tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79716844447775893162024-03-13T12:11:08.680+00:00Twisted TalesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger145125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-47467826678002209842017-11-18T09:56:00.001+00:002017-11-18T09:56:28.901+00:00Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan interviewed by David McWilliam<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan is a writer and game designer. He wrote the <i>Darkening of Mirkwood</i> for <span id="goog_649906051"></span><span id="goog_649906052"></span>Cubicle 7's <i>The One Ring: Adventures in Middle-Earth</i>, the <i>Laundry Files Roleplaying Game</i>, new editions of <i>Paranoia</i> and <i>Traveller</i>, and <i>Fear Itself 2nd Edition</i> and <i>Eyes of the Stone Thief </i>among other projects for Pelgrane Press. He co-wrote the epic <i>Dracula Dossier</i>, voted Product of the Year in the 2016 Ennie Awards. Find him on twitter @mytholder <br />
<br />This interview focuses on the new <i>Trail of Cthulhu </i>supplement, which can be purchased <a href="http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/cthulhu-city/" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a>.<br /><br /><b>DM: Can you tell me about how the idea for <i>Cthulhu City</i> first came to you?</b><br />GR-H: It originated as an outgrowth from a scene in another <i>Trail of Cthulhu</i> adventure I wrote a few years ago, ‘Return to Red Hook’ in the <i>Arkham Detective Tales</i> anthology. There’s a sequence in there where the investigators travel to this bizarre alien city that’s impinging or overlapping on New York. I recall describing this fantastical procession wending its way between basalt skyscrapers, and thinking ‘hey, I could do more with this’.<br /><br />In some ways, it’s not so much an idea as a cross-section – if you took all of Lovecraft’s cities, Arkham and Innsmouth and Boston, but also R’lyeh and the City of the Elder Things and Carcosa and the marvellous sunset city, mashed them up, and then took a slice of the resulting urban cacophony, that’s <i>Cthulhu City</i>.<br /><br /><b>DM: You have mentioned both Alex Proyas’s <i>Dark City</i> (1998) and Jeff VanderMeer’s <i>Finch </i>(2009) as influences for <i>Cthulhu City</i>. How would a familiarity with either prepare players and GMs for engaging with this setting?</b><br />GR-H: <i>Dark City</i> is the elevator pitch reference. ‘Take Dark City, chop off the dark bit, stick Cthulhu on instead – that’s the game’. It’s a shorthand, and it gets the mood of the place across quickly: ‘You’re trapped in this bizarre city that looks normal on the surface, but is in the thrall of sinister forces, it’s all a bit noir, and your memory may be unreliable’. <br /><br /><i>Finch</i> – and all of VanderMeer’s work – does wonders with the idea of infection and oblique horrors. His characters are always fumbling around the edges of something too vast and terrible for their minds and perceptions to wholly encompass, and in their fumbling, they touch something abhorrent and invidious that infects them, drawing them inwards towards that inhuman revelation. <i>Finch</i> deals with a city that’s been occupied by the alien fungoid gray caps; similarly, <i>Cthulhu City</i> is about a city that’s been occupied by the Mythos.<br /><br />It’s closer to <i>Dark City</i> than <i>Finch</i>, though, in that most people are unaware of the occupation. Usually, they’re wilfully unaware – the Mythos isn’t so much hidden as so all-pervasive that you can avoid acknowledging it, because it touches everything. There’s no comforting rationality to retreat to, except in your own delusions, so most people delude themselves into thinking everything’s normal. <br /><br /><b>DM: What else has inspired you while writing <i>Cthulhu City</i>?</b><br />GR-H: Various books on the Stasi and surveillance states. Real-world American history – there’s a thinly disguised riff on Tammany Hall, for example, only it’s full of Deep Ones. The suppression of the Armitage Inquiry took inspiration from J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts against Communism. Also, and I suppose this was inevitable, current events pushed their way in. Politics is full of fear and madness and rumours of strange cults right now. <br /><br />Musically, I had VNV Nation albums on repeat for months.<br /><br />More than anything else, it’s a paean to Lovecraft and the Mythos. Or possibly an exorcism. <br /><br /><b>DM: How do you think noir can inform a horror RPG? Are there tips in the book for evoking a noir sensibility?</b><br />GR-H: Noir is about people trying to defy - or work within, or getting crushed by – a corrupt and oppressive system. Its protagonists are often detectives, or police officers, or ordinary people trying to solve a mystery, and uncovering horrible truths. The big difference between noir and most horror RPGs is that noir’s a very human genre – the villains do what they do because of their human passions and failings and desires, not because they’re inhuman monsters.<br /><br /><i>Cthulhu City</i> bridges that gap – the city is secretly ruled by inhuman horrors, but their servants are humans, and not the crazed cultists of, say, <i>The Call of Cthulhu</i>. It’s the city councillors, the wealthy industrialists, the police chiefs, the priests and bankers who are in league with monsters. <br /><br />One of the tools added in <i>Cthulhu City</i> is that every NPC has a clue that can be leveraged. Everyone’s got some dirty little secret that you can use to blackmail or manipulate them. It adds to the feeling of sordid betrayal and intrigue.<br /><br /><b>DM: What narrative and gaming possibilities do you think <i>Cthulhu City</i> will offer to <i>Trail of Cthulhu</i> GMs?</b><br />GR-H: It’s a setting that flips a lot of the assumptions of classic <i>Cthulhu</i> play. The cultists aren’t the ones who have to keep their schemes hidden – it’s the investigators who need to hide from the authorities. It’s a setting where clinging to normality is a form of madness. It’s one where the Great Old Ones aren’t slumbering beneath the seas – they’re here, now, at your throat.<br /><br />It also addresses one of the long-standing bugbears of this sort of game. If the default investigator is ‘an ordinary person who encounters the Mythos’, that works great for a one-shot, but is less convincing in a campaign. If my mild-mannered antiquarian rescued his friends from Deep Ones one week, it’s jarring to have him battle Mi-Go the next. Making the Mythos omnipresent makes the conceit of the heroes being ordinary people absurd. The two traditional solutions are either making campaigns a linked series of investigations into the same phenomenon – playing a whole campaign about Deep Ones – or saying that the player characters are part of an organisation that investigates the Mythos, like Delta Green. <br /><br /><i>Cthulhu City</i> offers a third approach – the player characters are surrounded by the Mythos, so they can be ‘ordinary people’ while encountering many different manifestations and facets of horror. You can run into Deep Ones in one adventure and Yithians in the next without losing cohesion.<br /><br /><b>DM: <i>Cthulhu City</i> seems to be part of a wider trend at the moment to play in the End Times, when the Old Ones are ascendant (such as <i>Cthulhu Wars</i> and <i>Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones</i>). Why do you think there is a growing interest in either playing as the Mythos entities or in a world that has already fallen to them?