oh! Edo Rocket taught me about the malaise the common people felt in the final years of the shogunate.

3) Yojimbo. It’s easy to forget that this film takes place in the late Tokugawa period – if you don’t remember that one of the villains is carrying a revolver. One of my contributions to the geography of Steamscapes: Asia is the Republic of Ezo, an independent Hokkaido that I like to think of as “Kurosawa Land.”

4) Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex might seem completely off-topic, but Steamscapes concerns itself with more typically cyberpunk fare like transhumanism. Puls, when I needed to prove that the Japanese would indeed build robot geisha, I got to just point to the first episode of GiTS: SAC.
5) The biggest contribution that wasn’t manga or anime was the pop group Wagakki Band. They combine rock bass, guitar, and drums with traditional kodo drums, koto, shakuhachi, shamisen, and vocals into a beautifully unique sound. They’re probably my favorite active musical act today, and the video for “Senbonzakura” perfectly captures my vision of the Steamscapes aesthetic.

Q: What's next for Sean Bircher?

Four-in-Hand Games is publishing The King is Dead as a full Savage Worlds setting book next summer, so that means I have to write it. Thankfully, a good third of the book is written already.

I expect there will be a Kickstarter, but we’re going to keep the goals really humble. I hope to be able to do the art using original photography and stock photos – the concept is to make the book look like a licensed game for movie or TV series that doesn’t exist – but I’ll need some cash to pay illustrators if that approach fails.

I plan to organize some playtests in person and online. I’ll definitely be taking The King is Dead to all the local gaming conventions – and that means PAX South and Chupacabracon, so hopefully we’ll get some decent exposure.

I have some upcoming articles for Savage Insider (including a gazetteer for Steamscapes: Asia’s version of the Yoshiwara), but after that I’ll be cutting back on external commitments to concentrate on The King is Dead and the blog. (Unless EN5ider commissions my absurd “Manos:” The Hands of Fate-as-a-D&D-module idea for their Halloween issue.)

Down the line, I’d like to experiment with the AGE System. I talked to Chris Pramas at Gen Con and he said they plan to have a license modeled on the one for Savage Worlds, so it might prove a fun system for future projects (or a conversion of The King is Dead). I have an idea for a playful, sexy swashbuckling setting called Altellus and I’m not sure what system would be best for it. It’s a spiritual successor to the classic Lace & Steel RPG, mixing Greco-Roman half-humans with a vaguely 16th century aesthetic. I expect it might push the boundaries of Savage Worlds’ self-imposed PG-13 content restrictions, and I’m hoping the AGE System (or even D&D 5e!) might be a bit more open to a little cheesecake and beefcake.

The Man with the Wizard Van: An Interview with Wayne Snyder

My theory is that we just don't pay attention to the regular gamer and what he or she has to say about their hobby. I don't remember when or where I first started chatting with Wayne Snyder, but man, this is a guy that just seems to be in it for the fun. He's got it right.

Q: I feel bad for the rest of the gaming world because I own the best piece of art to come out of the DIY gaming scene: the picture you drew for the cover of Devilmount. Can you give us a bit of your background in art? How did you get started and what inspires your work?

I grew up drawing all the time. There was a lot of down time as a kid. Time spent waiting around while my mother took care of something or other. I remember drawing chainsaw armed robots on the back of the church program during Sunday services, using the back of a hymnal as a drawing board. I found my way to D&D the summer I turned 9 and it has been on my mind ever since. Fantasy art has filled my life. As a lad I learned a lot from Wormy comics in the back of Dragon mags. I spent long hours just staring at the illustrations in my game books. There is no separation for me between game and art. If a game doesn’t have engaging art, I won’t play it no matter how great the system is. Back in the 80s you didn’t have 40 reviews of a game available even before it came out. You walked into Walden Books once a month to see what was up and if a new book was on the shelf you took it down and flipped through it. You didn’t really have time to read and understand the core rules. I just looked at the pictures and made my decision based almost solely on the art, same with comics. Early on the 80s TSR art department became my pantheon of saints. I wanted to be Larry Elmore. Later it was Savage Sword of Conan comics and the European artists in Heavy Metal mixed with the grim dark of newly discovered Rogue Trader and Warhammer Fantasy. I took all the art classes available in high school and even took some of them twice and then trucked off to art school after that. But I had no idea what I was doing. I went to a really theory heavy fine arts program and they didn’t have much to say about my bugbears and castles. I was really naïve. I didn’t know enough to transfer to a different school, I just buckled down and made a bunch of conceptual art and graduated in 4 years with a BFA and a professional grade drinking habit and trucked off to the south with no greater aspirations than to sit on a porch and drink all the PBR.  I didn’t make much art for a long time. It wasn’t until I found G+ in 2012 that I really started producing again. That cover for Devilmount is one of the first pieces I had made in a really long time. The G+ rpg community is so inspiring, it really moved me to get back on the horse and reclaim a lost skill I really enjoy employing. I still make it my business to know all about fantasy artists and their bodies of work. It’s a hobby unto itself. I usually know more about the person who painted an rpg book cover than I do about the game itself. 

  

Q: You're a fan of Dungeon Crawl Classics. What is it about that particular fantasy rpg that drew you in initially, and what about it keeps you interested in it?

When I first stepped on the G+ scene back in 2012 I didn’t know anything about DCC. I believe it was Edgar Johnson who first posted an invite to the Metal Gods game. His blurb was brilliant and totally heavy metal. It sounded like everything I ever wanted in a game. I realized I had to play in that game. I had never played online and I was a bit worried but that went out the window five minutes in. I played DCC online for six months before I got around to buying the rulebook. The game is intuitive to me after years and years of D&D. DCC has a lot of things going on, but they don’t require constant book reference ruining the immersion and slowing down the action. The most entertaining part of any RPG is the people you play with, the smart, funny, clever fuckers, who make it all go round. DCC gives you room to play. It offers a swift coherent frame work to keep things rolling along, but it is an open field of player driven fun times beyond that. Now it takes a certain clever brand of person to really get on with a system like this. DCC has removed the rewards of power gaming and math hammering, which I’ve seen bloat some other games down, and through that, has created a self-selecting community of true fun seekers. Folks who want to min-max or “win D&D” don’t seem to want to play this game. It isn’t balanced, in fact it’s often completely haywire and that’s why I love it.  This play style has aggregated a super creative community (see all the zines) and you’ll rarely meet a player who you wouldn’t love to have back to the table. The amount of awesome new friends I’ve made in the last three years because of DCC is incredible and something I never would have expected to occur in my adult life.

