Join us for Tom Stoppard’s 1988 spy thriller Hapgood, directed by Justin Alexander, performing at the Nimbus Theatre April 17th  May 2nd 2015.

With his characteristic intelligence and sharp characterization, Stoppard “spins an end-of-the-cold-war tale of intrigue and betrayal, interspersed with explanations of the quixotic behavior of the electron and the puzzling properties of light” (David Richards, The New York Times). It falls to Hapgood, an extraordinary, matriarchal officer in the British intelligence agency, to unravel a mystery of mistaken identity and deep betrayals.

Cast includes Jim Tucker, Phillip D. Henry, Song Kim, Zac Delventhal, Joe Schneller, Andy Gullickson, Gillian Chan, Skot Rieffer, and Jenn Sisko as Hapgood.

Facebook Event – Reserve Tickets!

Go to Part 1

This article originally appeared in the March 2001 issue of Games Unplugged.

John Tynes built a reputation of excellence with products from Delta Green to Unknown Armies. In the fall of 1999 he helped to cement that reputation with his dual New Style offerings: Puppetland and Power Kill. In July he took the time to answer a few questions I had…

So here you are. How did you start playing RPGs to begin with?

When I was…oh…eleven or twelve in Memphis, Tennessee, I was friends with a kid named Chris Brown, who was a year or two older than me. He was playing AD&D and got me started on it. Eventually I bought Chill and got into the idea of horror gaming. Some dabbling with Call of Cthulhu followed, and off I went.

How did you get involved with the New Style line of games?

I’ve been friends with the head of Hogshead Publishing, James Wallis, for years. We’d been talking about finding a way to work together, and the first project that worked out was when James asked me about publishing my freeware game Puppetland in an expanded and illustrated edition, along with Power Kill.

Having worked on the line, what do you think of the entire “New Style” concept? What does “New Style” mean to you?

I think James Wallis has done something interesting with the line in that he’s presenting the idea that fun RPGs can come in small packages, without simply being incomplete versions of larger works. The New Style games present rules that they be played with non-gamers. Baron Munchausen is suitable for any group of barflies with a sense of humor. I’ve heard from a youth counselor who played Puppetland with at-risk schoolkids. I think you could hand a New Style game to someone with no roleplaying experience and have a real shot at them making it work, certainly a better shot than if you handed them a typical RPG rulebook.

Who, or what, has been the biggest influence on your as a rule designer?

I’m not much of a rules designer–I’m better at kibbitzing the designs of others. But for what it’s worth, my ideas about good design are drawn from three sources: Call of Cthulhu, the work of Jonathon Tweet, and the work of Robin Laws. They key lesson is that as you create your world setting, you dig deep to uncover the key principles that define that setting, and then you find ways to weave those principles through every level of both the setting and the rules. Greg Stolze and I took that concept to heart with our game Unknown Armies.

So, at a certain level, the two are connected: The important elements of the setting are the guideposts you use in designing the ruleset. What makes a “key principle”?

Like pornography and art, you know it when you see it. In Call of Cthulhu, a key principle is the frailty and insignificance of humans. In Feng Shui, a key principle is that if it looks good, it works. In Unknown Armies, a key principle is humanocentrism — humans make the world and are responsible for their actions in it. Good game design incorporates key principles at every stage and at every level.

By any definition of the word, Puppetland is… different. Very different. What path took you there?

Well, I’ve always been interested in puppets. As a kid, I found a book on making finger puppets in the public library and read it over and over, obsessively really. I persuaded my mom to sew me a set of finger puppets that included Punch and Judy. My friend Charles and I put on a series of puppet shows that had nothing to do with the original Punch & Judy. They were surreal adventure stories, such as when Punch crashes his biplane into a swamp and is kidnapped by the Present People, a group of still-wrapped Christmas presents that have turned to villainy.

I think I explained the impulses behind Puppetland fairly clearly in the text, but that wasn’t what I was consciously thinking of when I wrote that opening passage in the book, which is what started it all; I was just thinking of freaky things and that’s what I came up with. Coming up with neat ideas isn’t hard. It’s turning them into something finished that’s the tough part.

Power Kill ended up drawing some severe fan backlash. What message were you trying to get across?

A few years ago, I started thinking about how so many in-game RPG activities involved breaking the law. The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me that we were playing games which amounted to criminal fantasies.