</b><br />GR-H: I’m not sure if that’s a trend in itself, or just part of the general expansion of the Mythos into every possible genre and style of play. You could equally point at historical Cthulhu, or espionage plus Cthulhu, or sci-fi plus Cthulhu. Cthulhu plus Apocalypse might be just another hideous miscegenation of genre, so to speak.<br /><br />One possible attraction is the feeling that one doesn’t need to put your toys back in the box afterwards. In most settings with Mythos elements, the Mythos has to remain hidden for the setting to make sense. You can’t go back to quaint, sleepy Arkham if there are mi-go openly roaming the streets; everything has to be kept in the shadows, or banished before the newspapers arrive. But if preserving human society is no longer a consideration for your setting, you’ve got a freer hand. <br /><br /><b>DM: What else are you working on right now? Is <i>Cthulhu City</i> likely to be a standalone source book, or can you foresee the possibility of expanding on it with future supplements?</b><br />GR-H: <i>Cthulhu City</i>’s standalone, just like <i>Bookhounds</i> or <i>Dreamhounds</i>, although we’ll continue to support it through our <i>Page XX</i> magazine and other channels. I’ve got some adventures, for example, that will see the light of day in some form.<br /><br />Right now, I’m working on an anthology of adventures for <i>Night’s Black Agents</i> called the <i>Persephone Operation</i>, revolving around bioterrorism, Greek myth, and the horrors of immortality. I’ve got some <i>13th Age </i>supplements on the to-do list too. I should really write something light and fluffy one of these days…<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-89881553205673025872017-11-01T10:56:00.000+00:002017-11-01T10:56:56.262+00:00Ghost Stories at Keele Hall<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Join us for the second Ghost Stories at Keele Hall in the atmospheric surroundings of the Senior Common Room. This will feature unsettling readings from <b>Robert Shearman</b> (writer for <i>Dr Who</i>, and author of <i>Remember Why You Fear Me</i>, the World Fantasy Award-winning <i>Tiny Deaths</i>, and the Shirley Jackson Award-, the British Fantasy Award-, and the Edge Hill Short Story Reader’s Prize-winning <i>Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical</i>), <b>V.H. Leslie</b> (author of World Fantasy Award-, and the British Fantasy Award-nominated <i>Skein and Bone</i>, and <i>Bodies of Water</i>), and <b>D.P. Watt</b> (author of <i>Almost Insentient, Almost Divine</i>, and <i>The Phantasmagorical Imperative: and Other Fabrications</i>). There will then be a panel discussion and audience Q&A.<br /><br />When: <b>7:30-9:30pm on Monday 6th November 2017</b><br /><br />Where: <b>Senior Common Room, Keele Hall, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG</b><br />
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Book tickets <a href="http://estore.keele.ac.uk/product-catalogue/arts-keele/literature-drama-film/keele-writing-ghost-stories" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a><br />
Twisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-62026535125778067332016-12-19T10:55:00.000+00:002016-12-19T11:22:34.142+00:00Audio from Ghost Stories at Keele Hall 2016<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-580899625/sets/ghost-stories-at-keele-hall-2016" target="_blank">Here is the audio from Ghost Stories at Keele Hall</a></b>, which took place on Monday 21st November 2016. Part 1 features readings from <b>Timothy Jarvis</b> (author of William Hope Hodgson-inspired novel <i>The Wanderer</i>), <b>Helen Marshall</b> (author of the World Fantasy Award- and Shirley Jackson Award-winning collection <i>Gifts for the One Who Comes After</i>), and <b>Stephen Volk</b> (BAFTA-winning writer of <i>Ghostwatch</i>, <i>Afterlife</i>, and <i>The Awakening</i> and author of the award-nominated novella <i>Whitstable</i>), while Part 2 consists of the panel discussion and audience Q&A, chaired by David McWilliam. Thanks to Pawas Bisht, Lecturer in Media, Communications, & Culture at Keele, for recording the event.<br />
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<br />Twisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-76160885566054732412016-11-02T10:14:00.000+00:002016-11-02T10:14:25.097+00:00An Evening of Ghost Stories at Keele Hall<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-be-NNmBhLxU/WBm72g4BgEI/AAAAAAAAAMw/7CB3Ofouv3YoFLV-r75OH_00qo50wqLpACLcB/s1600/Stephen%2BVolk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-be-NNmBhLxU/WBm72g4BgEI/AAAAAAAAAMw/7CB3Ofouv3YoFLV-r75OH_00qo50wqLpACLcB/s320/Stephen%2BVolk.jpg" width="239" /></a><span style="background-color: #eeeeee; color: #272449; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">In the tradition of M.R. James, Twisted Tales has gathered three of the finest horror authors in the UK for an evening of ghost stories at Keele Hall. They are <b>Stephen Volk</b> (BAFTA-winning writer of <i>Ghostwatch</i>, <i>Afterlife</i>, and <i>The Awakening</i> and author of the award-nominated novella <i>Whitstable</i>), <b>Helen Marshall</b> (author of the World Fantasy Award- and Shirley Jackson Award-winning collection <i>Gifts for the One Who Comes After</i>) and <b>Timothy Jarvis</b> (author of William Hope Hodgson-inspired novel <i>The Wanderer</i>). They will each give a reading, followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="color: #272449; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">When: <b>7:30-9:30pm on Monday 21st November 2016</b></span></span><span style="color: #272449; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"><b><br /></b>Where: </span><b style="color: #272449; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Senior Common Room, Keele Hall, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #272449; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-size: 12.8px;">Tickets are FREE, but you must register for them <a href="http://estore.keele.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&deptid=10&catid=37&prodid=451" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a></span></span>Twisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-57844289272992517972016-07-03T13:49:00.001+01:002016-07-03T13:49:17.601+01:00Twisted Tales of the North<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Uzlcdqm0giQ/V3kIxCao7fI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/DTuVeRQWQu8CrhKmmauRBMrqu_B2oFnPgCLcB/s1600/The%2BLoney.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Uzlcdqm0giQ/V3kIxCao7fI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/DTuVeRQWQu8CrhKmmauRBMrqu_B2oFnPgCLcB/s320/The%2BLoney.jpg" width="198" /></a><b>Andrew Michael Hurley</b> in conversation with <b>Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes</b> (<b>Chaired by Dr David McWilliam</b>)<br />
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When: <b>6-8pm Friday 21st October 2016</b><br />
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Where: <b>The John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 3EH</b><br />
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<b>Tickets are FREE but you must register <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/twisted-tales-of-the-north-with-andrew-michael-hurley-tickets-26243277349" target="_blank">here</a>.</b><br />