Q: You're part of the triumvirate behind the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad 'zine. What's the hardest part of publishing a gaming 'zine? What's the most rewarding part?

I think the hardest part is laying out each issue, making it fit together coherently, and the business end of it, the production of physical copies and shipping logistics and internet store fronts. But Adam Muszkiewicz is a hero and he does all that unpleasantness for us. So for me the biggest hurdle is everyday life. Just having enough gusto left to draw or even come up with good ideas after a full day of landscaping work is getting harder and harder as age catches up with me. The most rewarding thing is having people enjoy the fruits of our labors. The zine makes people happy, and that makes me happy.

Q: Speaking of metal, I always associate you with crushing riffs. What are the last three albums that blew your mind? How does metal intersect with your love of gaming?

Satan Worshipping Doom by Bongripper is still making ripples in my brain juice with its all instrumental brutal crushing doom. Acid Mothers Temple & The Cosmic Inferno - Anthem of the Space is a real experience. I recently got to see them live and couldn’t get the smile off my face for a week. Ancient Japanese space hippies know where it’s at. I don’t think they have ever played the same song twice and that is perfect. Estron by Slomatics is an album I just can’t get enough of. It is a concept album, really a single 40 minute song. It sounds like the things Lovecraft talks about when he uses the term cyclopean. It would make a good soundtrack to the Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath motion picture.

Metal intersects with every aspect of my life. Metal is a lifestyle for me. It inspires my art and my gaming. It keeps me on point while I’m fighting dirt for a living. Like most good sci-fi and fantasy novels, there is a lot of philosophical truths under all the genre trappings, the skulls, and chains, and fire. Metal is my anthem for whatever I’m about at the time.

Q: You recently posted about how old-school miniatures, especially John Blanche's stuff, continues to move you. What is it about that style that speaks to you, and what advice would you give someone interesting in getting into the minis hobby?

John Blanche may be the longest working art director on any single gaming IP. He has been crafting the dual worlds of the gothic retro-future Warhammer 40k and the sodden moss shrouded medieval heap that is Warhammer Fantasy almost as long as I’ve been alive. It is in his blood. It is made of his blood. He crafts miniatures the same way he crafts his artworks. He builds them from the ground up, creates a story, and defines a mood. He has always been a kit basher and DIY miniature modeler, taking parts from any number of model kits and piecing them together to form something completely new. His mini painting style is reflective of his 2D works. He splashes on paint and inks, working over the surfaces in layers of colors and textures, letting the materials do the work for him. It’s grimy and corroded, stained, patinaed and beautiful. I’ve fallen in love with his miniature creations and the works of an ever growing group of artists who see his work as inspiration for their own. They work in the medium of tiny plastic, metal, or resin figures, where each miniature is a work of art in its own right. It is a far stretch from batch painting 100 space ork boyz to get them on the table by next Saturday. It’s the art in it, making it personal, which keeps me coming back, same as the DIY table top game scene.

My advice, to someone just stepping into the miniatures hobby, is start slow. Check out some skirmish games. Buy two or three minis at a time and work on them until they are done. See how long it takes you to do the work before you buy 200 of them. Having boxes and boxes of unpainted miniatures you’ll probably never have time to assemble and paint can be kind of depressing and you can easily tie up a hefty amount of cash that way. But if you’re trying to play some sort of huge wargame with 100s of little dudes on the table, all I can say is good luck with that.

Q: If you could command the DIY gaming braintrust to create one product for your use, what would you demand? 

Wow… I have trouble keeping up with the flood of great stuff people are putting out already. Something I would find useful would be a book of dungeon puzzles of varying difficulties, like a ZORK reference book.

Q: What's next for Wayne Snyder?

I’m working on a third issue of Dark Ruins, a mini adventure zine I’ve been putting out. I’m signed up to write and illustrate five monsters for Mike Evans' Hubris kickstarter, coming soon. I’ve got Metal Gods #4 in the works and some other illustration work for some indie folks. I’m really looking forward to being able to climb into the wizard van I’ve been working on and set off on a strange and exciting odyssey across the USA, meeting up with awesome gaming folks, playing games, do some camping and really make the most of this crazy hobby we all love.

Master of the Hill Cantons: An Interview with Chris Kutalik

When I first joined Google+, everybody over there seemed to be talking about how cool Chris Kutalik's Hill Cantons campaign was. Haven't heard of it? Well, here's a quick primer on what you've been missing out on. Over the years, Chris has not only kept up with his blog, he's also put out quality gaming materials such as By This Axe, Slumbering Ursine Dunes, and Fever-Dreaming Marlinko -- he's truly a model of self-publishing efficiency without any of the crowd-funding goldrush flim-flam.

Q: The Hill Cantons is one of the best-regarded and long-running campaigns to come out of the old-school blog scene. One thing I've always wondered about the setting: how to you balance the folkloric inspirations in it (Slavic myth) with the more humorous aspects (pantsless barbarians, Church of the Blood Jesus, etc.)?

It's funny and a bit sad, I suppose. When I launched the Hill Cantons campaign in 2008 it was like just most any leisure thing you do as an adult: something I thought this would be fun distraction for a few months as I get through some big life changes. The blog started as something totally modest, a player-info clearinghouse for house rules, play reports and the like.

I don't think I had any pretensions other than I want the game to be a radically-plotless West Marches-like sandbox and the setting background to be a fantasy mirror of Bohemia during the insanity of the Hussite Wars mixed in with heavy dollops of Jack Vance absurdity and tone, Moorcock Eternal Champion-era fever dreaminess and J. Eric Holmes's anarchic gonzo. Which of course is a totally pretentious and contradictory, unsustainable trainwreck of an idea.

The West Marches “no town adventures and no overarching plots” was the first casualty to actual play and years of playing just starting growing more and more layers over the tiny 30-by-30 mile sandbox that was the starting core. One of the first of those layers was adding pre-Christian Slavic mythic elements (which filled in a lot more as the play groups hit mythic wilderness areas like the Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Feral Shore). It just hits some satisfying nerve in me.