I started thinking that it would be interesting to create an RPG where you simply were criminals. I started writing Power Kill intending to make a full-blown criminal RPG. But putting that much effort into what was in effect a satire seemed like a waste of time, and I realized that I could make the same point in far less space. The result was Power Kill.

In no way did I intend anyone to actually play Power Kill. It’s just a satire that uses the form of an RPG system to critique that form. What I did hope was that it would encourage people to think about the games they play and maybe consider diversifying their entertainment content a little–or perhaps just pay more attention to the narrative possibilities of repercussions for criminal acts. Slaughtering orcs in a fantasy campaign, for example–there’s a whole world of people in that campaign who never kill anybody or anything because they’re too busy caught up in their normal lives. Why just play the bloodthirsty thrill-seekers? How many fantasy campaigns have there been where, following a dungeon crawl, an orc tribe placed a fat bounty on a paladin’s head that sent even human bounty-hunters after him? Considering the repercussions of PC actions can lead to interesting narratives, and perhaps mitigate the kill-loot obsession we often get into in gaming.

When we next see the name of John Tynes, what will it be attached to?

Besides my usual editing/development/writing duties for Unknown Armies and Pagan Publishing’s CoC products, I’ve co-designed a fast-play miniatures game for Pagan called The Hills Rise Wild! which will be out in August of this year. This is another case where my co-designer, Jesper Myrfors, crunched the rules and I kibbitzed and rode herd. It’s a really fun and funny game, and I’m looking forward to seeing it released.

Elsewhere, I’ve just finished the fourth and final draft of a screenplay for a short horror film with the working title of The Yellow Sign. Post-production should finish this fall. I don’t know how it will be released yet, but I’m very happy with the way the script turned out and eager to hear how the filming goes.

Next: An Interview with Robin D. Laws

Go to Part 1

The exiled Jew could be treated politically, religiously, and racially as the antithesis of “Englishness”. He was simultaneously a secret, corrupting threat. As James Shapiro expresses it in Shakespeare and the Jews, “The Jew as irredeemable alien and the Jew as boogeyman into whom Englishmen could be mysteriously ‘turned’ coexisted at deep linguistic and psychological levels.”

Perhaps the purest expression of the Jewish boogeyman can be found in the widespread tales of Jewish ritual murder which sprung up like wildfires throughout England during the 16th century. In the Jew of Malta, Christopher Marlowe collected these tales and personified them all in the villainous Jew Barabas, who brags:

I walk abroad o’nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinion’d along by my door.
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon the Italian;
There I enrich’d the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells:
And, after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars ‘twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems:
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill’d the gaols with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them–
I have as much coin as will buy the town.

The Jew of Malta might have been fiction, but it reflected dozens of similar stories which were being published as nonfiction every year with virtually no written rebuttal or questioning of their veracity.

Interestingly, the first known repudiation of the charge that Jews committed ritual murder in the history of the world was also one of the few published in Elizabethan England. It was made available when Thomas Lodge translated Josephus’ rebuttal of Appion’s charges of Jewish ritual murder. (This becomes even more interesting when one considers that Thomas Lodge was an author well known to Shakespeare. Shakespeare would later adapt Lodge’s Rosalynde to the stage as As You Like It, but his entire early career was heavily influenced by the book’s cross-dressing heroines and comic conceits. It doesn’t take much imagination to say that Shakespeare was a fan of Thomas Lodge, making it likely that he was familiar with this Jewish self-defense.)

Shapiro writes again in Shakespeare and the Jews:

“Lodge’s translation describes how Antiochus, who invaded and desecrated the Jews’ Temple in 168 B.C., came upon a man held prisoner in the Temple. The man told Antiochus that ‘he was a Grecian’ who, ‘travelling in the country to get his living … was suddenly seized … and brought unto the Temple and shut up therein.’ He had been ‘fed or fatted with all dainties that could be provided,’ which ‘at first … made him joyful, but afterward he began to suspect it.’ Finally he demanded of his jailors why he was being kept there, and learned to his horror that ‘the Jews’ annually take ‘a Grecian stranger and feed him [for] a year’. At that time they ‘then carry him to a wood, and there … kill him and sacrifice him according to their rites and ceremonies, and … taste and eat of his entrails.’ Afterwards they cast the ‘residue of the murdered man … into a certain pit.’