<br />Following the success of his first novel, <b><i>The Loney</i></b>, which won the <b>Costa First Novel Award 2015</b> and has secured a film deal, Andrew Michael Hurley will take part in this popular annual event in conversation with Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes.<br /><br />Andrew completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School in 2007.<br /><br />Hurley’s debut novel captures the desolate surroundings of the Lancashire coastline in a story of 1970s remembrance. The narrator explores his lost teenage years during a Catholic pilgrimage. The story draws from the longstanding tradition of the Gothic. Hurley inflects his text with an unseen and inescapable horror that never truly manifests but lurks carefully beneath each sentence: 'terror exists in your imagination' he explains.<br /><br />Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has taught widely in the areas of Gothic studies, contemporary literature, film theory, critical theory, modernist literature, and has also co-convened or co-designed specialised units on the Gothic and on British culture and society 1800-2000. His areas of expertise are Gothic Studies, horror film and fiction, and contemporary literature.<br />
Twisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-4592375680279859662016-06-27T20:25:00.003+01:002016-06-27T20:25:55.169+01:00Can Oral interviewed by David McWilliam about 'Stygian'<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kyUUo63VMnY/V3FzzFrpKJI/AAAAAAAAALU/US5z88SxC_0v8-p8-fnn1zkrmqGBNXeywCLcB/s1600/Stygian.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kyUUo63VMnY/V3FzzFrpKJI/AAAAAAAAALU/US5z88SxC_0v8-p8-fnn1zkrmqGBNXeywCLcB/s320/Stygian.png" width="250" /></a>Can Oral is the Lead Designer and Creative Director on <i>Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones</i> for Cultic Games. Cultic Games is a newly-established independent game development
company from Istanbul. Team Cultic is comprised of multi-disciplinarian
members from the video game, film, and music industries. Cultic Games is
very aware of its role in the coming apocalypse and is crafting <i>Stygian</i> with the utmost care.<br /><br />Prior to taking on this role, Can was a film director by trade. He has written and directed several award-winning short and medium length films along with commercials and music videos for the last twelve years. Can has been interested in video game design since the days of C64 and was considered for various roles in companies such as Bioware and worked in Riot Games as a director.<br /><i>Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones</i> is currently on <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1698219403/stygian-a-lovecraftian-computer-rpg" target="_blank">Kickstarter</a>.<br /><br /><b>DM: What is your pitch for <i>Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones</i>? Why have you taken it to Kickstarter?</b><br />CO: <i>Stygian</i> is a highly thematic, narrative computer role-playing game which takes place in the nightmare worlds of H.P. Lovecraft. We are developing a multiple-choice role-playing game which not only serves the themes of Lovecraft in storytelling and presentation but also in game systems and other design approaches. I am an avid role-player myself and I can say that I came across very few interesting settings in computer RPGs in the last decade or so. With <i>Stygian</i>, we also ask are we condemned to settings like sword and sorcery or space opera in CRPGs? Do we have to take a part in the war between good and evil eternally? Can't we choose fragile and flawed beings as player characters instead of heroes?<br /><br />This is a pitch which may look a little risky from the perspective of a publisher. With Kickstarter, we opened our imaginations, visions, and our prototype directly to the players. Now it's up to them to continue the dream (or the nightmare) we've formed.<br />
<br /><b>DM: Are there CRPGs that you particularly admire and take inspiration from? Or do you draw more from the imaginative worlds created for pen and paper RPGs?</b><br />CO: I can say that we draw from both worlds. At the CRPG side, we have been analyzing titles of the early 90s like <i>Dark Sun</i> and <i>Ultima Martian Dreams</i> to the more contemporary CRPGs like <i>Pillars of Eternity</i> and <i>Shadowrun</i>. We aim to create a unique experience with <i>Stygian</i> but we are very interested in how other teams crafted their worlds, created a sense of progress, approached their systems, etc.<br /><br />I believe if you know where to look and have some patience, you can unearth incredible mechanics, approaches, and solutions from the history of CRPGs. On the other hand; tabletop role-playing, with its endless variety and freedom, is also an equally productive exploration field for Team Cultic. I can easily name settings like <i>Ravenloft</i>, <i>Planescape</i>, <i>Dark Sun</i>, <i>WoD</i>, <i>Nephilim</i>, <i>Call of Cthulhu</i>, and such among my pen and paper inspirations for <i>Stygian</i>.<br /><br />
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<br /><b>DM: The cell-shaded art for <i>Stygian</i> is highly distinctive. Why did you opt for this approach?</b><br />CO: Lovecraftian horror takes its strength from the unknown. We are developing a turn-based, axonometric game, so we are risking showing all these strange, vague entities to the player. This was a challenge from the beginning. I decided to go for an authentic art style which is reminiscent of book illustrations instead of an approach which tries to duplicate reality. This way, I aimed to create a reflection of the indescribable nightmare actuality the player is facing, thus leaving space for your imagination while honouring the illustrations of the pioneering pulp magazines such as <i>Weird Tales</i>. Also, I have to admit that I have a soft spot for outlines!<br /><br /><b>DM: Although the game begins in Arkham, it has been transplanted into a much more hostile, alien environment. How does this build on H.P. Lovecraft's stories and distinguish the game as its own entity?</b><br />CO: H.P. Lovecraft emphasized humanity's fragility in the face of a cosmic threat and our inescapable demise when the Great Old Ones awaken, but he never described the actual apocalypse. Our aim is to create a supernatural post-apocalyptic anti-utopia which is being ruled hand in hand by the Mob and the Cult in the absence of the proper institutions after the fall of society in Arkham. We wanted to isolate the iconic town of Arkham in a limbo between dimensions to be able to create a pocket plane, which we intend on filling densely with figures and entities of terror. We take our inspiration from the social reality of the period in which Lovecraft wrote as well as his work to create the devilish status quo of our Arkham. So I can say that we are interpreting a lot while respecting the actual canon.<br /><br /><b>DM: This is a very unusual take on post-apocalyptic settings and reminds me somewhat of Curst in Carceri from <i>Planescape: Torment</i>. However, it feels as though there is more of a sense of slow-burning dread than a frenetic fight to save the town. How have you approached pacing in <i>Stygian</i>?</b><br />CO: A very true observation. Stygian's human characters have already accepted their doom. The surviving folk in Arkham lost any hope of seeing the sunlight or their loved ones again long ago. Most of them also lost their minds while trying to face this unbearable truth. Others struggle to hold on to their miserable existences by going to the extremes, whether in belief, in pleasure, or in power... The pacing of <i>Stygian</i> will come from the player character's urgent need to reach the mysterious Dismal Man before losing his tracks forever.