Leaving aside the balls-out gonzo, elfgame elements, much of the comedy comes straight out of the two strands in Czech humor/culture that are lodged some deep, cracked place in my own psyche: a dark, dry gallows humor (the kind of culture that produces one-liners like “an optimist is someone who thinks things can't get worse”) and the slightly absurd and satirical school that produced such things as Hasek's Good Corporal Svejk or Capek's War with the Newts. (Not that I claim to be doing anything like their work when running or writing about D&D ferchrissakes, just nodding at their influence.)

Q: In what ways has the Hill Cantons setting changed over the course of the campaign due to the players' actions? Is there any advice you'd give to a fellow DM about how to make their world responsive to the characters over the long haul?

It was completely transformed by their actions as I kind of hint at above.

As a kid or teen I just played with the people around me: my brother, close friends and camp mates. These days I have been super lucky (and intentional) about getting players into the game who are pretty dynamic and thoughtful people. It's a waste to not try and build an environment that gives them free rein.

At one point the players decided to just up and leave the campaign area in the Hill Cantons proper and really never came back. They moved their center of activity to a half-ruined city a couple hundred miles away and I had to scramble to build almost build a whole other campaign--and they did another big move to a colony-building effort in the Feral Shore two years back. I love that kind of player-driven surprise and challenge.

That last part is a big question and I have to admit that I am kind of stumped for a concise answer. One of the pillars to a long-running campaign with high player buy-in is being very deliberate and regular in soliciting honest feedback (and actively listening to that feedback). A second I believe is finding a sweet spot in between having enough material fleshed out to give players options but not so much detail that you waste material. Practice just-in-time production.

Also learn to let go of your own precious ideas, NPCs, sites whatever that just don't get picked up by the players. While I think it's more than fine to recycle/reskin unused material, don't oversweat it if something doesn't stick. Like say a big underwater ruined city, cough, cough. Not that I am bitter.

Q: Aside from Hill Cantons, I think of you as a guy who makes time for the occasional game of Traveller. Is there something about Traveller that scratches a gaming itch that your usual D&D can't reach, aside from the obvious change of genre?

Traveller has always been my “second game.” Technically, it's the first rpg product I ever picked up. I remember buying a model kit for a tank around 1979 and reading through 1001 Characters which is just this collection of hexametric numbers for character stats, strange skill notations and military rank. It seemed so esoteric, so otherworldly. I played an ungodly amount of it starting a few months after playing rpgs (good old Holmes Basic).

It's funny sticking with it now as an adult because most of the Campbellian hard-SF buzzcut books that influenced it I am just not a big fan of. I do however still love the shit out of the lifepath character generation, tramp steamer/heist mode of play and the softer, aesthetic overtones of say the Terran Trade Authority books and other 1970s SF art which filled in the gaps of those art-free little black books back in the day. So it stays in my rotation. 

Q: One thing you're known for is asking your Google+ circles what they've been reading lately, and if it is good. Turnabout is fair play: what have you been reading lately, and is it good?

I am mostly fishing for new things to read. Right now I am reading Bathhouse at Midnight by W.F. Ryan which is really not about half-ogre handjobs but a thorough (and credible) exploration of folk magic in Russia. Holy shit is it good.

One of may favorite chapters is about zagovory (“false prayers”) which are these lyrical invocations. Take this actual Russian 17th century folk magic spell against erectile dysfunction; "I, servant of God N. shall arise, blessing myself and I shall go crossing myself into the open field under the beautiful sun, under the bright moon, under the crowding stars, past the grave of the bones of the giants, and just as the bones of the giants do not bend or break so may my member not bend or break against woman's flesh and parts and memorial bones. And I servant of God N. shall take my red elm stick and go into the open field, tossing up its head and looking into the sky and moon and Great Bear...and strike the three-year-old bull on its horn.”

Predictably I have been trying to figure out ways to shoehorn that beautiful, unintentionally hilarious weirdness into gameable form for the campaign.

Q: What is the Hydra Cooperative and what is the benefit of producing game materials as part of a group as opposed to working as an auteur?

I am hesitant to universalize the experience. There are any number of highly creative people—most of whom are putting out all of their work free or at-cost—with intensely personal visions about how to design games or adventures who just work better as one-man operations. And there are any number more of people in hobby publishing who just plain don't play well with others.

I come out of a couple of decades (journalism, labor organizing) of working with small, tight-knit groups of intense, passionate people focused on common projects. Personally I thrive in that kind of work environment and tend to find cross-inspiration working alongside creative or driven people. I know you are required to politely say things like I really love working with folks like Trey Causey, Robert Parker, Anthony Picaro, Mike Davison, Humza K, Luka Rejec, Jeremy Duncan, David Lewis Johnson and Jason Sholtis. But I really do. It's like a dream team of my DIY gaming soul. 

Q: I consider the Kickstarter you did for Slumbering Ursine Dunes to be a mega-success in that it funded, people love the gaming content that came out of it, and you managed to deliver the product without squandering the backers' money. What tips would you give a new game publisher about to embark on their first foray into crowd-funding?

I was fairly critical as a hobby blogger of the first wave of gaming Kickstarters. It seemed a bit too close to the unchecked insanity of the pre-crisis financial industry of last decade where you had too much easy money floating around with little to no consumer accountability. No wonder it produced so many trainwrecks.

But inside of all that you had people like Kevin Crawford creating great, responsible and ethical counter-examples. The lessons as I see them are first and foremost to treat backers not as wallet-things or pre-order buyers, but as people who are taking a risk and supporting you. Secondly to have something written and ideally ready to go when the Kickstarter ends (expecting the reward first and then the writing to follow is really kind of foolish). And the third is work like hell and don't quit. (A big hats off to Robert Parker who faced some real world grief and who still pushed through to not just edit but to add sections of his own to Marlinko.)

Well we are still a year later working on the stretch goal adventures, but we are intentionally over-fulfiling them, having turned them from was supposed to be sketchy “further adventures” outlines of 15-20 pages each to fully-realized products (Fever-Dreaming Marlinko was 6,000 words longer than the Dunes even). I feel pretty proud of how we handled the Kickstarter, in the main getting the main adventure out right before the December 2014 deadline as we promised.

Q: What's next for Chris Kutalik?

I am going to drink a lot and stay up all night!

Seriously though, I see a full docket ahead. We have Jason Sholtis's Operation Unfathomable coming down the line and I look forward to switching out of writer/designer hotseat mode. We also may have a Big Fucking Surprise coming down the pike in early 2016. And of course there's still all kinds of things I want to write or design from undercities to microgames.