The story contains all of the defining features of native versions of the accusation circulating in Lodge’s England: the yearly crime, the initial imprisonment of the victim, the cannibalistic devouring of the body, and the attempt to hide traces of the body and the crime. What sets Lodge’s book apart from earlier English accounts of Jewish ritual murder is his decision to include Josephus’ repudiation of this ‘forged lie’. This ‘fable’, Josephus argues, ‘is not only stuffed full of all tragical cruelty’ but is ‘also mingled with cruel impudency’. Josephus contested the accusation on factual grounds, and asks ‘how is it possible that so many thousand people as are of our nation, should all eat of the entrails of one man as Appion reporteth?’ Josephus first refutes the charge point by point and then concludes that it is ‘ignominious … for a grammarian not to be able to deliver the truth of a history’ and accusses Appion of ‘great impiety and a voluntary forged lie’ in spreading this myth.

In understanding the full scope of how the Jew existed as both Alien and Monster in Elizabethan culture and thought, we can now turn our attention towards Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice within the specific context in which it was written.

Originally posted on December 4th, 2010.

Tagline: Edgy humor, industry news, and high-gloss production values. The new kid on the magazine block, Games Unplugged shows a lot of potential.

I’ve been looking at the cover of the first issue of Games Unplugged for several months now (it’s been posted on their website). It’s a picture of a Scotsman, in his kilt, wielding a two-handed sword. It’s fairly well executed (although the guy is not particularly convincing as a threat – he’s terribly unbalanced), but it instilled in me great reservations concerning a magazine I was otherwise fairly excited about laying my hands on.

I know, I know. One shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but this image was so ineffective as a cover it raised some serious reservations about just how much effort and capital was being invested in making this magazine a success.

And that’s all the bad news you’re going to get in this review, because any lingering fears or paranoia I may have had were more than unjustified. Games Unplugged is well worth your time.

The magazine has three primary focuses, and all of them are delivered upon en force: Industry News, Reviews, and Insight. All of these, of course, feed into the core of GU’s primary goal: Serving as an industry newsletter, by hyping not only products but people.

INDUSTRY NEWS: Perhaps the most surprising thing about GU’s industry news features (including “Da Buzzzzzzz” and “Gameorandum”, along with feature-length articles), is the fact they have actually managed to report on things with which I was not previously familiar in the industry. For example: The second edition of Blue Planet. The return of Cosmic Encounter (woo-hoo!). The second edition of Big Eyes, Small Mouth (the fact I missed this one is particularly noteworthy). The Sovereign Stone revised hardcover (high hopes here). I consider myself to be fairly well plugged in to various industry channels, so the fact that GU is trumping me not only proves the magazine’s worth – but also demonstrates that they’re really on top of their ball where this is concerned.

REVIEWS: I love reviews. I write ‘em. I read ‘em. I love ‘em. And Games Unplugged is chock full of them. This issue had over twenty pages of them (ranging from full page, in-depth pieces to snippet previews), covering dozens of products. (There’s a negative side to this, of course: My “To Buy” list swelled prodigiously as I read through them.)

INSIGHT: Here’s where the magazine really shines for me, though: Not only do GU’s staffers discuss various facets of the creative personalities behind the products we all know and love, Games Unplugged is also providing a forum for those creators to speak out in their own right. This first issue, for example, has Robin D. Laws discussing the design principles of Hero Wars, Shane Hensley describing the development process of Lost Colony, and Gary Gygax talking about the early days of TSR (in a recurring feature which will discuss the earliest days of the major game companies).

Beyond all of this (which has already, in my opinion, justified the $4 cover charge), is there any other reason you should pick up Games Unplugged?

Wellllll…. How about all new SnarfQuest strips? That’s right. Elmore is back, and although I wasn’t terribly impressed with the inaugural strip (too much recapping for new audience members, leading to some poor pacing throughout the piece) I have high hopes.

I also enjoyed the “Local Retailer Order Form” – basically a list of products which were mentioned in this issue of Games Unplugged, letting you easily check off what you’re interested in. Then you give the form to your local retailer, as an easy way of letting them know of products you’d like to see on the shelves (or are willing to special order). In a market where too many local retailers aren’t carrying products, it’s nice to see this encouraging feature.

CONCLUSION

At the end of the day, do I think you should get a subscription? Absolutely! Do I think you should at least give it a look? Positively! If nothing else, should you at least look at their webzine? Why the heck wouldn’t you?

