Xcrawl Diary I: "Justice Says You Have to Run a Game"

(Psssst . . . I'm going to make the first four posts in my blog reprints of my Xcrawl Designer's Diary from the Kickstarter . . . skip ahead if you have already read these.)

 “Justice Says You Have To Run A Game”

Here is how it all came together. 

In 2001 I was living in Seattle with my roommates: Jason Jenkins, Jared Clay, and Peter Morson.

Jason Jenkins is a quintessential gamer, a true gamers’ gamer. Brilliant character work, lots of fun, a real role player and combat monster.

Peter Morson had just moved up to Seattle from Georgia. Peter is a brilliant GM, and his long-running World of Darkness campaign was the stuff of local gamer legend. He had just moved in and we had many great nights of Vampire, and Champions supers.

Jared was a buddy gamer – he would just as soon go fishing or play Frisbee golf as play in a game. But he was always fun when he did play. Fun fact: before Xcrawl, we were changing our games up constantly, always in a cycle of coming up with a new game. Anyway, no matter what genra of game we were playing that week, Jared would describe his new character as “A real man’s man . . . like Tom Selleck.” By Dumakrüm I swear it is so.

Jason calls the period when he and I lived together The Golden Age. We were gaming four and five nights a week - great, brilliant, sprawling, unfettered games. Jason and I had long-distance girlfriends who would come in town every other weekend – and they were both gamers, so the dice might hit the table depending on the mood. 

And then 3^rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons came out.

The 3.0 core books came out one at a time, spaced out over a months. I got all three of the core 3^rd edition books  - Player’s Handbook, DMs guide, Monster Manual - the day they came out.  We started playing almost immediately. There was a mild period of disgruntlement – Jason thought that with all the new strangeness (Feats? Skill ranks?) that there would no longer be room for that good ol’ human fighter in plate mail that he was so fond of. Peter grumbled about how much he loved 2^nd ED. 

Of course we got past all of that, very quickly. I led the 3^rd edition charge. I was terribly excited to be excited about D and D again. The system I grew up on was back, and the changes . . . well, it was love at first sight. In time, I discovered stuff about it that I would tweak in my home game, but that first night I sat with my new player’s handbook I was excited about Dungeons and Dragons again for the first time in way, way too long.

I started a new game, and we played that for a while and it was great. I remember our first pick-up game with Pete’s friend Mike, I remember them getting caught in the net of a pair of ogers who wanted to have them back to the cave for dinner. I remember rolling for treasure randomly and it feeling just like the old days – only sleeker. One of my buddy’s said “The D&D 3^rd edition rules are like a stripped down Porche.”Hear hear. We had a lot of fun with the new system.

And then Star Wars d20 came out.

I remember the first two crossover characters I made up – it was a wookie ranger and his pal, an elf jedi. That was a good night. Even as I rolled them up I knew that those characters would most likely never get a chance to shine their light of mmmm-MMMM geek awesome into the world, and it didn’t matter. I love rolling up characters – my favorite “lazy day” activity is to put classic movies on, and make up new adventurers for games I would likely never, ever play.  Anyway, once I came down from geek nirvana, I started thinking about the d20 OGL.

They made a Star Wars game. Same rule structure as D and D, easy to pick up, easy to learn. And if they could  make a D and D compatible  Star Wars, why not one for Dune? The Matrix? Dawn of the Dead?

Why not for one of my stories?

And with this in the back of my mind, Xcrawl happened.

I had all of these different things swirling around in my head. D&D, of course. Professional Wrestling, which I loved for its over the top characters and thrilling action. This fun movie I had just seen, First Knight, where a hip blacksmith marked all of her plate mail with a Nike swoosh. This other crazy movie I had seen as a kid, where Molly Ringwald had to fight her way through this maze full of death traps while a bloodthirsty crowd cheered her on. And Gladiator with Russell Crow.

I was on the bus on my way into work, sipping my coffee and daydreaming, when a picture popped into my head: it was a dungeon door, with a party of adventurerers in front of it. The rogue was kneeling by the door, checking for traps. There was a fighter with a shield, and on the back of his shield was a stick-on digital clock, the same kind as my dad put in the cab of his truck once the dash clock went out.

In this little movie in my head the fighter was watching the seconds pass, grousing about how long it was taking the rogue to do his job.

That was it. I wanted to see that in a game, and I started plugging in elements in my head, and by the time I got to work I had a dungeons and dragons scenario in head where the player’s were pro dungeon crawlers. 

It became a pleasant back burner imagination project, and I would think about it when I was on line for coffee or stuck on hold while making calls.

Then Justice, an eight year old girl who worked at the Renaissance festival I participated in, decided it was time for me to run a game. 

The Justice method was a North West Renaissance Festival classic gaming maneuver. A group of guys who have nothing to do on a warm Tuesday decide they would like to play in a little day game. So they would go and find Justice.

“Justice,” one might say. “Go find Lynn and tell her that you think she should run a game today.”

More often than not that game would happen. It was not too difficult to get some kind of game going at the festival. 

So this Sunday morning, I came back in the house after getting coffee and was informed by my roommates that Justice had decided that I would be running a game that day.  Never mind that we were in Seattle and she were some two hundred odd miles away in Spokane; Justice had spoken.

I told them to give me a couple of hours, and to go ahead and make up 3^rd level D and D characters. I said not to give them standard fantasy world names, but rather to think of nicknames for them. “WWF style monikers,” is about how I remember putting it.

