Go to Part 1

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.

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.