<br /><br /><b>DM: Without wanting to spoil too much of the story, can you hint as to who the Dismal Man may be and how he is linked to the fate of Arkham?</b><br />CO: This may mean giving major spoilers David, but let's analyze the data we have at hand together. In his/her prologue, the player character meets this peculiar fellow called the Dismal Man and he says one thing: “Find me beyond Arkham after the Black Day”. This means he was aware of the coming events like the awakening of the Old Ones and the isolation of Arkham from our dead world. Is he a mere watcher of the events, or an actor in this scenario of cosmic dread? You will find the answers in <i>Stygian</i>.<br /><br /><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X1YOb-7zO7U/V3F2OQT1L7I/AAAAAAAAALo/xvstmcg5UMkGn-UhEmCB4PqxdI_6l-9iwCLcB/s1600/Heroes%2Bof%2BMight%2Band%2BMadness.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X1YOb-7zO7U/V3F2OQT1L7I/AAAAAAAAALo/xvstmcg5UMkGn-UhEmCB4PqxdI_6l-9iwCLcB/s1600/Heroes%2Bof%2BMight%2Band%2BMadness.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X1YOb-7zO7U/V3F2OQT1L7I/AAAAAAAAALo/xvstmcg5UMkGn-UhEmCB4PqxdI_6l-9iwCLcB/s400/Heroes%2Bof%2BMight%2Band%2BMadness.png" width="400" /></a><br /><br /><b>DM: The combat system is very reminiscent of the <i>Heroes of Might and Magic</i> series. What are your reasons for making this choice and how large a role will combat play in <i>Stygian</i>?</b><br />CO: It was the perfect choice for our combat system considering <i>Stygian</i>'s miniature-like perspective. Also we are all <i>HoMM 3</i> fans here in Cultic Games and were very eager to add elements like action points, cover mechanics, and sight to the already proven, addictive <i>Heroes</i> formula. I personally spent probably thousands of hours playing the <i>Heroes</i> series.<br /><br /><b>DM: <i>Stygian</i> is described as a game of horror, madness, and loss. How do you explore these themes while allowing the player to make progress?</b><br />CO: We like to emphasize that <i>Stygian</i> is not about winning, but about “enduring” in terms of progression. From the beginning, we wanted our players to feel the sense of progression in continuing the journey somehow, rather than owning the game's meta. If you are alive, not completely insane, and still going, that is progress in <i>Stygian</i>. I believe there is a survivalist (and maybe a bit masochistic) satisfaction in that kind of design and balancing approach.<br /><br /><b>DM: Now that <i>Stygian</i> has funded, can you elaborate on the upcoming stretch goals? If the campaign picks up lots more backers in the final few days, do you have any really major additions that you would like to make to the game?</b><br />CO: We are very excited about the possibilities. Our first major stretch goal is the Dreamlands. It will add a unique questline to the game along with a bizarre, surreal landscape, which you will be able to enter only by resting. In this vague and blurry quest-line, you will try to reach the memories of your ancestors in the strange realm of dreams, thus witnessing their sins and struggling to redeem them. The Dreamlands will add adventure game mechanics to <i>Stygian</i> while giving an edge to the familiar “progress-rest-progress” formula.<br /><br />Thanks a lot for your thoughtful questions, David! It was a pleasure!<br />
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Twisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-46836689861557645972016-06-13T17:32:00.000+01:002016-06-13T17:32:31.364+01:00Bryan C.P. Steele interviewed by David McWilliam about 'Dark Age' <a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cq27EZOgw9w/V17ObasrlTI/AAAAAAAAAKY/7XeLst1FM80WCSQmPQa5I0UOJFE5A1kRwCLcB/s1600/Johann-In-Action-Color_01.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>From the early age of seven, Bryan can remember always keeping gaming as a big part of his life, and now it is just that. Moving from playtesting and demo-staffing to his first paper publication with <i>Warmachine: Prime</i> in 2003, he has leapt into the gaming industry with both feet. Working on award-winning projects with a number of different companies over the years, he has had input on several fan favorite games such as <i>Iron Kingdoms</i>, <i>Traveller</i>, <i>Shadowrun</i>, and <i>RuneQuest</i>. Bryan has also been fortunate enough to work with such fantastic settings as <i>Conan</i>, <i>Babylon 5</i>, <i>Starship Troopers</i>, and <i>Judge Dredd</i> over the years. <br />
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Branching out into professional miniature painting and sculpting, Bryan has done his best to try his hand at every aspect of the industry. Writing, designing, collaborating, marketing, and managing; if it has something to do with the enjoyment of gamers, Bryan has shown that he happily will be a part of it! Currently a game developer and writer over at Cool Mini or Not, Bryan spends his days in his home studio fleshing out, designing, and spit-shining games like <i>Dark Age</i>, <i>Wrath of Kings</i>, and even has had some hand in the company’s popular board games like <i>Rum & Bones: Second Tide</i> and <i>Massive Darkness</i>. <br />
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For more information on <i>Dark Age</i>, visit <a href="http://www.dark-age.com/">www.dark-age.com</a>.<br />
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<b>DM: How and why did you become a tabletop games designer?</b><br />
BS: I’ve been a gamer for over thirty years. It seemed to be the only thing, aside from comic books, that I stuck with. Every other hobby or talent came, left its mark, then vanished. As I grew as a gamer, I moved into writing house rules, adjusting what I thought was wrong with existing games, and eventually official playtesting for companies that would have me. <br />
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It was during that era that I decided I wanted to try and be a part of the ownership circle in a local comic book shop. The current owner of the shop took me to a retailer-only convention where I ended up playing lots of games of a little game that was not finished yet set in this RPG universe called the <i>Iron Kingdoms</i>. By the end of the show I was handing these guys my gamer creds because I wanted to demo their game when it came out. I wanted to help them make this thing happen. As fate would have it, they saw that I had done some writing for games at the exact moment one of their staff writers left the project. They asked if I could do a test piece, the test piece led to a contract that in turn became the original <i>Warmachine: Prime</i>. We won a few Origins Awards the following summer, and that basically set me on my path. I never looked back; gaming was going to be my career. Here we are, fourteen years later, and I’m still going strong.<br />
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<b>DM: With Mark 3 of <i>Warmachine</i> out this summer, the game is getting lots of coverage. What do you consider to be its greatest strengths and have they influenced your subsequent game design?</b><br />
