This long bit of bejabbering is by way of providing some context for what has happened in my arrival at this current list and its contents. If you’re not interested in plowing through such things, you can ignore it with no real loss of understanding for the material that comprises the majority of the thread.
The Meandering Backstory
Like most nerds, I got my introduction to RPGs at an early age. For me, that was the Spring of 1981, meaning that I am fast approaching 40 years in the hobby. Unlike many other gamers, though, my gateway drug wasn’t
Dungeons & Dragons. Some friends of mine who were already in the hobby knew I was a comic book fiend and so they introduced me to
Villains & Vigilantes.
I was hooked immediately.
From there I branched out to
Superworld (Chaosium also exposing me to
Call of Cthulhu at the same time, starting another lifelong love),
Heroes Unlimited, and in High School a local group finally showed me
Champions.
Champions became my touchstone for gaming for decades afterward. I was crestfallen when the Iron Crown Enterprises killed the line. Later,
Champions: New Millennium was a mixed bag when it came out, but I still found things to like in it, and I enjoyed a bit of
Silver Age Sentinels in the really early 00’s, but not enough to run it. Hero Games resurged and I had my touchstone putting out new product after a bleak few years, and, then, I found a comic book game that actually tried to hold to comic book art standards and include genre tropes in the basic mechanics: 1st edition
Mutants & Masterminds. I dove in.
Dungeons & Dragons I finally started playing college — but that’s a different meandering series of blather.
The other gamers in my ever-changing groups over the years corralled me into GMing early, and so I started coming up with my own settings, setting elements, and NPCs at the same time. My nerdliness runs deep and one predominant symptom is a fixation on details. I couldn’t stop with just my own characters or NPCs to populate the spaces around the other player’s efforts. Nope. I created universes, histories, cosmologies, timelines, character genealogies, and so on. The full avalanche of mental detritus that other parents would have taken as a sign to get me into therapy early. Luckily, my parents were oblivious.
The seed for what would later become the A.L.G.E.R.N.O.N. Files was my playing in a
Golden Age Champions campaign back around ‘91 or so. My character was “Doc Steel,” designed to be a crossover homage to Doc Savage and Philip Wylie’s
Gladiator. That campaign was a lot of fun, and I started building the “world” that surrounded Doc to use in my other games. Thus began my first campaign notebook. A paper notebook, yes. The first of many that filled with setting notes. Some items were just a name and a few sentences, others page upon page of cramped information that leaked out through the margins and into the corners. Those notebooks saw a number of the characters it contained translated into one system after another.
Sometime around 2002 or so, a few friends and I got together and discussed the OGL and the flood of third-party materials. Arrogant nerds that we were, we decided if much of the material we were seeing could see publication and sales, we could certainly beat a lot of what we saw. We decided to form Blackwyrm Studios and we each did some freelance work here and there to scrabble together funds to support the company’s legal birth. Dave had already put in several years of fanzine work and publishing, Derrick was doing a bunch of art for Hero Games, and even Ryan already had credits for his mapmaking and vehicle design. Me? My sole published credit in the industry prior to our discussion had been a single article in an issue of the
Earthdawn Journal. I felt a little …light …in the credit department while sitting at the table where were trying to decide what project we wanted pursue as Blackwyrm’s first as a company. So, I had brought my notebooks full of material to show I could pull my weight. Derrick and I had both seen the announcements regarding the Superlink license and ultimately it came down to Superlink/M&M or HERO games. The deciding factor? The license offered by HERO cost money to use and the Superlink license from Green Ronin didn’t. Bada-Bing-Bada-Bam.
Now, when we made that decision, Ryan lost the vote 3:1 on that first project. He wanted to do D&D stuff, or d20 Modern, or pretty much anything that wasn’t superheroes. Little did we realize at the time how deep his antipathy for the genre ran.
We played around with names for a while before falling back on the fictional conceit I had already used in a few games, namely that the “records” being seen were files compiled by A.L.G.E.R.N.O.N. for use by Doc and other authorized viewers. Ergo,
The A.L.G.E.R.N.O.N. Files as the name of the product series. Derrick did almost all of the interior character art and Ryan did all the pre-press formatting, some clean-up on Derrick’s art where needed, and all the digital coloring. Dave did the layout (…in MS Word, people. Yes, MS Word. Dave can do things with that software that Gates’ people probably don’t know how to do). I did about 90-95% of the writing and character design, with me and Dave dividing up editing duties (Dave catching the lion’s share so I could keep writing as we approached our planned deadline). Derrick even pulled in a friend of his named Eric Rademacher to do vehicles and HQ art (we loved his version of Fortress so much, Ryan tinkered with it a little to put it on the cover).