And I went in, and drew an extremely basic dungeon, the kind where you just write the names of the monsters and maybe a note or two inside of the room you just drew on graph paper.  Then I added a green room, two break rooms, and some doors that would allow cowards . . . er, smart strategists who would live to fight another day to run backstage and out of danger. I called it the MemphisCrawl, because I hoped that Memphis would put the guys in mind of classical Greece – the more I had thought about this adventure, the more it was becoming like the Bread and Circuses episode of Star Trek. And I called the game Xtreme Dungeon Crawl.

We had a blast. I obviously had the guys attention from the beginning, when I described the green room where they were introduced to their brand new cleric – their old one had been dropped by his sponsors and forced to retire after a scandal, and how the referee told them to wait by

Lots of it I made up on the fly. The DJ (back then it was called a, heh heh, certain copyrighted term that for legal reasons I will call Mundgon Dastard) had to have a way to talk to the player’s, and whatever it was couldn’t keep getting smashed by arrows or destroyed by area effect spells. So the AVS just happened mid room at one point. Referees too - I had never thought of referees in my early imaginings, but once I actually saw adventurers walking around in front of cheering crowds in my head we had to add the boys in stripes, if only to make the adventure that much more surreal. I had thought the Mojo Rules through, but I came up with the name mid game.  

I think we got the entire first level done that day. I remember calling for a break, and Jason leaning over to me and whispering “This is rad!” Sure felt good.

(For the record, that first team was Sellsword the fighter, played by Jason, and Fineous Fingers the Rogue, played by Peter, and an NPC cleric of Minerva who I believe was called Bullwark.  The guys were brilliant, excellent role players and strategists. They inspire me and I dedicated the core book to them).  

So the next day after that, I decided that the Xtreme Dungeon Crawl Game had been a success, and it was time to move on to another thing I wanted to try. I told everyone about it the next night over pizza. It was going to be a Shaolin versus Wu Tang game, where they would eventually have to band together to fight an evil warlord. I started to describe it to the guys . . . who were looking at me a little horrified.

Nope, I was told. We would be doing more Xcrawl. Or somebody was going to call Justice.

And that was it. Xcrawl became the house game. We brought in a few more players and expanded the team. The first Xcrawl team, calling themselves the Mighty Hackmasters, won the Memphis Crawl (the final room had the Rancor from the d20 Star Wars book. For the record, Rancor beats cleric). They went on to the St. Louis Crawl, which went haywire, and the gang had to fight monsters back stage in total darkness. We stopped playing that team, and created a new one with some friends who wanted to play but didn’t want to start off higher levels. Xcrawl just became a thing in our house, and all of our gaming buddies eventually joined up. We even ran a big Christmas game in Atlanta with some old friends, and that was a total hoot.

Eventually I moved back to Georgia, and started looking for work there. Some good friends of mine out of Marietta had started a publishing interest, called Pandahead. They wanted to publish original RPG material in electronic form. I got in touch and asked if I could run a demo for them, to see what they thought of this game concept I had.  They agreed, and that next Friday night I ran the Memphis Crawl for the Pandahead crew over Chinese food.

The Pandahead demo went well. That’s a group of top-notch role players, and they all had fun taking their character’s personalities to the limit. I remember Brett’s eyes lighting up when one of my goblins tried to cheat – the rascal had pulled a syringe full of window cleaner out of his boot and tried to inject Oni. That got his attention.

(For the record – that team was the Dungeon Gaangstas, with Brett Brooks as Oni the rogue, Alyson Brooks as Angus the fighter and pro-golf handicapper, Micah Haag as Sleeper the sorcerer, the amazing Scott Knutchel as dwarf fighter, name unremembered, and the same NPC cleric I ran in the first MemphisCrawl).  

(Again for the record? Oni one-wacked that cheating ass goblin later on in the same round. Monstra timeamus iudicium).

Two days later Brett called me – Pandahead was interested in publishing the Xcrawl core book. And my heart cheered and was glad!

And then he said that he would like the first draft of the 90K manuscript in seven weeks. And my heart gasped and knew fear. That seemed like a whole lot of words to young, as-of-then-unpublished me.

So I wrote. Brett Brooks was an amazing developer, and he gave me some of the best creative advice that I ever received. Brett knew we couldn’t call our show runners Mundgon Dastard, and came up with calling them Dungeon Judges – which is so, so much better. He is also the reason there is a history of the Xcrawl world at all, because I just hadn’t thought about it much before that. In my mind, we would just put out rules and dungeons. Brett had me create the history and backstory.

About two days after that my genius mother shaped the Xcrawl world with an insight. I was describing working on the St. Louis Crawl to her, and she wanted to know why there was a place called St. Louis if there were no Christians.

Good question, Mom. The entire history of the world of Xcrawl took shape that day.

I wrote with everything that I had. I was living in my mom’s basement at the time (could that be more perfectly stereotypical?), and was working ten hour days on the manuscript. It was exhausting, but it was also so much fun.  One day during that period I wrote from eight in the am til ten in the pm, just going up stairs for coffee, bathroom breaks, and tablespoon scoops of peanut butter right from the jar. It was one of the best days of my life, and I visit it in my head whenever I’m feeling rocky. 

And then it was done. I wrote the actual dungeon first, basically just typing the dungeon up like I had written it in my notes in those long ago days of the Justice campaign. Then the book, then the index (you got to have the index!). I emailed the last file to Brett, slept for three days, and that was that. But over the next several months I got to watch as Pandahead Brett and Alyson laid it out, added art, and made a book happen. 

Bam! Xcrawl.