Hiatus
Xcrawl hibernated for a few
years. What happened? The same thing that happened to all those “D20 boom”
publishers: the D&D 3E craze was slowing, and Pandahead, like many
publishers, moved on to focus on other projects. Panahead had a few books left
on the burner when we had to stop production.
Another player’s book, this one chock with character options like
prestige classes, equipment, and new specialties, the Antarctic Crawl, which
was going to be a doozy of a “real world” adventure. And a dream project, an Xcrawl monster
collection. I have a ton of notes on both of them and I truly hope to someday
see them all in print.
Freed up from constantly
playtesting Xcrawl, I branched out into other games. I ran a lot of Deadlands and
Call of C’thuhlu. I worked on my own rules system, and played a bit with that.
I I moved from Marietta, GA, to Athens, GA, and after a few dry months I hooked
up with a new gaming group. I met a gal. And I wrote a couple of the old 3rd
Edition Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures, which were a whole lot of fun to
work on. One of them was my first and so far only ever epic level adventure,
Belly of the Great Beast which was tremendous fun. Grueling game – when you
play epic there are so many factors to consider and evaluate that the simplest
encounter takes an hour.
I was still making the convention
scene whenever I could. I missed one year of GenCon during this period, and was
utterly miserable for it. I got a call on GenCon Saturday from Steve, a guy I
play with every year. He was in the dealer’s room and he wanted to know what
time we were going to get together and play. And my heart played the chord of
sadness.
I missed Xcrawl. Not working
on it left a hole in my life.
Mister Goodman
Back when I moved back to
Marietta, Georgia, I got myself a job at the game store in the mall. For legal
reasons, I will call this place the KameGeeper.
Other than the fact that it
paid less than I had made in high school when I was frying chicken at KFC, it
was a good gig. The inventory was mixed between board games, card games, fancy
chess sets, and about two shelves of RPGs. The staff, on the other hand, were
all hard core RPG people, and we talked gaming incessantly – like, people were
getting written up kind of incessantly. Looking back, I remember thinking that
the old Geeper had a surprisingly good selection and variety of RPGs on the
shelves, and I had my first exposure to a lot of systems there (including
GURPS, which I played for the first time at an in store game on the clock. On the clock Liz Lemon!
As my buddy
Frank would say, good tymes!
We got a new game one day,
Broncosaurus Rex, published by Goodman Games. I give it the thumb through, then
I actually read the first couple of pages between ringing up sales and trying
to talk people into trying Rook.
(NB – You should still try
Rook. It’s hard to get me to play anything that isn’t an RPG but Rook is a hip
card game).
Broncosaurus Rex, for the non
initiates, is a brilliant game where you get to fight the American Civil War in
space with dinosaurs.
Just typing the above sentence
fills me with such joy that I have to go and kiss my wife. Talk amongst
yourselves for like five minutes.
Back. She’s making some kind
of curry out of our trusty green Bittman book. My kitchen smells heavenly.
Okay, I was talking about the
Civil War in Space with Dinosaurs.
Civil War in Space with
Dinosaurs. That should be the name of a cocktail involving moonshine and crème
de cacaio. Or a Phish album.
I remember saying to my old
work buddy (no idea what his real name was anymore but his friends called him
Panda) something to the effect of see here, this guy is into the same stuff I
am. Why does all fantasy have to be medieval? And for that matter, why does all
fantasy have to be based in the British tradition? Lords and ladies, knights
fighting dragons, elves and trolls and giants? Why can’t we change it up?
Broncosaurus Rex and Xcrawl
have something very cool in common (although written like that I notice for the
first time another thing – one ends in an X, one begins with one #takealookatthisscully),
which is that they are both fantasy stories based in the American tradition,
rather than the British. There is a good reason most fantasy games are steeped
in English history and tradition, and for legal considerations I will call that
reason The Fnord of the Schlings, but that makes it all the more cool for me to
see someone consciously put that aside – lovingly put it aside, mind you, with
all respect – and try something different.