[ Note: This is a review of a PDF version of the magazine provided by Dynasty Presentations specifically for preview purposes. Potential Sources for Bias: I intend to write reviews for Games Unplugged in the future. Plus, they give a really nice review of Dream Pod 9’s Jovian Planet Sourcebook for their Jovian Chronicles, a book which I helped write. ]

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Various
Company/Publisher: Dynasty Presentations, Inc.
Cost: $3.00
Page Count: 64
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/05/09

One thing I’ve learned is that this industry is intensely hostile to disclaimers of potential bias from reviewers. Particularly the revelation that a review copy was provided. Stuff that is just bog standard procedure for reviewers in every other industry is viewed by a certain segment of the gamer community as some sort of dark heresy. There were at least a half dozen people who were outraged — outraged! — that Games Unplugged had given my book a good review in exchange for a good review of their magazine. (You’ll note that this is not what actually happened.)

In any case, at this point in my life I was a huge grog-head for reviews and RPG industry news: Games Unplugged was basically a magazine designed specifically for me. Of course, it’s totally unsurprising that it was out of business less than two years later. It was exactly the type of magazine that the internet rendered totally obsolete and it was premiering at exactly the wrong moment in history.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Part 1

This article originally appeared in the March 2001 issue of Games Unplugged.

James Wallis is the man behind Hogshead Publishing – and thus directly responsible for seeing the New Style games, the Warhammer FRP, SLA Industries, and the forthcoming Nobilis into print. He can thus be described as one of the savviest publishers in the roleplaying industry you’re likely to find. He’s also a pretty nice guy (although don’t tell him I said so, it’ll go straight to his head).

What first got you involved in roleplaying?

A guy called Josh Astor, who introduced me to AD&D when I was 14 and bored to death at boarding school. He was the kind of DM who was visibly disappointed when a monster didn’t kill at least one character. He later left the school under a drug-related cloud, and the last time I heard of him was in a story in the Guardian two or three years ago. The headline was “Naked man on hotel roof high on crack”.

Actually, that’s not true. I mean, all that stuff is true, but the person who actually introduced me to the concept of RPGs was Angus McIntyre, who was a year above me at school and played Traveller. He was an enormous influence on me – but we never actually gamed together. Angus is one of the most fiercely original people I know. He’s doing research for Sony these days. See, we’re not all drug-addled fiends.

And what made you think to start your own game company?

Three factors. Firstly Bugtown, an RPG I’d been working on since 1990, was dumped by its publisher, and I wanted to publish it myself. Secondly, Andrew Rilstone and I had started Interactive Fantasy, a magazine about games design, and the first issue sold out in a heartbeat. And thirdly, a friend at Games Workshop told me the rights to Warhammer FRP were up for grabs.

Of course, it never works out the way you planned it. IF didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped, the trademark-owner pulled the rights on Bugtown, and we got screwed by a distributor and were almost bankrupt four months after launching.

But your question was, “Why did I think I should start a games company?” Because I didn’t want to get a proper job, and because I felt I could contribute something to the games industry that wasn’t there already. I still feel that. I am astonished at the lack of innovation in gaming. The market is still stuck in the paradigm created by Gygax and Arneson: one GM, multiple players, character sheets, open-ended narrative, stats or skills, characters improving in terms of abilities rather than as personalities. It’s a paradigm that works, but it shouldn’t be the only one.

Yet here we are in a field where there can be massive arguments about whether it’s even possible to roleplay without dice, and where a game like Ghost Dog – one GM and one player – is considered a major innovation. Is that really all we’ve got to show for 25 years of development? Stupid dice tricks?

That’s why Hogshead exists. To do something new.

You inaugurated the New Style line yourself with the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. What were your guiding thoughts at the time?

“Oh God, don’t let me lose my shirt on this one.”

Munchausen went through a weird birth. I’m a huge fan of the Baron’s stories, and had been trying for years to come up with a core mechanic that could be used on them – the idea being to do the standard RPG-style 200+ page rulebook. I was in the shower one day (JW’s first rule of games design: Ideas in the shower are usually good; ideas on the bog are usually bad) when I suddenly realised that the real essence of the Munchausen stories lies not in their events, but in the way they’re told – and bang, in literally ten seconds, I had the entire game. That was my first thought. My second was “I can’t stretch this to more than half a page of rules. How am I going to be able to publish it?” And then bizarrely I found this manuscript commissioned by my ancestor, John Wallis…

…which is true by the way. The note in the front of Munchausen, I mean. John and Edward Wallis really existed. They published a series of very popular games at the end of the eighteenth century and they were ancestors of mine – not direct-line forbears, but the family tree’s connected. And I didn’t know any of that until I’d been running Hogshead for a couple of years. Game design is hereditary. It’s official.

