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.

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

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

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

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.
James Wallis, Hogshead Publishing

BARON MUNCHAUSEN

Prior to 1998 Hoghsead Publishing was a small English company known only for their licensed production of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. Then, in 1998, they released a small 24 page pamphlet entitled The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, A Superlative Role-Playing Game in a New Style, Devised & Written By Baron Munchausen.

Munchausen was a clever little game, written by James Wallis under a simple affectation: The game was not designed by Wallis, but by the famous Baron Munchausen himself in the year 1798 while staying with a friend of his, the publisher John Wallis, in London. Wallis, however, realized that the manuscript was simply unacceptable for it time period. Instead he sealed the manuscript, which was later discovered by his descendant – James – who decided the time has come to show this marvelous creation to the public at large.

It became the surprise hit of the convention, and changed the direction of Hogshead Publishing forever.

What truly made the game click for everyone who laid eyes upon it was the simple fact that, at least in one way, the title was no joke: It truly was a “role-playing game in a New Style”.

It works like this: You get together with a bunch of your friends over some drinks and roleplay a group of eighteenth century noblemen telling stories of their fantastic adventures to one another (just as the Baron himself might). A very specific set of mechanics, involving challenges and duels which structure the stories as they are being told, guide the play of the game. There are winners and losers.

It was a roleplaying game completely out of the norm which D&D established and every game since has followed, yet it was a game which featured roleplaying. Many games claim to be something you’ve never seen before – but Baron Munchausen actually was.

Since its release, the game has gone on to become the most successful RPG under twenty-five pages – earning its way to an Origins nomination, foreign language editions, and general critical acclaim. The game was so successful, in fact, that James Wallis, who is also Hogshead’s founder an director, decided it was time to launch a whole new line of games: New Style.

 VIOLENCE

Next up on the figurative chopping block was Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed – a game so bloody, brutal, dark, and evil that its designer’s true name has to be concealed under the pseudonym of “Designer X”.

Well, okay. Not really. Greg Costikyan’s name is clearly visible underneath the Designer X “label” on the game’s front cover. The game is bloody, brutal, dark and evil (with players taking on the roles of contemporary criminals who go around killing people) – but it’s also a satire. It is self-confessedly designed to nauseate you and digust you. To get you “down in the muck and wallow with the pigs”. To make you sit back and openly wonder about why a large portion of the gaming population consists of people who are no more than “perverted little Attilas” desiring nothing more than “violence of the most degraded kind; suppurating wounds, whimpering innocents pleading vainly for mercy, torture and rapine and cannabilism”.

Suffice it to say that this was not what anyone expected out of a sequel to Baron Munchausen. But then there was Puppetland…

PUPPETLAND / POWER KILL

“The skies are dim always since the Maker died.

The lights of Puppettown are the brightest beacon in all of Puppetland, and they shine all the time. Once the sun and the moon moved their normal courses through the heavens, but no more. The rise of Punch the Maker-Killer has brought all of nature to a stop, leaving it perpetually winter, perpetually night. Puppets all across Puppetland mourn the loss of the Maker, and curse the name of Punch – but not too loudly, lest the nutcrackers hear and come to call with a sharp rap-rap-rapping at the door.”

So we are introduced to Puppetland, designed and written by John Tynes.

The world of Puppetland is the nightmare of a child, rendered through the lives of puppets who are more than puppets. It is a startlingly powerful vision, rendered in an intense barrage of prose, which instantly captures your heart’s imagination. It is a surgical blade slicing through the detritus of maturity and laying open the veins of your inner child.

The game is based around three simple rules (“An hour is golden, but it is not an hour”; “What you say is what you say”; and “The tale grows in the telling, and is being told to someone not present”), and what impresses me most about it is the way in which Tynes effortlessly blends storytelling with gaming. Often when you hear the phrase “storytelling game” what it really means is that the game has been reduced to a set of muddy mechanics that serve “storytelling” by being easily fudged out of existence.