The Man Behind the Wampus: An Interview with Erik Jensen

As far as I can remember, I first "met" Erik Jensen online when we were yelling at each other over 4e's debatable merits. But a chap can't stay cross with another chap for long, and I've since come to see Erik as the exemplar of someone smart and interesting who takes an old game with an expected playstyle and uses it to do his own inimitable thing. His blog, Wampus Country, should be on your reading list; waiting for a new post is like waiting for Christmas: torturous anticipation, but completely worth it.

Q: In my opinion, Wampus Country is one of the great unpublished settings. Can you give us a brief description of it and how it came about?

I think we can agree it’s “unpublished”, at least! The gimmick behind Wampus Country is that it’s intended to be a frontier-exploration thing that’s sort of on the edge of dream logic, or seen through a child’s eye in some ways. Instead of a ‘mythic underworld’, it’s the mythic frontier, where the lands rarely-trodden by civilized man feel no particular need to conform to man’s physics. The other feature that varies from standard D&D is that the tech level is what I’d call “mixed 19th century” - Wampus Country has reliable revolvers, for example, but no electricity or steam power. I wanted to keep the explorers on horseback and try to maintain a “Lewis & Clark” vibe initially. The original concept was to mash up American frontier tropes - like tall tales - the way regular D&D mashes up European folklore and mythology with willy-nilly abandon. And, on top of that, Wampus Country is sort of a twisted America, but in a loving way rather than a cynical one. I don’t know if that intent always shines through, but it’s there in my head.

I said ‘intended to be’ earlier because the campaign, and the setting, have wandered a bit from the initial concept - I suppose that’s a normal, organic development. Wampus Country has veered more deeply into comedy and satire in actual play. What was supposed to be West Marches with pistols has turned into a kind of episodic sitcom. And I’m not complaining about that - there are plenty of games and campaigns out there with a wild west inspiration, or even tall tales, but I might be one of the only ones consciously doing D&D-America-as-loving-sitcom. Whatever that means! The influence of my son has been very strong from the early days, as he’ll come up with things I wouldn’t, or see things from a really original childlike perspective. He’s an important part of Wampus Country and has a role in creating the setting; he’s also been a player.

Q: How does prepping adventures for Wampus Country differ from prepping adventures for a more traditional fantasy setting?

There are two questions in there, because part of it is Erik’s GM Style, and the other part is Wampus Country. I’m an improv guy at heart - I spent a lot of time in college performing improv comedy - and my preferred way to GM any game is minimal prep. I’ll have half a page of notes to riff off of, and most of that will be ridiculous NPC names over which I’ve agonized. I imagine some other GMs draw and redraw dungeon maps to get them perfect; I recite silly NPC names and practice accents on my morning commute. And, actually, I guess that’s where you see the overlap between a desire for minimal prep, and really trying to hit those Wampus comedy notes. When I prep to run Wampus Country, I have to make sure I’ve prepped and seeded those opportunities for escalating danger and escalating ridiculousness. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t - I think when you’re running a game that’s meant to be a comedy, you have to be ready to seize opportunities and weirdness when they pop up. You probably need the right players to really make it sing, but I’ve yet to have a player who didn’t get warmed up and throw some comedy down. Players need to buy in to the genre. Just as you’d expect a certain level of lethality from an old-school game, you have to be ready for a certain level of nonsense. When you play Ghostbusters, you kind of want to get slimed. The other change I’ve noticed - and this is player-driven - is that Wampus PCs, or maybe their players, are reluctant to kill off NPCs. Especially if they’re amusing. It’s like there’s implicit buy-in that some NPCs - or maybe even most of them - “deserve” to be seen again on-camera. We’ve ended up with an immense roster of NPCs in and around the starting areas because of this, so there are a ton of potential interactions between NPCs, and between NPCs and PCs.

Q: One of the things I really admire about Wampus Country is that it led to my favorite house rule to come out of the old-school blog scene: It Gets Worse. In what ways does that house rule change D&D's usual mode of play?

Your favorite? That’s high praise, and a strong statement. One hopes that it changes the mode of play because it removes some of the fear of lethality and drives players to attempt really heroic or ridiculous stuff, which was what I was aiming for. But I have some news for you: It Gets Worse only sort-of works in play so far for me. That might surprise some people, so let me explain. The concept is that when you hit zero hit points, the PC doesn’t die, they just get placed in a more difficult or weirder situation. Complications instead of PC death. It works great as a guiding principle - this is a tall tale, a picaresque comedy, and the best way to get out of a bind is to escalate and change the sort of bind you’re in. Every player knows that if their PC gets in a bad way, things will very soon Get Worse and they’ll have an opportunity to squirm out of something even more ridiculous. And that’s great.

But here’s the problem: Wampus Country has evolved into the sort of game where PCs almost never get reduced to zero hit points. There are several reasons for this. First, I’m not much of a lethal GM most of the time, so there’s that baseline. Second, the players I’ve had are not, typically, uncautious types. Combine these, and you’re not threatening PCs very often - not physically, anyway. They have their care-abouts, and those get threatened pretty easily, but again, that’s shifting the tone of the campaign. I sometimes think that It Gets Worse would work better for someone that isn’t me. Is that weird? And, it’s worth noting, some other seemingly-clever rules tweaks designed to enforce internal genre - like the Wampus Country Hat Rules - only sort-of work in play as well. We always forget the damn rule, or again the minimized lethality means that a rule originally designed to get a new saving throw is less necessary or desirable. The Hat Rules actually work better adapted to 5e, where the right hat just gives you advantage on every appropriate save. There, done. I think the first version of a house rule is often very clever, but it’s the third or fourth version of it that can actually approach elegance. The process is iterative, and it can be rough to see your clever contribution just plain not work.

The takeaway: mechanics that reinforce campaign concepts are easy to dream up, but not always easy to employ. No plan ever survives contact with the players. It’s an evolving thing. But the point of it - and what probably drove the conversation around it’s creation, adoption, and discussion afterward - is that I think at the point when It Gets Worse was posted, we were at one of the peaks of the “Old School Is Lethal!” sine wave. As a deliberate counterpoint, it got some attention - and maybe more than it deserved, because of the context. But nothing happens in a vacuum. The gaming “scene” is a conversation.

Q: Another thing that I admire about Wampus Country is its longevity; it's been an on-going game for a number of years and an impressive number of players have gotten a chance to explore the setting. Do you have any advice you'd give to a fellow DM who is looking to run a lengthy, open-table campaign?