Our two games have something
else in common as well – both take an absurd situation and deal with it very
seriously, while at the same time having fun with it. That speaks to similar
sensibilities, and reading those couple of pages that day at the KameGeeper I
was nodding my head and thinking, yeah this guy is hip.
Months and months later when
the Xcrawl core book was nearly out and we were going from state to state doing
game demos, I noticed a booth with a bunch of Goodman Games covers pinned to
the curtain behind the table. I thought, wow I’m going to go meet the Goodman
Games reps and tell them that their game ruled.
I wound up meeting Goodman Games himself. Joseph Goodman was my age, super approachable, and into talking about his game. I told him about Xcrawl. He liked the idea, and actually looked away for a moment and said something like “Yeah, that’s a great idea. I wish I had thought of that.”
We started seeing each other
at conventions. Turned out he lived in Atlanta, about an hour from where I was
staying in Georgia. We were both very busy, but we managed to game a couple of
times. Joseph came and helped me test out my Regulator’s game, a kind of cosmic
genra mash-up I was playing around with for a while.
When his Dungeon Crawl
Classics line took off, he let me work on it. I sent him a pitch for a plant
based dungeon, and he gave it the thumbs up. That became Dungeon Crawl Classics
#10: The Sunless Garden.
Fun Fact: My first the first time I ran the Sunless Garden was the
worst playtest game I have ever ran. I let the crew roll up their own
characters, and the geniuses decided that everyone would take at least two
levels of monk. Sounds like a good idea until you think about all of the
spellcasters being a minimum of -2 levels versus the challenge rating of the
adventure, which was full of nasty stuff including a high level treant druid. Then
at one point, a player got bored and just ran up and knocked on a door he found
in the dungeon – that would be the door to the bugbear caverns with 24 hour
guards on it. I will say this – the crew’s deaths were valiant, and chock to
the brim with kung fu.
A while later, I asked Goodman
if I could write an epic level adventure. Greenlit, I made up a game where the
player’s would have to head out to space to rescue literacy itself. That game,
DCC#33: Belly Of The Great Beast, was the only time I ever had to ask for a
significant extention on a deadline. Those statblocks were like to kill a man.
Luckily, I had Aeryn “Blackdirge” Rudel backing me up on that one – best stat
guy in the business.
And right about the time I
turned Great Beast in, Joseph and I started talking about Xcrawl.
Somewhere in my house is a
notebook with a rant I wrote about my professional life that I wrote sometime
during the hiatus. I touched on my personal goals, health goals, writing goals.
The handwriting gets worse and worse as it goes on – it was that kind of
evening. But the very last line, scrawled large, is this sentence: I AM NOT
THROUGH WITH XCRAWL!”
Damn skippy.
Long Story Short
Goodman Games licensed
Xcrawl.
The first Goodman Games
adventure was Necromerica. When we first decided to do it (and Joseph jump in
and correct me here if I am remembering this wrong), Goodman Games needed
something fairly quickly, and so I went with the dungeon I had run on and off
for two years at various conventions, and home games. True story – I started
writing Necromerica in the back of a car on its way back to Georgia after a
convention, either GenCon or Origins, I can’t remember. My very first thought
was, what if Harly Quinn, as played by a Tank Girl era Lori Petti, ran a
dungeon crawl event?
Necromerica is probably the
most playtested adventure I ever wrote – I ran it three times for various
groups of friends, followed by a year of con games and pickups. It is so
important to me for many reasons. It’s the beginning of my relationship with
Goodman Games, and with artists Brad McDevitt and Jermey Mohler, both of whose
work feature prominently in Maximum Xcrawl. And the dungeon so much fun for me
to GM – DJ Creature Feature is this funny yet hideous yet bizarre character
that I have so much fun writing for. I think the encounters are crazy, and well
layered . . . nothing seems all too terrible, until you hit the last room on a
level and realize just how much of your resources you had to spend just to
survive up to that point.
Next up: a tour through the
Goodman Xcrawl adventures.
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