Then we ran into our first major complication. Not a lot of gamers understand the cost structure of producing material for publication unless they’ve actually been involved in the business. We discovered that the per unit cost bump to publish the book as a hardcover was trivial. Yay. Hardcover B&W was well within our resources to cover. The per unit cost bump to publish in full color, however, was gobsmacking. The planned print run, if done in color, was going to cost us between 4 to 5 times the total resources we were willing to use, and that was best case scenario after reaching out to contacts at different game companies and throughout the book trade to hunt down competitive bids. Jeez. So, B&W hardcover was what we did, putting Ryan’s color art up on our company website for people to look at.
Ryan was understandably unhappy about the hours he had put in coloring art that wouldn’t actually see print. We, as a group, were unhappy with the noticeable drop in enthusiasm from the distributors for a B&W product versus a color product. Such was life.
Anyway, a lot of fans seemed to like the 1st edition AF and that was a definite positive.
About this time, I met Steve at Gencon and we had a talk about the game and other things. I walked away with an invite to join the freelancer pool for GR, and, once I had access to the listserv for the freelancers, I saw that work was well underway for a 2nd edition M&M.
We (Blackwyrm) had already been discussing a WWII book that went back and presented some of the stuff only mentioned as vague references in the first book. We decided to change that from 1st edition rules to 2nd, with GR informing us that we would be the first third-party book out for 2nd edition, coinciding with their release of the 2nd ed core book at the upcoming Gencon. We were happy, GR was happy. There was joy, rainbows, and unicorns… for a short while, anyhow.
Then boom.
Less than a week before Gencon, with our print run next on the docket and arranged to be drop-shipped to Indianapolis on completion, the printer’s entire business imploded catastrophically, screwing us, a handful of other game publishers, and some commercial enterprises with actual legal staffs (guess who got priority?). We not only didn’t get our run printed, they tied up our funds for the several months it took us to get matters fixed and our moneys extricated from the dumpster fire. By the time we had our money back and we were able to get the print run done elsewhere for
Fires of War, there had already been several other 2nd ed books published. Hell, I had even already finished my writing on both of the first freelance contracts for GR —
PARAGONS and
Worlds of Freedom —and was almost entirely done with the writing on the core
A.L.G.E.R.N.O.N. Files 2.0 book. It was an aggravating experience as a company, and it cost a lot of good will we would have needed among the partners to move on.
The next thing we did together was
Lux Aeternum for the
True 20 roll out. This was Ryan’s baby and I had very little to do with it. As I had monopolized the writing and design on all the M&M stuff, Dave and Ryan did 99% of Lux. While working on some of the interior art, Ryan also started his own side company doing digital art for ship and building design.
Lux Aeternum saw print … and made barely a noticeable blip in the radar, fanbase-wise. This was
Ungood for our cohesion as a company.
By this point the writing was on the wall for the company itself. Ryan didn’t want to work on any more of that “supercapeguy crap.” Derrick was getting hammered right and left with a bunch of ridiculous but
mucho nasty real-life stuff that it would take him (quite literally) years to get out from under. Dave really wanted to shift the company from 100% game design and publishing to a substantial amount of its business being publishing Sci-Fi and Fantasy fiction for both new and established authors that he knew or was meeting through his business contacts and organizations. I didn’t really have a defined spot at the odd-looking table that was shaping up and given my real-life obligations, I was cool with that.
My wife and I had adopted two special needs kids, both our employers were undergoing massive changes (my employer had been bought out by another corp, the first of many such buy-outs in the upcoming years, and the cascading series of kerfluffles that was happening to the state government and would continue to happen for the next 10 years and two governors was just starting to surface and cause my wife many headaches and sleepless nights), and major illnesses and deaths began plaguing our families and friends with depressing regularity.
Looking at the next three contracts I had lined up with GR, the several other technical writing contracts I had lined up outside of the gaming industry, and my slate of day-to-day obligations, I suggested Blackwyrm meet as a company and discuss the future. I wanted out, as did Derrick and Ryan. I told the guys that I didn’t want my shares bought out in money — instead, all I wanted was the complete and unencumbered legal ownership of my IP, the 95+% of the A.L.G.E.R.N.O.N. Files that was my work and my work alone. They found those terms agreeable. Derrick and Ryan took cash for their shares and Dave was left as the sole owner of Blackywrm (at least until he acquired other partners later).