Wampus Country has been on painful hiatus for far too long, and that’s entirely on me as far as prioritizing work and family stuff far ahead of the backburnered hobby stuff. But it certainly had a nice run in its first push, and I’m proud of that. Something like fifty different players with seventy different PCs have taken a dip in the Wampus Country pool, and I guess that’s nothing to sneeze at when you’re talking about open tables. For a while there Wampus Country was the only consistently-run FLAILSNAILS open table, as some of the earlier campaigns had either gone closed-table, or weren’t running every week at the same time. I tried to run every Friday night, and there were some play-by-posts in parallel at several points as well.

I don’t think there’s a secret to running a lengthy open table. You just do it. Run your game. Schedule your game. Shill for your game, and play in other people’s games if that’s an option - building that community is important, and people who see you’re a fun person to play with will be more willing to try you out as a GM. I think the trick is that if you’re going to do an open table, you have to really embrace the open table. You can’t get disappointed when players don’t pick up the leads you wanted them to chase, or when your favorite PC’s player doesn’t come back. You just run, run, run, and let the campaign build itself. You can’t give up. If something tanks, oh well, you move on. My first play-by-post didn’t run right and I was disappointed with how it all worked; so I learned from it, and tried again with a play-by-post that tried to play to the strengths of the format, and that one was more successful. It’s all a continuing experiment.

Q: One thing I always associate you with is Transformers. What is it about them that captured your imagination? And have you ever found a way to translate that love of transforming robots into an rpg?

A: That’s interesting, I don’t think I spew about Transformers that much in social media, but I’m definitely a fan, as is my son. I loved the toys, the comics, and especially the cartoon, and I love the continuity porn of the various versions. I like Marvel Comics’ continuity porn as well, but that’s probably a more common malady. Like any kid in the 80s, I had my fill of Transformers and other mecha stuff. But the Transformers - like their cousins, G.I.Joe - had that amazing cartoon which was, after the season, an amazing mix of superheroes, sci-fi, pulp stuff. I think it was the blend that hooked me. Marvel Comics, when they’re good, work a similar magic of blending genres into this monstrous, beautiful thing. D&D’s another offender. The 80s were a good time to be a kid and learn about crashing genres.

Transforming robots in rpgs have not had a great history. None of them have caught on in a general way, even though there are “big names” in mecha games. There are plenty of games that have done it, but the ones I’ve seen so far are either too crunchy for me - I’m thinking of Mekton and HERO here - or they are more about mecha as a genre than the actual mecha. Someone once tried to sell me on Bliss Stage as a mecha game, and that’s not what the game is about, not really - it’s a relationship game that happens to have mecha in it. That wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted, and continue to want, a game that does all the adventure stuff well, and the custom robot characters well without needing a calculator. They always say to write what you’d want to play, and of course that’s true, but...I have told myself for years that I should write a game that includes transforming robots and tokusatsu stuff, and like most gamers I’ve tried to write it half a dozen times, but the moral of the story is I’m not a game designer. Or at least, not a from-scratch guy. I have the setting all set in my head, I’ve posted about it in the past, but it’s a covered-in-cobwebs type project at this point.

Q: You're currently involved in TridentCon. What are the most difficult parts of organizing a gaming convention? What are the most satisfying parts?

TridentCon is very small - last year we had about seventy attendees, we’re hoping to break a hundred this year. The difficult part is that although I have some helpers this year, it’s still essentially a one-man show, and trying to get things prepped while balancing the day-job and family stuff can be difficult. Getting other people excited about an event that isn’t happening for six months is a challenge, but that’s when the groundwork has to be laid. Finding a site, recruiting good GMs, publicity. And growing the thing each time means you can’t just fall back on what worked last year - there’s always something new to do, something new to learn. It’s definitely satisfying, though, once the con starts - walking amongst the tables and hearing the laughter, that’s the payoff. TridentCon is building up to be a little con that’s big on dungeon crawling games of yesterday and today - we have D&D5e and Pathfinder, many many offerings of Dungeon Crawl Classics, and even sessions of Castles & Crusades and Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea lined up. That’s a lot of fantasy, and it gives the proceedings kind of a family reunion vibe, even though we have other games - FATE, Shadowrun, for example. This year TridentCon happens to be on the same weekend as a gameday in Washington DC, but that event is 18+ and focuses more on indie and under-publicized games, which is great, because there’s something for everybody. Gamers in the mid-Atlantic can go to DC and drink beer while they play Night Witches, or they can bring their twelve-year old to TridentCon and teach ‘em how to stab goblins. I don’t see it as a competition, any time gamers can get together is good by me.

The whole point of TridentCon was to bring gamers together for charity, in the same way Save Vs. Hunger has done so successfully. In our area there is strong organized play presence for both 5e and Pathfinder, but there are also naturally these little home groups that never talk to one another. I want to get them talking to one another and cross-pollinating, and the con is one way to hopefully do that. At the same time it’s showing the community that we can give back, visibly, as a group. And I confess that I enjoy reminding the public that “gamers” didn’t always mean sitting in front of the X-Box.

Q: What's next for Erik Jensen?

We’re expecting our second child around Christmas, so that’s my major household focus at the moment, but I have hobby plans as well, and I want to get some of those out the door and in print in the coming quarters. It’ll all be under my Daydream Tiger imprint, so watch for that logo.

I always get questions about the Wampus Country Almanac, which is the notional setting book for that campaign, based on the blogposts and the actual-play. That’s still in the works, because it needs to be completely written before I start scraping together art and layout. It’s not just a matter of bundling the blogposts, because let’s face it, blogposts alone don’t necessarily give you what you’d need or want in order to make a setting book. A lot more material is needed, and I want to make sure it’s good material, drawn from play where appropriate, and in the proper Wampus spirit. I don’t want to pad this setting-book with things that a reader would expect from a non-Wampus book - like NPC stats you’re never going to use, long lines of hit points for first-level bandits. Nobody wants that from this book. The Almanac needs to be a summation of Wampus Country, and be a good setting and a good read, even if that means sacrificing some other things. I think in the case of the Almanac if I have to make choices between “entertaining” and “useful at the table”, I’ll choose entertaining every time, although that might buck current fashion. I want this to be the book you flip through over and over on the john, trying not to laugh out loud, and you’re always finding new little things throughout. The presentation will be a layout nightmare; in my head there are marginal illustrations and fold-ins and cut-out paper dolls and comic strips and sheet music and recipes and all manner of crazy crap. A mix between a farmer’s almanac, a kid’s magazine...but it’s a setting book. You learn about the setting through this in-universe artifact, that’s the goal, and the whole thing is just chockablock with adventure hooks. Although I started running Wampus Country with Labyrinth Lord, the Almanac will be system-neutral.