BS: Yeah, I am very proud to have been a part of what got that game started in the first place… now it is a juggernaut, no pun intended. Greatest strength, though? Probably the simplicity of its core system. This plus this, roll dice, hit, roll damage. Easy as that. It doesn’t take too long to understand, but it takes a lot of time to “master.” As for whether or not it has influenced my work later on… maybe? 95% of what I did for Privateer Press was just narrative design, so the rules and stuff was on someone else’s plate. But I will say this, I learned a lot about the “process” of creating good, memorable characters that people actually want to read about and play. Hopefully the fans agree.<br />
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<b>DM: What is your pitch when describing <i>Dark Age</i> to new gamers?</b><br />
BS: It is a true sci-fi skirmish game set in a world ravaged not by one apocalypse… but several. Aliens, humans, monsters, and robots all fighting each other for domination of a broken world that no one else wants. It’s a dangerous game where technology isn’t necessarily going to work, probably will kill you, but you’re damned if you don’t try to use it anyway.<br />
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<b>DM: Are there any post-apocalyptic worlds that you draw inspiration from?</b><br />
BS: I watch a *lot* of movies and international television series on Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, so my inspirations can come from the most random of places. As for specific sources that kind of fit, it depends on what I’m thinking about at the time. With the Forsaken, I can watch <i>Kingdom of Heaven</i> or possibly some <i>Game of Thrones</i>. Outcasts get <i>Mad Max</i>. Skarrd actually get <i>Ghosts of Mars</i>, <i>Mutant Chronicles</i>, etc. The CORE get <i>VIRUS</i>, <i>Terminator</i>, <i>First Contact</i>. But recently, with the impending new releases for the Kukulkani, I watched <i>Apocalypto</i> again. Now that I’m working so heavily on the upcoming Dragyri book, <i>Predator</i> movies have been in the rotation. Next year, when we do the Brood, it will be sci-fi monster movies from <i>Species</i> to <i>Aliens</i>. As for the world itself, I turn to anything Riddick has to deal with.<br />
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<b>DM: Can you give an overview of where <i>Dark Age</i> began and where it is today?</b><br />
BS: <i>Dark Age</i> was the first miniature game property of Cool Mini or Not. <i>Dark Age</i>, way back in 2003, began as a heavily narrative miniature game that almost felt like a roleplaying game. Low model count, heavy story factors, lots of in-game effects; that sort of thing. The game has evolved a great deal, and the current version is brutal magic, in my opinion.<br />
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<b>DM: What do you consider to be some of the most effective and affective narrative elements that convey the horror of <i>Dark Age</i> to players?</b><br />
BS: In the narrative itself, <i>Dark Age</i> is set on Samaria, a planet that was used, abused, and eventually abandoned by the collective corporate scum of the United Worlds conglomerated government. The humans, collectively falling into the religious fanatics of the Forsaken and the Darwinian survivalists called Outcasts, do everything they can to eke out a normal existence amidst honor-bound aliens, genetic monsters, sacrifice-happy space invaders, meat-powered robot monsters, and mutant cannibals. It is a rough place, and if they could stop their own Machiavellian schemes they might be able to thrive.<br />
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In the game’s rules, we represent the world’s situation in two real ways – the constant use of models’ “psyche” for fear and panic purposes, and the presence of a Malfunction number on most attack types that include anything more advanced than an edge or heavy weight. In <i>Dark Age</i>, pulling the trigger on your favorite sidearm might just backfire and cost you your hand! Sometimes, especially if an important model is already wounded, you choose the lesser attack with a smaller chance for Malfunction instead of a potentially more lethal one.<br />
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<b>DM: There is a real focus on body horror within the setting, from grafting, mutations, cannibalism, and more. Is David Cronenberg an influence on the game?</b><br />
BS: An influence on the game? Probably not. On me personally? Absolutely. I’m a *huge* horror movie fan, and if I said that some of the things I have let my eyes feast upon haven’t influenced the way I see <i>Dark Age</i>… I’d be a liar for sure. I love Cronenberg, but Carpenter and Craven are where much of my personal tastes lie.<br />
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<b>DM: Can you give a sense of each of the main factions and what you consider to be their most interesting aspects?</b><br />
BS: Sure! <a href="http://dark-age.com/forsaken/" target="_blank">The Forsaken</a> (and the Prevailers) are a theocracy battling amongst themselves politically while trying to survive against the world around them. The Forsaken have a great strength in their adaptability, because as a faction they definitely have the greatest number of units to look at. <br />
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<a href="http://dark-age.com/outcast/" target="_blank">The Outcasts</a>, whether talking about the core survivalists, the Slavers of Chains Barrow, or the Salt Flat Nomads, are all about making a living outside the comforts of reliable technology. They cobble together what they can. Make use of it, and try to get by. Like the Forsaken, they have a lot to choose from, but they bring a ton of interesting skills and special abilities to the table.<br />
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<a href="http://dark-age.com/skarrd/" target="_blank">The Skarrd</a> – mutant cannibal cults bent on the evolution of mankind through hardship. True monsters made by forbidden science, psychic powers, and the harsh environments of Samaria, maybe with a touch of evil madness tossed in. They are offense, offense, offense; give them the opening and they will tear you to pieces… and eat them!<br />
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<a href="http://dark-age.com/dragyri/" target="_blank">The Dragyri</a>, who are getting a big update and a brand new sub-faction before the end of the year, are a race of aliens that have actually been on the planet for longer than humans, oddly enough. They are powerful close combatants that use either swarms of pathetic slaves or hulking Trueborn brutes along with some powerful “magic” to crush their foes. Dragyri armies have some of the most durable individual models at a mid-level point cost the game has to offer.<br />
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<a href="http://dark-age.com/brood/" target="_blank">The Brood</a> are genetic beasties born in a lab and eventually left to their own devices in the Blackmire Swamp. They are part animal, part science project, and the only faction built around the idea of regenerating wounds. They take a licking and keep on coming. <br />
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<a href="http://dark-age.com/core/" target="_blank">The CORE</a> are self-replicating robots that run on scavenged or aggressively claimed organic matter. They are a force of somewhat mindless drones that never give up led by higher programmed AIs that can hold their own against nearly any enemy. The draw to the CORE is a collection of unit-changing Upgrades that certain models can choose, allowing certain models to play different roles to the army each time you play.<br />
