Coney Island
Soon after I started
considering myself a writer, I started developing a strange reluctance to work
with other writers. I knew that this was a bit irrational, but that is how I
used to feel. Over the years I tried collaborating with other folks despite
this: on poetry, short stories, a novel, and one memorably awful failed essay
attempt (that guy and I just sat in silence for a few hours, drinking coffee.
Finally I said, “Well, I’m out of here.” We haven’t spoken in decades).
Then came Duane Waldrop, and
the Coney Island crawl. Duane and I have been friends slash gaming buddies
since early childhood – he is actually the cousin of Jason Jenkins, who I
mentioned earlier, and we met when I was about 14. He and I had one thing in
common that we instantly bonded over – at the time Duane was the only other
FRPG player I knew who also listened to hip-hop. It sounds trivial, but at the
time we were like aliens visitors to a planet that mostly rocked out to movie soundtracks
and Weird Al.
When I moved to Athens, Duane
let me couch surf for a few months while I tried to find a job and a place. We talked
gaming a lot, especially Xcrawl. Duane was in the first 20 people to ever play
Xcrawl with me, and his very first character was a standout – in the green room
he declared that he had signed up to play one night when he was drunk, and now
he was terrified and afraid for his survival. Every room he would run over and
hover by the NoGo door, shooting arrows . . . it gave me a very different
perspective. Duane instantly got what I was doing – the world of Xcrawl was a very dark and
scary place.
After I moved out of Duane’s
place, we put a local gaming group together and started playing weekly. About a
year into the life of that gaming group, Duane says he has an idea for an
Xcrawl dungeon he wants to spring on us. And its going to take place in Coney
Island.
Hurry, hurry, step right up!
That game rocked. Any time I
get to actually play Xcrawl I get excited and go all out. And you needed to go
all out for this dungeon – DJ Faces was a tough customer. It was a great game.
(For the historic record, I
played Busker, a streetwise bard who was the spiritual forefather to the Jammer
class. I did the bard thing – hung back and buffed and de-buffed, and talked a
lot of shit. I remember that he had a +2 tongue stud of charisma).
Between sessions Duane and I
talked about pitching the idea to Goodman. The Coney Island crawl needed to see
print. Goodman liked the idea, and Duane and I were off and running.
I just called Duane to talk
about the experience of working on the adventure together. We got all excited
about it again.
We rarely sat in the same room
and worked. Mostly, we would design a map together, come up with a rough idea
of what we wanted in each room, and divided the rooms up, so he might work on 8
– 15 with me knocking out 1 – 7. Duane says he is still amazed at how well the
rooms meshed together, even though we wrote separately.
And we laughed. We would have
meetings or phone calls where we would discuss what we wanted to do, and we would just
laugh at all the horrible stuff we had in store for the crawlers. Coney Island
is certainly a survivable dungeon –
our second playtest team had zero
casualties. But it isn’t screwing around either. You have to be smart, brave,
and lucky to get through that dungeon with your party intact.
Anyway, that project
completely changed my prospective on working with another writer. I think I had
some kind of irrational fear of being hemmed in by someone elses ideas, and
quite frankly nothing could have been further from the case. Talking to Duane
about it last night got me very excited about future collaborations.
As Duane said: “Fun times,
great times . . . I would gladly do it again.”
In the call I just had with
Duane we started talking about the next adventure we want to do together. Watch
yourselves, Xworld!
Las Vegas
I didn’t so much write the Las
Vegas crawl as watched it evolve. It started off as an improv. I had a group of
folks play in a session at Origins – this would have been 2002 I believe. Later
on Brett put a sign-up sheet for an after game at the Pandahead booth, and that
night the more-or-less exact same group showed up to play again. I couldn’t run
them through the exact same adventure - I had to do something.
So while they got themselves
settled I made a quick map, and picked out a few monsters out of the 3.0 . . er, Unstermay Annualmay. The first room
has the players actually ejected into a room that looks like a gymnasium sized
craps table in a capsule shaped like a huge six sided die . . . because I had
just picked up an oversized six-sider, and it made for a good quick and dirty
prop.
That night was fun, and the
next day over breakfast I jotted some notes down on the bits that I liked best.
The Vegas Crawl wound up being
my go-to after game adventure for a year. I just ran it off of basic notes
except for the treasure – it’s harder for me to make up decent, Goldilocks-just-right
treasure on the spot than encounters, so I made up a master list of all the gold,
prizes, and magic items inside, and whenever I played it I would just work my
way round the list depending on the party makeup.
A year later I actually sat
down one weekend and mapped the entire dungeon out.
Fun Fact: Joseph Goodman and I discussed the cover, and he
encouraged me to try sending Jeremy Mohler a description of the cover art. Give
him as much detail as you can, he said.
I went too far. I sent Jeremy
an idea for my dream cover – I think it was about 2K words, with details like
horse facial expressions and hobgoblin hair style. Jeremy, who is a truly good
sport as well as being an amazingly talented fantasy artist, did a fantastic job
with my notes, and opted out of giving me a truly well deserved punch in the
face when I saw him at the next Con.
The Vegas Crawl is ultra special to me for several reasons. Chief amongst them is that that dungeon wound up being the first adventure I played with lots of groups who became long term friends and allies, including the hysterical Short Bus Gamers (that’s the Fat Dragon Games crew, led by my homeboy Tom Tullis), and the brilliant Surgical Strike (you might remember them as winning every Xcrawl tournament, ever).
Also – and this speaks to my
personal design geek aesthetic – Vegas really says everything I want to say
about Xcrawl. It’s over the top, it’s absurd; it makes me giggle every time I
leaf through it. It has the just right mix of classic Greco-Roman influences
and modern media culture. Also, it’s meaner than a 5 AM wake up nut punch.
Favorite Vegas Story: This is how I met the Fat Dragon gang.
I had a scheduled session of
Xcrawl, and only one guy showed up. This happens a lot at conventions and I
never get mad: those folks might have won some tournament and gone on to the
second level, or met interesting new friends they wanted to spend time with, or
could have a touch of food poisoning from those delightful convention center
tube steaks. No biggie.
I went down to RPG HQ, and
there was a group of folks there complaining that their GM had not shown up.
And there were five of them. And they were familiar with d20.
Destiny! I took the whole
bunch of them, having no idea of what I was getting myself into. This was the
Fat Dragon crew, and meeting them changed my life.
That was the single funniest
convention game I have ever had the pleasure of running. They were awful;
gleefully, proudly, hilariously awful. They celebrated bad die rolls, and that
night they had a whole lot to celebrate. Quick example: area 1-4 is a trap – if
the door opens before the trap is disarmed it drops a velociraptor into the
room. Their rogue detects the trap, then sets up for the disarm. The rest of
the gang states that they are going to go back a ways in case something bad
happens. Good call. Without even looking at the map I tell them to just
position their miniatures wherever they want to be while the rogue does his
thing.
Aaaaaand it’s a natural 1.
Fumbleaya! The rogue flubs it.
The dinosaur wins initiative.
I check the board and see that the rest of the team is all huddled in the far
corner, just as far away as you can be from their poor rogue. They have to run
up to help their buddy out, giving my dinosaur two combat rounds of quality
alone time with poor Mr. Rogue.
(For the record: 2 talons +13,
2 foreclaws +7, bite +7. Ah yeah.)
We instantly bonded, and I am proud to call myself a member of the Fat Dragon crew to this day.
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