There are some adventures in various states of completion that should come out first, though - non-Wampus stuff, probably for DCC. There’s one about Mayan vampires that I started years ago right after that first Secret Santicore, that one’s nearly done, and I think once I break the seal the others will finish up in sequence. I’d like to present those in a magazine-style format that feels kind of like Savage Sword of Conan and those sorts of magazines, color covers with black and white, almost newsprint interiors. I want the covers to really express a pulp vibe - I really like things that look like other things, and I think that will match the DCC milieu just fine. So all those adventures, when they start rolling out, will be titled and numbered like issues of a periodical - the working title is Tales of Valor & Sorcery since it would allude to my sons’ names. This really is a family affair! Another adventure in the pipe, one that I’m playtesting at TridentCon, involves surviving and escaping a dwarven prison. That’s been fun to mess with because I can play with all these “prison movie” tropes, and there are tables for generating your prisoner - their crime against dwarfdom, a d30 contraband table, and all of that. Obviously, there’s a comedic aspect. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and frankly I don’t think I know another way to be. We’re hoping to combine that funnel with another adventure a friend is writing, plus a bit of a hexcrawl, and call it all Heavy Metal Devil War, since it’s about dwarves versus infernal terrors. If the hexcrawl portion is seeded with a hundred different music-related jokes, well...don’t be surprised. But if you can’t get behind dwarf berserkers in KISS makeup, you’re probably not the audience for this particular romp.

An Interview with Trey Causey

Trey Causey's From the Sorcerer's Skull was the first gaming blog I encountered. His boundless creativity (and commitment to a regular, and astoundingly prolific, posting schedule) helped me see the potential in getting gaming ideas out into the wild with a minimum of fuss. When he isn't embarrassing the rest of us with the quality and quantity of ideas on his blog, he's busy putting out fantastic books such as Weird Adventures and Strange Stars.

Q: From your long-running examination of the Warlord series and your weekly comics posts, it's obvious that illustrated fiction is a big point of inspiration for you. In what ways has your interest in comics carried over to gaming? Are there any ways in which comics have changed the way you approach writing gaming material?

I think comics encouraged me to always be a bit more "kitchen sink," a little bit more "gonzo," in the GMing and world-building, even when trying to play it straight. That doesn't come through with every idea necessarily, but I think it's my default mode. They also probably made me more interested in visuals and the look of things. I tend to start commissioning art well before I start really writing a project (which is probably not that way to do it!) and I've always been interested in kind of set-pieces (in terms of distinct locales and action) for the player's to interact with/in. Probably the need to really convey a visual style has effected by writing, though I consciously try to curb that a bit, as what I've got in my head isn't necessarily what someone else needs to have in theirs. Still, I think that influence, partnered with talented artists, is responsible for the distinctive look and feel of my stuff.

Q: You've released well-regarded game books independently, but you've recently joined forces with the Hydra Collective. What was the impetus behind that? What does being part of a collective of content creators enable you to do better than you could do on your own?

Doing projects on my own is a lot of work and can be expensive. The chance to combine efforts meant a chance to get some help shouldering the various unfun burdens. I also feel like my stuff hasn't necessarily reached its biggest possible audience--even within the relatively small rpg community of G+. Having a bigger megaphone can't hurt. Those were the practical considerations, I guess. Beyond that, it's enjoyable seeing other people's projects come to fruition and even doing small, lower pressure, creative things to help that along: finding fonts, goofing around with designing ads, etc. Kicking around cover concepts with a talented guy with his own strong aesthetic like Jason Sholtis is probably more fun than writing a page of my own stuff, honestly.

My hope is that Hydra will make me more productive than I would have been otherwise and give me the satisfaction of helping other people do projects that might not have happened if Hydra hadn't have been there. 

Q: Over the years you've built a lot of different game settings. One of your most recent games was a Sargasso Sea-inspired game that you ran for a group of first-time 5e players and a few "lapsed players." Are there any special considerations that you kept in mind when crafting a setting for first-timers in a new edition?

I tried to go lighter on the "special snowflakeness" than I might otherwise in the setting, and to say "okay" to anything that was in the Player's Handbook. With the adventure set in an interesting location, the players could imagine their characters from as generic a D&D world as they wanted or needed, and I still get the sort of sense of place that made it fun for me. Being as these guys were mostly veterans of White Wolf games and Shadowrun, I tried to sort of play to their expectations, which wasn't really hard, as I don't typically run high-lethality, heavy resource management games most of the time anyway, but I did have to recognize their desire for more tricked-out or specialized characters than I normally roll with.

Q: I think everyone who has been making game-stuff for a while has a project that "got away"--something you started working on but ultimately grew bored with or gave up on. What's yours?

There are a lot of projects lying dormant or semi-dormant that I plan to get back to--someday. There are a couple that I feel like it's less likely that I will, though not because I think they're bad ideas. more just that too much time passed without me moving forward with them. One is Eldritch Earth or Planet of the Elves, a semi-Bakshi, post-apocalyptic fantasy. The other is probably Pulp Space, my alternate history, spell-jamming sort of thing.

Q: Best things you've read, seen, heard lately? What things are you most looking forward to reading, seeing, and hearing in the near-ish future?

The best movie I've seen recently is Spring. As I'm between books at the moment, reading-wise I'm digging the new fantasy comic, The Spire. I'm looking forward to giving The Etched City a second go, as I put it down too hastily years ago, as your recent review now shows. I'm interested in seeing del Toro's Crimson Peak and Snyder's Batman vs. Superman.

Q: What's the game product you wished existed? What thing that does exist comes closest to scratching that itch?

From an utterly selfish (and perhaps self-aggrandizing) standpoint I wish there was something like the Guide to Glorantha for Weird Adventures. More realistically, I would kind of like a Bas-Lag rpg or supplement for a game I have. There are the old d20 Dragon articles, which handle the mechanics fine, but lose the flavor--which is probably what we'd get again, but I can hope that something as enjoyable to read as GURPS Goblins could come out of it.

