This article originally appeared in the March 2001 issue of Games Unplugged.
I’m asking everyone this, so I’d better ask you, too: How’d you get started in gaming?
The short answer is that I got involved in an APA called Alarums and Excursions, and through that found myself accidentally making connections to people like Steve Jackson and Jonathan 
Tweet. Soon I was getting offers of work, or seeing stuff I made up for Jonathan become part of his Over the Edge game, and not long after that I was doing this game design thing full-time.
What were the influences behind your design of Pantheon?
Baron Munchausen, of course, set the format for New Style. It may be the best-written roleplaying game, period, and certainly the most entertaining thing I’ve ever read on an airplane.
Once I saw how well it, and Puppetland, were received, I knew I had to have me some of that action. And John Tynes made his a 2-in-1 (Puppetland + Power Kill), so I knew I had to set a standard for number of games in one New Style book that no one would dare to challenge.
Somewhat more seriously, I had the idea for the final scenario banging around in my head for years but hadn’t ever come up with a framework to make it work. Then, thinking about how I might do a New Style game (at GenCon last year, during my morning ablutions), the whole thing unfolded like a flower in my little, sleep-deprived brain. I spent a few minutes jotting down the concept, went to the exhibit hall (where I was weaselling at the Hogshead booth), pitched the idea to James, got his immediate approval, and, a year later, here we are.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that, except for the previous games in the line, I wasn’t thinking about any particular precursors when the concept seized me.
Pantheon’s modular design means that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that new games using the Narrative Cage Match are easily done. Are we going to see future support for the NCM?
That’s up to James; I believe the current answer is “possibly.” It would certainly make for a painless, easy-to-publish entry that could be kept on hand and floated into any surprise gaps in the Hogshead publishing schedule.
Time for a controversial question: Does Pantheon really “count” as “five-games-in-one” if all five of them use the Narrative Cage Match?
If Greg Stafford, Sandy Petersen and the rest of the Chaosium team had managed to fit Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, Ringworld, Stormbringer, and Superworld into 24 pages, would it be one game or five?
Good answer! What projects can we expect to see from you in the future?
A thick tome of a Vampire: The Dark Ages book called House of Tremere should be hitting stands at about the same time as the October issue. After that, check out the Dying Earth RPG, on which I did Senior Designer duties. It’s a more traditional roleplaying game than Pantheon, but nonetheless maintains at least one point of interesting similarity with it. That’s coming soon from Pelgrane Press. Then in (probably) spring there’s another new roleplaying game, Rune, based on the 3rd-person action computer game of the same name. Atlas Games is publishing it; it bends the definition of roleplaying in yet another direction, by making it competitive: it’s got Vikings with swords the size of Buicks, and you can win!
Some brief reflections on “Hog Wild!”: The title was not my own. I’m pretty sure you can credit Tony Lee, the editor of Games Unplugged, with that one. I remember pitching him the concept for this article in the parking lot at Origins 2000: Tony was passing me review copies he’d collected from the convention floor.
Most of the time I spent developing this article was dedicated to the interviews — contacting the designers, conducting the interviews, editing the transcripts… and then the interviews were cut from the article when it appeared in print. (I think I vaguely recall that they were put up on the Games Unplugged website as a bonus feature at some later date, but I was never actually paid for them.) I’ve only conducted two sets of interviews for professional RPG gigs, neither of them ever appeared in print. (And the interviews I did with Ryan Dancey and Bruce Cordell for the unrealized D20 Nation project with RPGNet ended up getting lost in a computer crash.)
Hogshead Publishing went out of business in 2002. Greg Costikyan and John Tynes left the roleplaying industry around the same time (give or take a year). James Wallis was also absent for a lengthy period of time, but he’s recently come roaring back and is currently developing the new Paranoia RPG. Robin D. Laws has been producing fabulous material with Pelgrane Press for more than a decade.