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Lastly we have <a href="http://dark-age.com/kukulkani/" target="_blank">the Kukulkani</a>- a race of Aztec/Mayan-themed alien invaders from space that (if you ask some of the other <i>Dark Age</i> staff) might have had a hand in the possible destruction of humans on Terra (maybe in 2012?). They live on the biological energies taken from living things through advanced technomancy, using science to create magical effects. On the tabletop they have a resource they gain from some of their units or killing others called Bio-Energy, which they spend to cast powerful rituals or enhance some of their units in spectacular ways.<br />
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I think that about covers it.<br />
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<b>DM: Every faction seems to be getting a book of their own at the moment (those for the Forsaken and Outcasts are already available, with the Dragyri one due out later this year). What is the idea behind this and how are the books allowing you to build <i>Dark Age</i>?</b><br />
BS: We are going forward with <i>Dark Age</i> in new ways, starting with an official “Web Update” for the Kukulkani coming very soon. We will be using our website downloads section a lot more to update factions, repair card typos, adjust for balance mistakes (we all make them, unfortunately), and such, but when we have BIG releases or faction/story-wide events that need more pomp and circumstance, we will put together a faction book. Eventually, we will release a compilation of the Web Update stuff, too… but only when we have enough to make it worth the customers’ while – no tiny splat book syndrome here! So, things like the emergence of the Dragyri Shadow Caste or a new evolution within the Brood, those require a published product.<br />
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In all of our books and web updates we will write narratives and further the overall story of <i>Dark Age</i>, but it is a matter of scope. In a Web Update, we will focus on the changes to the faction involved, maybe getting a little bit into the overall story, whereas a fully published book will have a heavy narrative element that will talk about all the factions – and more. Effectively we want to grow our world in small steps, space out the changes we make, and even the game as we go. A fair game is what we want; at least fair between players – the models themselves are pretty much screwed from Jump Street! <br />
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<b>DM: Where do you see <i>Dark Age</i> going in the near future? What are your long-term hopes for the game?</b><br />
BS: Well, in the near future we have the update and new releases for the Kukulkani, the long-awaited reveal of the Shadow Caste in the Dragyri book shortly thereafter, and then an update to the expansive CORE robotic hordes. That’s the rules and models part of it, as for the narrative… well, that is another story (pun definitely intended that time). <br />
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The Shadow Caste coming out to play is like breaking every rule of Fight Club all at once, and Samaria is about to get a heaping helping of violent interaction. The spidery Dragyri had a ton of little threads wrapped around their talons, and now that they are up and out of hiding – a lot of those puppets are about to dance. <br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bhab3EYgL-8/V17acA9CS3I/AAAAAAAAAK4/Yt9oEeASCf44y1Sc_8AWhalcxj_Y8SBhQCLcB/s1600/amabilia.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bhab3EYgL-8/V17acA9CS3I/AAAAAAAAAK4/Yt9oEeASCf44y1Sc_8AWhalcxj_Y8SBhQCLcB/s320/amabilia.jpg" width="226" /></a>As for the long term, the number one thing that I would like to see out of the game is a driving force of games being played all over the world for people trying to become "Immortalized" as a model in our annual Immortals tournament and March To Immortality event circuit. The “MTI” (as it is commonly phrased) is about to get a little shift in how it happens, beginning with this 2017 Circuit, and I really think that people are going to enjoy climbing toward our Immortals event in Atlanta, Georgia at the Cool Mini or Not Expo next spring. Basically, I want the game to be as popular as other skirmish games like <i>Malifaux</i>, <i>Infinity</i>, and eventually my old alma mater, <i>Warmachine</i>. Once people get to playing it, reading our stories, and seeing all the fantastic new sculpts and re-sculpts in the <i>Dark Age</i> line, it will be an easy sell, so to speak.<br />
<b><br />DM: For people who are entirely new to <i>Dark Age</i>, how would you advise them to get started? What resources are there for them to draw on?</b><br />
BS: For beginners that aren’t getting to play in starter games at a convention or an official Legion (our demo team) store event, I’d say the first place to stop would be <a href="http://www.dark-age.com/" target="_blank">www.dark-age.com</a> to peruse the factions, the gallery of models, and maybe download the basic rules. Also, hopping to our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/darkageminis/?fref=ts" target="_blank">Facebook page</a> (or the very popular fan group on Facebook, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/183757445321780/" target="_blank"><i>Dark Age: Samaria Reborn</i></a>) and asking questions is always a good way to find out what’s what. For a game about everything being thrown to hell in a proverbial handbasket, we have a very tight and friendly community that is growing every week. I hope it continues to do so as we move forward. A good community is the foundation to a successful game, that is my belief.Twisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-60163827825107517242016-03-29T12:57:00.000+01:002016-03-29T12:57:54.568+01:00KULT: Divinity Lost Design Team interviewed by David McWilliam<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fJAh3TZOuhg/VvphmV5dMgI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/c3cMHSYTXNAmx1-GMvjOMa3MPX_8HO2Yg/s1600/KULT%2BPain.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fJAh3TZOuhg/VvphmV5dMgI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/c3cMHSYTXNAmx1-GMvjOMa3MPX_8HO2Yg/s320/KULT%2BPain.jpg" width="213" /></a>Robin Liljenberg, Head Writer and Designer, started working on the origins of <i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i> back in 2010, as a small, Swedish, downloadable fan-hack to the RPG <i>Apocalypse World</i>. He came in contact with Marco and Petter, who saw the potential and together developed the game slowly into a fully-fledged RPG, fit for 2016.<br /><br />Petter Nallo, Creative Director, has been involved professionally with RPG development and writing since the turn of the millennium. He headed the development of one of Sweden’s biggest fantasy RPGs, <i>Eon</i>, for over ten years, then co-wrote the critically-acclaimed and Game-of-the-Year-awarded <i>Noir</i> – a dystopic horror RPG set in a dreamy fictional film-noir world, together with Marco.<br /><br />Marco Behrmann, Project Lead, is an RPG-industry veteran, and was co-founder of Sweden’s largest RPG publisher during the 1990s. Besides writing and publishing <i>Eon</i> and <i>Noir</i>, he has been involved with classic Swedish RPGs such as the cyberpunk <i>Neotech</i> and historical <i>Viking</i>.<br /><br />Marco and Petter, together with other partners, run one of Sweden’s biggest RPG publishing houses, Helmgast AB.