I had no idea whether Munchausen was going to be any kind of success at all, but it playtested really well and people loved the manuscript, so I decided to just throw it out and see what happened. At that point, it wasn’t a game-plan and the New Style line wasn’t dreamed of. It just seemed like a cool idea and a format that hadn’t been tried before, and I wanted to see how it did.

Everywhere I’ve looked, the games have met with great critical success. Have they been a commercial success for you, too?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised. When we launched Munchausen it looked like we were going to take a total bath on it: advance orders worldwide were for only 300 copies. Then we took it to Gen Con, sold more than 300 copies from our booth there, and the word of mouth started spreading. I owe Ken Hite a lot, actually: He spent the whole of Gen Con ‘98 telling people that they really ought to buy copies. And they did.

Munchausen’s been the runaway success, it’s about to go into its fifth language, but both Puppetland and Violence have done well too, and it’s too early to say definitely on Pantheon but I think that’s going to be huge. The profit margin on $5.95 is pretty slim, but each one does well enough to encourage me to commission more.

Greg Costik— Err… excuse me: Designer X’s Violence and John Tynes’s Power Kill both drew some fan backlash. Some have said they were games which were never meant to be played – so why did you publish them?

Very different reasons, neither of them to do with any kind of “games suck” agenda. Greg actually pitched Violence to me in 1994. When I was looking for a follow-up to Munchausen I asked him if he remembered that, and his response was the first 2000 words of the manuscript. I read it and knew I had to publish it.

Violence isn’t a great leap forward in game design, but… well… the best analogy I can think of is Memoires, the Situationist book that was bound in coarse sandpaper. You’d put it on your bookshelf, and the sandpaper would rip into the other books – it was a book that destroyed books. Violence is an RPG that destroys RPGs. Read it and you’ll never be able to look at a dungeon-bash the same way again.

Power Kill is different, and I have to admit that it was only when it and Violence were at proof-stage that I realised how similar in outlook they are. What attracted me to PK was not its stance on violence, but its amazing design. It’s a completely new type of RPG: a meta-RPG that can fit on top or alongside any conventional RPG. And it’s just three pages long. That blew my mind. There will be other meta-RPGs, as other games writers take Tynes’s design, strip it down, and run with it. That’s New Style: showing that the existing way is not the only way; there are different ways of playing and designing these games. Violence does that too.

You’ve been extremely successful attracting some of the premier talent of the industry to the New Style line. What’s your secret?

Nepotism.

Actually I think –­ I hope – that designers are taking each New Style title as a thrown gauntlet: “Here’s something even cooler. Beat this.” Pantheon came about because Robin (Laws) saw John (Tynes) fit two complete RPGs into 24 pages and wanted to top that. If that provokes someone into thinking they can do eight RPGs in 24 pages, and so long as those eight RPGs don’t suck, then we’d love to publish them.

Games designers, pretty much by definition, have radically weird ideas for new games. There are three things they can do with them: forget them, stick them on the web, or bring them to Hogshead. If we think the idea’s as cool as they do, we’ll give them money and publish it. Ultimately I’m enormously flattered that Greg, John and Robin let me publish their ideas. I get a huge kick out of seeing the names of people whose work I respect on the front of a Hogshead book. But New Style is not reserved for big-name designers. If John Q Newcomer has an idea for the next Munchausen in his shower tomorrow, I want to publish it.

Where do you plan to go from here?

One word: Nobilis. Nobilis is the most amazing RPG I’ve seen in years. The first edition took my breath away. As I write we’re recreating the game for its second edition into something that I sincerely believe will change the way that a lot of people think about RPGs. It’s going to be astonishing. Right now I can’t think of any RPGs that I’d call “literary” or “beautiful”, and very few I’d call “intelligent” or “well-written”. Nobilis is all those.

We’re going to keep on with the Warhammer and SLA Industries releases: We may want to push the boundaries, but we haven’t forgotten our roots. We’ve got a translation of a terrific French game, Bloodlust, waiting in the wings – it’s a Croc design (best known over here for creating In Nomine). Derek Pearcy, who did the American edition of InNom for SJG, is developing it for us. It’s influenced by Conan, Elric, Frazetta and way too much vin de table.

Beyond that… we’re not saying just yet. But we have plans. Oh man, yes.

Next: An Interview with John Tynes