Q: What's next for Trey Causey?

Next are the the two Strange Stars gamebooks. The Fate book is somewhere in putting corrections in layout. When your layout guy is in demand, you sometimes have to wait in the queue. The Old School gamebook, compatible with Stars Without Number or really any old school sci-fi game, is in the writing stage. After those two, I have in mind to do two adventures: the pirate thing, In Doom's Wake, and the first thing from my sort of Oz-ian 5e setting, the Land of Azurth, Cloud Castle of Azurth. I tend to be at the mercy of my creative whims, though.

An Interview with Jez Gordon

This is the first in a series of interviews with people I know who play roleplaying games. My goal here is to not just showcase what they've put out as product, but to also touch on how they play, why they play games, and what inspires their gaming. Our first guinea pig interviewee is Jez Gordon, whose art and layout work you may have seen in Porphyry, A Red and Pleasant Land, The Magnificent Joop van Ooms, the revised Death Frost Doom, et al. I can also personally attest that Jez is a super fun player. He has a blog named Giblet Blizzard, and it is here. You should check it out.

Without further ado, let's learn something about the man, his art, and the way he approaches gaming.

Q: I just realized that I don't know anything about your history with art. Did you go to art school, doodle incessantly as a child? I have no idea. Fill me in on how you developed you skills.

There's pics of me drawing dinosaurs the first day out of the womb, and I'm pretty sure I left some graffiti behind in there too. I had encouraging parents, they supported me in whatever it was I was interested in. I have an obsessive personality so there's very distinct phases of what I was interested in while growing up (dinosaurs, Superman, Star Wars, Greek mythology, early Apple IIe games like Chopper and Lode Runner, Tolkien, and they all squished into D&D) and during whatever phase it was, I was drawing.

I drew dinosaurs, I drew my mum dressed as Superman, I drew tonnes of Star Wars stuff... when Clash of the Titans came out it turned me on to Greek myths and there was like a two month period where every night after dinner I'd trace the outline of the Greek peninsula. Chopper and Lode Runner made me look at drawing for the first time in a stylised way, and after school I'd be at friends places drawing these endless side-on stick figure battles on page after page, and then we'd stick them together in these megawar deathpanoramas. In 3rd grade I saw a high school musical of The Hobbit (somewhat different — they had these KISSpunk rocknroll goblin dance troupe that were great, and Thorin and Co. all go home happy after the dragon is dead) and that put Tolkien on the horizon... and then the Bakshi Lord of the Rings film was out, and I was more and more interested and then suddenly lost in Middle Earth. Shortly after that my cousins came back from Indonesia for Christmas where they'd been to an international school, and an American friend had put them onto D&D (thanks Quentin!), and my Aunt gave me the Moldvay Red Box thinking I'd like it. And then I was drawing character illustrations for all my guys, and for my friends, and I never really stopped.

Later on in high school I was always the guy drawing in English class, but I wasn't encouraged by the school to pursue fine art. I spent a lot of time drawing chicks for the cool kids in the year, but mainly cribbed my style from TMNT characters and Wormy comics (there's a reason why my Pre-teen Dirty-gene Kung Fu Kangaroos never made the comic stand). It wasn't til I dropped out of advanced ancient history in 11th grade and needed to pick up a subject that I ended up doing visual art for the HSC (dunno what the American equivalent is, the SATs?) and that ended up being my best subject.

My folks insisted I get qualifications after school, but I flunked uni entry to all the nearby fine arts degrees and was still just too young in the head to move to another city, but I ended up qualifying for an Associate Diploma in Graphic Design at a very well respected public institution, and somehow in between the grunge and Hellboy (boy did I love Hellboy) and playing in bands I ended up getting the certificate and heading out into the real world, where I quickly realised I knew nothing about design. I did six months of computer skills, and the next year Quark Xpress and Photoshop where EVERYWHERE in the industry and I barely knew anything about it.

I bounced around between a few jobs for the first few years learning computer skills on the job, til I ended up in a printshop doing fast turnaround layouts and four colour/spot color proofing and that was a real important step in my career; that close to the furnace you get to see exactly how printing works and I think that's an essential part of the trade. The proofing press did work for the Sydney Morning Herald, which is one of the big newspapers down here, and I knew the design manager at SMH from college so she got me a design job there for a few years; and after a brief dabble in Disney animation and film concept illustration (zombies, zombies, and more zombies) I went on to a series of better paying but soul destroying jobs working for Foxtel, which is the largest cable tv provider in Oz. I did a long session with those guys — having an excellent design manager makes such a difference to the job — working on films, boxing and wrestling promotions. Tons of storyboarding. All this corporate work taught me a helluvalot about dealing with clients, and while there's little work I'm proud of from that time there was tons I learned about professionalism and negotiating with people who don't think in visual terms. And then my wife and I got jack of living in the big city and we moved to New Zealand.

About the time I started getting involved online with roleplaying games (which I had never stopped playing and illustrating during all that time) and doing Secret Santicore in 2011 I landed a job at the local Dunedin newspaper where I ended up working alongside a nationally recognised political cartoonist, and it was from him I learned the basic techniques I now use in the black and white style I'm most known for. You wouldn't recognise it if you put our work together, but it's the same (very simple) technique and it just seemed to work perfectly with what I was trying to do.

If you look at the quality of concept artists out there, there is so much horrifyingly good talent out there that's being brought together thanks to the net. It's a global market. And while I've always been "the drawing guy" among my friends I look at so much of the stuff that's out there and just know I'll never be as good as they are. When I realised that I was pretty broken artistically for a while, cause it's what I'm best at, and I'm too far down the track now to take three years out to retrain. And then I realised that if you can't be brilliant, at least be unique. Have a style that's yours. And I think over the last four years of hammering out that black and white style (I've never drawn so much in my life, it's awesome) I've managed to peg out a style that people (hopefully) recognise as distinctly mine. 

Q: You're not only a talented artist, you're also a really accomplished layout wizard. What are the big mistakes that people producing game content make in the way they present their material?

I think gaming graphic design is almost always disadvantaged by this pressing need for content creators to be so goddamn wordy. You shouldn't need 600 pages to communicate everything you need to make an excellent game (unless half of your book is gorgeous art). The more wordburners and darlingkillers involved in the process before the document ends up in the graphic designer's lap the better. None of us are getting time-richer, so the more succinct the job is the better. But it's rare that you can be fussy about that.