<br /><br /><i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i> is about to enter the final 48 hours of its <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1037361623/kult-divinity-lost-horror-roleplaying-game-rpg/description" target="_blank">Kickstarter campaign</a>.<br /><br /><b>DM: One of the most fascinating elements of <i>KULT</i> is its relationship to Gnosticism and the idea that reality is just an illusion. How would you describe <i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i> to someone who is unaware of its history?</b><br />PN: I think that the Gnosticism is something you discover when you dive into the game. To a newcomer, I would describe <i>KULT</i> as a modern role playing game of personal horror. The game is set in the world as we know it, except that what we know is a lie. Some of us have started to see through the veil that has been drawn over our eyes, to see that the world we live in is far darker and more dangerous. There are ancient beings living in our midst, hidden doorways and gates to other worlds. And we as humans are also the source of our greatest horrors, where our nightmares, hidden fears, passions, and dark desires may come to life to haunt us. It is grotesque, fantastic, and beautiful at the same time. And it does not hold its punches, but goes to places where most other horror RPGs wouldn’t dare to.<br /><br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hj42JYaUxIU/VvphOjgkRWI/AAAAAAAAAPM/OLxKNxzEUMEG5sZjuqVZ5-57olHiqWtbQ/s1600/KULT%2BDark%2BAngel.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hj42JYaUxIU/VvphOjgkRWI/AAAAAAAAAPM/OLxKNxzEUMEG5sZjuqVZ5-57olHiqWtbQ/s400/KULT%2BDark%2BAngel.jpg" width="400" /></a><br /><br />RL: I usually describe it as a game with a unique feeling of horror and vulnerability that other horror tabletop RPGs can’t recreate. <i>KULT</i> has this fantastic and complex universe with cool mysteries, weird designs, and philosophical groundwork that haunts you after you have experienced it. When you play it, you realise that this game is one of a kind.<br /><br /><b>DM: What changes have you made to the setting and system to update <i>KULT</i> for 2016?</b><br />PN: We have left the 90s behind us and updated the setting for 2016.<i> KULT</i> primarily takes place in our day and age, so the game has been revitalised with a modern setting where social media, the internet, and global politics are intertwined with the mythos of the game.<br /><br />We decided not to use the old system from <i>KULT</i>, and instead created a completely new system based on the <i>Apocalypse World</i> engine, but rewritten and adapted for <i>KULT</i>. We wanted a fast-paced system where the rules always drive the story forward and which is really simple to understand for new players. We have had several groups of playtesters, many of which have never played an RPG before, and none of them have had any trouble to understand how the rules work.<br /><br />RL: I loved the dark secrets and disadvantages in the first edition of <i>KULT</i>, but felt that they weren’t integrated to the storytelling mechanism. When I designed <i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i>, my number one goal was to find a way to create stories using the characters’ dark secrets and disadvantages as generators of plots and horror. It’s really easy to create stories the way the system works. The system helps the narrator to use dark secrets as background plots on which to build stories, and by letting disadvantages generate suggestions for events and twists. I think a tabletop RPG in 2016 should have a system that supports you to play the game as the creators intend you to. In <i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i>, the system will help you create dark horror stories with antiheroes haunted by their past, destined for great deeds or horrible fates. Every story will have its own life because of how the system integrates with the storytelling.<br /><br /><b>DM: Quite often, contemporary horror RPGs avoid linking their supernatural mythology to current political events. Can you give an example of how this works in <i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i>?</b><br />PN: <i>KULT</i>’s primary setting is our world, Elysium. The different powers (mainly the Archons and the Death Angels) that try to control us have their presence all around us. And, naturally, they are connected to the political events of our time. The Death Angel Hareb-Serap, for example, thrives on conflict, and tries to cause conflict. The being is also strongest in areas with a lot of conflict, such as today's Syria. On the other hand, the Archon Geburah is strongest where there are strict and clear laws and rules that entrap mankind and is of course strongest in police states with limited freedom. So, the influences of these beings sort of moves and shifts and changes in power and domain as the world changes - or they change the world. You also wanted an example. Well, even if it is not a current political event, 9/11 has a clear connection to the mythos of <i>KULT</i>.<br /><br /><b>DM: The concept of dark secrets is intriguing as a way of allowing the players to shape the horrors they will face. Will this edition of <i>KULT</i> focus on more personal stories than prior versions?</b><br />RL: In campaign mode, the players will shape the background of the story together with the GM. This type of play style will create very personal stories where the characters’ dark secrets are the focus. If the GM wants to prepare a scenario instead, she will control how much the characters’ dark secrets are connected to background of the story. I recommend always having some connections as it make the characters more important to the plot. The system for disadvantages also helps the GM to shape the story around the characters. The degree of personal horror is still up to the GM.<br /><br /><b>DM: Aside from previous editions of <i>KULT</i>, which influences have you been drawing on most while revisiting the mythology?</b><br />PN: <i>KULT</i> always had a close bond to the early work of Clive Barker. That bond is still intact. But we have also drawn inspiration from authors like Neil Gaiman and his fantastical and wondrous worlds that are interwoven with our own. The violence and cynical nature of Bret Easton Ellis and his book <i>American Psycho</i>, and the beautiful violence of Cormac McCarthy’s <i>Blood Meridian</i>. When we come to movies we have visited the twisted worlds of David Lynch (<i>Lost Highway</i>, <i>Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me</i>), and Lars von Trier (<i>Antichrist</i>), as well as David Cronenberg and TV shows like <i>Mr Robot</i>, <i>True Detective</i>, and <i>Masters of Horror</i>. But the book’s mythos chapters have their own particular inspiration, often rooted in the bizarre; grotesque, but also beautiful.<br /><br /><b>DM: Will the magic system still draw on elements of real-world occult belief systems? If so, how will they be integrated into the updated setting?