Once again, the A.L.G.E.R.N.O.N. Files (TAF) existed only in the form of my notebook entries (now spanning multiple notebooks). Over the years of doing work for Green Ronin, I would eventually get into the habit of drawing on one of three sources for many of the ideas I sold them in my writing.
<>Entirely original and having nothing to with pre-existing TAF material: This would be stuff like the character Adamant, where I would suggest stuff I saw as needed to fill in “holes,” which in Adamant’s case was someone to fill the Juggernaut/Doomsday role. Also, sometimes Jon or Steve would throw out a name or description or a few details and leave the rest to me, or ask me to stat up characters they already had ideas for (such as Doctor Shock or Tribal) or who had been mentioned in previous books and needed a write-up (like Blackthorn or King Cole II*)
<>Adaptable material: These were requests whose scant details or general descriptions already matched up to something I had written of in my notebooks before. I adapted the material and sold it; e.g., several magic items and entreatable entities in the
Book of Magic.
<>Full-on matches: This was where a description or set of details or the general “we’re looking for something like…” included in a request from GR matched exactly stuff I had already written. I cleaned up my existing material and formatted it right in with no muss or fuss. A good example of this would have been The House That Hate Built from
PARAGONS.
I also used this method with the M&M stuff I wrote for Dawsey over at Vigilance Press. Couldn’t do that with the Marvel Cortex stuff I wrote for MWP, but who am I to complain about getting to write Marvel stuff?
Over time, I grew … we’ll just call it “dissatisfied” … with my freelance relationship dealing with Green Ronin. There were lots of reasons and I won’t go into detail about them in public. Suffice to say, the conversions I wrote up for
Freedom City 3E are VERY likely the last things you’ll see with my name on them published by Chris and Nicole. Similarly, my experiences with MWP and Catalyst Game Labs pretty much soured me on doing freelance for pretty much anyone in the industry again as those experiences reminded me of previous bad experiences back in the beginning with Gold Rush Games and Tintagel Media during the “scrabble funds for creating our own company” period. The exception is Vigilance Press — Dawsey is an excellent person to do work for and I’d take a contract from him without hesitation.
Anywho, about the time all this was happening, I had the bright idea [<= note:
this is sarcasm] to publish my material under my own name. I had certainly gotten a lot of vocal and vociferous requests to do so over the years, and if I couldn’t trust me not to screw with me, who could I trust? And thus was started the 3rd edition versions of TAF, with spiffy art by Alex Williamson and professional layout by Eloy Lasanta (another great person to work with).
Mournful sigh.
Much rue.
Insert lengthy trains of self-deprecating anecdotes here.
It turns out that I have what is known in comic book and forum-using circles as a “Doom Patrol” fanbase. This means they’re fewer in number than they appear because their vocal enthusiasm completely drowns out any meaningful attempt to accurately gauge the size of them as a group. They are loud. They are loyal. But they are not as many in number as a business might otherwise hope for. Of the 21 products I put out under my Wordmonkey Studios imprint over at DrivethruRPG, the sales were remarkably consistent. I sold between 63-66 copies of every single one of them, and all generally within the first week of them going on sale. Remarkably consistent sales. God bless those 60-something customers. I love’em, each and every one, even though I don’t know but a few of their names (emails of gratitude and compliments are a highlight for any creator’s ego). Unfortunately, I needed 74 copies of each product sold on average to break even given the unit net return and productions costs. Yes, I admit publicly and freely that I lost money on every single one of them. I chalk this up as a learning experience and life lesson. After my other experiences over most of the last 20 years, I’m pretty much done with the industry (see my statement about Vigilance Press, though). Tis not the place for me, and that’s okay. Less fuss and unlike most of the people I know in the industry I’m financially secure in the real world and have benefits.
I’m not done with gaming, however, or growing my notes and writing my stuff. In the future, though, it will be done without care towards what would sell or not, or what a developer/editor would want. It’s just me satisfying me.
*Funny Story: When Steve sent out the writing assignments for Freedom's Most Wanted, McG later asked to write Cole (as he had apparently originated the mentions of the character) and Steve said, "sure," completely forgetting that he had already assigned it to me. He was extremely apologetic the he realize what he'd don (Steve has never been anything but polite and professional in his dealings with me) and awkwardly asked if I had any ideas nohow to modify my work so both could be used (as the two are very different characters). I think he thought I could change some names around and slap-whammo new character. Instead, I suggested to him that my Cole be from a an alternate Earth fleeing apprehension from hero-types there. And now you guys know a little bit of backstage lore you didn't before. Ain't life grand?