Not so with Puppetland. Here the game creates the story; and the story creates the game. In other words, the mechanics of gameplay are instrumental in the creation of a Puppetland story On the flip side of the coin, the nature of a Puppetland story (heavily influenced by the storytelling mechanics of puppet shows) are the foundation of the game’s mechanics. The symmetry reinforces itself, creating one of the most brilliant game designs of recent memory.

If that was all that this marvelous little New Style pamphlet had to offer, it would be more than worth the price: But Tynes wasn’t content with merely one game, he had to include two. And so, when you flip Puppetland over, you will find Power Kill – a second complete RPG within 24 pages.

Power Kill, like Violence, is a satirical commentary on the violent mores of a gaming session, with the conceit that the characters the players play are inmates in an asylum. But there is an interesting mechanic at the heart of Power Kill: What John Tynes calls a “roleplaying metagame”. As he says, Power Kill “is not a game unto itself – it is instead a layer of ‘game’ that you add to whatever” RPG you are already playing. So, for example, you might take a session of D&D and then add Power Kill onto it (so that the players are playing inmates whose violent fantasies take the form of D&D adventures).

Although used for satire in Power Kill, this concept of a “roleplaying metagame” has within it a nascent potential which we should expect to see impacting many game designs in the years to come.

PANTHEON

Robin D. Laws saw that John Tynes had placed two games within one cover. And, lo, Laws was angry with Tynes, and he smote the ground, and declared unto the Heavens: “I shall design five games and place them within over. I shall describe them in 24 pages. And I shall have true fame throughout the ages.” And as he said, so it came to pass.

You don’t believe that happened? Well, perhaps not. But the next New Style book was, indeed, Robin D. Laws’ Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games – topping John Tynes’ accomplishment by including five complete RPGs.

The game in question are the titular Pantheon itself, as well as Grave and Watery, Boardroom Blitz, The Big Hole, and Destroy All Buildings – covering the gamut from godhood to B-rate horror to Japanese monster movies. Each of these games use the Narrative Cage Match system, relying on a simple storytelling/roleplaying mechanic with the quirk that there is no GM: Play proceeds from one player to the next, with each contributing a new sentence to the story. This basic mechanic is then fleshed out with a challenge system, specific guidelines, and a scoring system.

Yes, you heard me right: A scoring system. These are games you play to win. There are no sacred cows in the house of New Style.

In any case, Hogshead had struck gold again: Laws had created a set of games which were not only a solid kick in the pants of the traditional RPG form, but also pure fun through and through. So what do they have up their sleeve next? So far nobody will say. But that only means that it’s going to be big!

NEW STYLE

At the end of the day, what do we see in the New Style line? Three trends, all valuable:

First, there are the games which serve as a commentary on the status quo of the RPG industry. We all have unspoken assumptions. Unquestioned premises. Unexamined beliefs. There are things we hold to be such basic truths that we never stop to ask ourselves why we believe them. These things shut down our creative horizons, and close our minds to a limitless array of possibilities.

Violence and Power Kill tear into these without even pausing to look back. Read Violence, James Wallis says, “and you’ll never be able to look at a dungeon-bash the same way again”. And that’s the point: Through satire and bluntness these New Style games tear apart the assumptions we hold. They encourage you to open your mind and look at all the little voids you’ve left unexplored because what you’ve always known to be true was keeping you from looking for the stuff that didn’t fit within your preconceptions.

And that’s when the other half of the New Style line comes rushing in to fill up all those voids which have been torn open. Baron Munchausen, Puppetland, and Pantheon

Last, but not least, the New Style line is about accessibility. They are complete games in a small package, priced at only $5.95 – a price which lends itself to impulse buys in a way that most RPGs can only dream of enviously. Plus, the games which aren’t deliberate commentaries directed at existing roleplayers go to the other extreme – as John Tynes says: “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.”

The New Style games have a strong possibility of being a cornerstone in the future of roleplaying. And if they are, we’ll all be better off for it.

Next: An Interview with James Wallis