The next thing that kills me is walls of text. I like going to my UFLGS and flipping through gamebooks, but as soon as I hit a full page of text my eyes glaze. You need to break up every page with visual hooks and deliver your words in digestible chunks. Headings should always be bigger than you think. Work with the author to try and find out if there is a better way to visually represent what they're trying to communicate to the reader, and if there is a better way, do it.

And if there isn't a better way, smash the walls with art.

Q: Are there any ways in which being a visual artist affects the way you run games or even choose a game to play?

Yeah I think there is. Choosing a game... bad art will make it so much harder for me to get into a game, bad layout won't help either.

In how I run games... yeah I've been thinking about it and I think that the phrase "theatre of the mind" is obsolete. "Cinema of the mind" is much closer to how I like to run a game. yeah I think it's trying to recreate a cinematic experience using every tool you have except a screening room, which is where the players' imaginations kick in. So (perhaps unconsciously until now) everything I do in prepping for a game has been to help simulate that experience. I like having a soundtrack ready to go, a theme song to kick off every session; I work on striking visual scenes to frame the game in. I like having a poster sized map of the campaign on the table, it provides a strong visual cue and help sets the experience and is good reference especially if you're playing a game that moves around a lot. I don't go for miniatures — I love'em but just don't have time to paint any more — but I've got a lot of mileage out of Pathfinder pawns. With my skill set it's easy for me to make my own out of character and monster designs. I think the single most influential piece on my game mastering is in WEG's 1st Ed Star Wars roleplaying game, and time and time again I do stuff that comes straight out of the cinematic experience they suggest. And given how formative Star Wars was on my creative development it's really not surprising that I'd go for high action, dramatic gaming.

Q: You know I'm excited about the Dead West project that you're working on, but I want everyone else to be excited about it too. Give us the elevator pitch for it, please?

I guess the intro from the game will do the job:

DEAD WEST is a weird fantasy roleplaying game inspired by the myths and legends of the Wild West. It takes a lot of cues from the American story— emancipation, the Civil War, and the aftermath of internal conflict; the frontier, exploration, opportunism, and exploitation; and the technological revolution, firearms, rail, and industry — then feeds the lot into a fantasy grinder. Mix in some eldritch horror, aliens from beyond the stars, mutants and monstrous critters and yeah... you get the idea.

Basically I just wanted to make a great setting and game rules for gritty, cinematic action and adventure stories.

The other thing I wanted to do was present my take on the classic d20-based roleplaying-game rules. I’ve played every version of the big game since I got the Moldvay Red Box for Christmas back in ’81, and there’s good stuff to be found in every version of the game, as well as cribbing some of what I think are the best bits from other RPGs as well.

I think there’s a few philosophies at play in deciding what stayed, what was cut, and what got mutated: ease of play, inclusion, what seemed to make the most logical sense (to me anyway), and just whatever was cool and fun at the game table. Which really is the overriding factor here, cause that’s what really matters to me when I sit down to game.

The problem I'm facing right now is that I started on this before 5th Edition D&D was released, and there is sooo much good to be found in it that I'm wrestling between sticking with the d20 rules I currently have, or abandoning them for a straight up 5E setting. I'd like to think that some of my ideas have merit and are worth seeing the light of day, but the amount of fun my gaming crew have had with 5E makes it very hard.

The other thing is I'm designing, illustrating and writing it all at the same time. There are probably more functional methodologies out there, but I think it's worth it. Every word on the page is meant to be there.

Q: What is your dream project that you'd love to illustrate? What is the most unexpected or out-of-character project that you'd like to work on?

Right now it's one that pays well enough to justify the last four years getting to where I am now! That Silver Ennie was awesome, but it doesn't put my kids through school... yet :) Moneygrubbing aside, the project I dream about, the one I most want to see on the shelves, is just to have one of my own games published. To walk in to the game store and see one of my own on the shelves... yeah I'll be pretty happy about that. Really I just want to get to a point where I can do what I'm good at, for people who seem to really like what I do, and earn enough to live off. Don't have to be rolling in it, just making ends meet to the point where the worry is gone. That's what I dream of.

I think the tyranny of distance has been given a solid kick to the balls but is far from out; there's no way I could be doing what I do now for clients around the world without the net and especially G+, but still the distance is there. The networking opportunities, the full time employment opportunities, you can only really get them in North America or Europe, and I'm not at a stage in my life where I can drag my family to the far side of the world. Is it insurmountable? Will see.

Out of character projects... I dunno. I'm honest with clients who've asked me to do stuff that I find morally objectionable or too confronting, there's no point working on something unless you're going to give it your best. I'd like to do more work at both ends of the age range. My black and white style isn't really kid friendly, but I like doing stuff for kids every now and then and have a huge variety of styles from over the years that I could use; and at the same time while I think I'm right where I want to be in terms of violence in my art, I wouldn't mind tackling more sexually explicit stuff too. I'm proud of the way I've depicted women in all my art, they're strong, tough fuckers.

I'm not outspoken about it but I feel very strongly about gender equality, LGBT rights, humanism, environmental degradation, and to work on more politically themed art would be good for my soul.

Q: What's the one piece of advice about running a game that you wish you had when you got started in the hobby?

Honestly, just go read that section on GMing from the old D6 Star Wars game:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w80znrrzw89lhdr/Star%20Wars%201st%20Ed%20GMing%20and%20Adventures.pdf?dl=0

Q: What's next for Jez Gordon?

I've spent the last four years working on other people's projects, helping them get illustrated and designed; that was a very deliberate decision on my part as a means of getting known in rpglandia and I think it's worked. I'm still doing lots of work for clients — I've got the design to do for Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess, maps for Jeff Rient's Broodmother Skyfortress, and James Raggi has always got a billion other ideas for me to work on; plus I've been speaking with John Harper about illustrations for Blades in the Dark which I'd really like to do, and I really hope I get the design gig for Jason's Sholtis' Operation Unfathomable which I love, though both those projects are far from locked down — but now I really want to start putting my own stuff out there. People know me for my art, and for my design chops, but I also wanna be known for my ideas, for my games. I have no idea yet whether I've got the writing skills to pull it off, but I think I'm at the stage where I've got to give it a go. Dead West and Goreball out for public playtesting by the end of the year, that's what I'm aiming for.

Beyond that, check with my Muse.