</b><br />RL: The magic system in <i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i> is based on the magician’s belief in herself. The ritual is a tool for the magician to focus her powers, but can differ between different cultures. For example, a death magician could be a Brazilian Quimbanda practitioner as well as a traditional western occultist. Their belief systems and rituals are different, but it doesn’t matter as the magician’s power comes from within, not the powers she is invoking. A magician can do a lot of things that lie inside her school of magic, but more powerful rituals pose greater costs and graver dangers. There is of course a possibility to make pacts with demons, angels, and old gods. These pacts can give the human servant great powers, but they aren’t magic in nature and have different rules than the magic system. We also explain how magical artefacts work and how they can influence stories. A magical artefact in <i>KULT</i> is more likely to be like the puzzle box in <i>Hellraiser</i>: a mystical thing of great power that’s very dangerous to use.<br /><br />PN: It is important to understand that in the mythos of <i>KULT</i>, we are all divine. How close you are to accessing those powers often depends more on you as an individual than the exact practice. Rituals and artefacts are ways to gain access to these latent forces within us. You can't just read books and learn spells—you need to expand your mind and find the nature of your own soul. So a person can be hell-bent on learning magic but never learn anything, because he or she is just staring blindly at the page, while another person may discover magic by accident. It is all about who you are.<br /><br /><b>DM: One Stretch Goal on the <i>KULT: Divinity Lost Kickstarter</i> that has caught many of the old players’ imaginations is the prospect of an English translation of <i>The Black Madonna</i> campaign. What is this and why is it so prized?</b><br />PN: <i>The Black Madonna</i> was the first massive campaign for <i>KULT</i>. It was never translated or released in English back in the day, which left the fans eagerly wanting it, and many probably lost hope of ever seeing or playing it. We intend to change that. <br /><br />The campaign, as such, became legendary in Sweden. The events of the campaign started during WWII in Russia and reaches its peak with the characters in our time. It is a story with a lot of complex characters that have many of the classic pieces of an epic adventure puzzle. Dark magic, beings from the dream world, intrigues by higher powers, mental institutions, and several different parts of the world where the story takes place. From Berlin to Russia, and into the Dream World. The campaign will be updated to the new rule system and also tweaked at some places and patched here and there.<br /><br /><b>DM: What are your hopes for building and expanding the game line with this Kickstarter and beyond?</b><br />RL: My hope is that we will write books for <i>KULT</i> for years to come and explore new aspects of its universe together with the fans. I also hope that we can find talented people in the RPG scene to contribute as writers and artists to <i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i> in future supplements. <i>KULT: Divinity Lost</i> will reanimate the game for both old and new fans. Hopefully, this edition will invite people who are new to the horror genre to roleplay stories in the <i>KULT</i> universe. <br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YYhD9P25LUA/Vvph-Y9nv_I/AAAAAAAAAPc/7x6dSdOdnZATnksiI0DqFclvsEWFBdwLw/s1600/KULT%2BNoir.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YYhD9P25LUA/Vvph-Y9nv_I/AAAAAAAAAPc/7x6dSdOdnZATnksiI0DqFclvsEWFBdwLw/s640/KULT%2BNoir.jpg" width="482" /></a>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-32703706000410594902015-11-11T13:00:00.000+00:002015-11-11T13:00:51.493+00:00M. John Harrison interviewed by Tim Franklin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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M. John Harrison is the author of eleven genre-melting novels, ranging from fantasy to metaphysical <i>Kefahuchi Tract</i> space opera trilogy of <i>Light</i>, <i>Nova Swing</i>, and <i>Empty Space</i>. He is also the co-author with Jane Johnson of the <i>Tag, the Cat</i> series, under the name Gabriel King. His collected fantasy stories are available from Fantasy Masterworks as <i>Viriconium</i>, while his 1975 space opera <i>The Centauri Device</i> is in the SF Masterworks, though he's not fond of that one. His many short stories were most recently collected as <i>Things that Never Happen</i>, due a reprint in 2016, and he blogs prolifically at <a href="https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">The M. John Harrison Blog</a>. Among other awards and nominations, <i>Nova Swing</i> won the 2007 Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick awards, while his realist novel <i>Climbers</i> won the 1989 Boardman Tasker Prize for writing about climbing.<br />
romance, most recently the <br />
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<b>TF: Your stories often have characters confronting a kind of weird ecstasy - the Pleroma in <i>Course of the Heart</i>, or Anna Kearney's experiences in <i>Empty Space</i>. The audience for Twisted Tales might be familiar with the dark side of ecstasy - the confrontation with cosmic horror that comes in a Lovecraft story - but for your characters and the reader the encounter is far less conclusive, far more confusing, if potentially just as devastating. Could you talk a little about ecstasy and your stories?</b><br />
MJH: That's true. And the characters in the more mainstream stories, like <i>Climbers</i>, suffer (I think that's the right word) a kind of secular ecstasy, which you might describe as the ecstasy of simply being alive. It's that aspect of the encounter with the sublime--which you would see as often in Kerouac as in Machen or Hildegard of Bingen--that interests me. The idea that if something ordinary sits at the heart of the mystical experience, then, equally, something profound lies at the heart of the ordinary. You can make that statement in either direction, of course, and frame the subsequent argument to your taste. Some mornings I'm a shade more interested in finding the profane at the heart of the sacred than I am the sacred at the heart of the profane. A certain restlessness around that is where I'd locate the 'horror' in my fiction, that's where it has something in common with the horror tradition. But Lovecraft's anxiety of the unknowable, his sense that it must always be undermining of the human, is of less interest to me. It seems frame-dependent. I'm very much in favour of inexplicability as an essential component of human experience. Aickman quotes Sacheverell Sitwell's for his epigraph to <i>Cold Hand in Mine</i>: 'In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation'.<br />
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<b>TF: Your characters often seem caught by that irreducibility. The <i>Climbers</i> are conscious of their trajectory towards an entangled ecstasy / annihilation, which they see in terms of routes mastered and cartilage ruined, but they wouldn't think of quitting. At the opposite end, those characters who try to deny the sublime, like Lucas and Pam in <i>Course of the Heart</i> or Michael Kearney in <i>Light</i>, become stunted, half-lived people. Is there a middle way?</b><br />
MJH: Not if you want to map the tension between the two, no. But I think most of us eventually find a way of living with it. Of course, that's a defeat as far someone like Choe Ashton (<i>Signs of Life</i>) is concerned. I'm not sure I'd describe Lucas Medlar as the stunted one in <i>Course of the Heart</i>--he's still struggling at the end, in fact like all good fictional ephebes he disappears *into* his struggle. I still have real hopes that he's out there, trying to get it. The stunted one in that novel is the narrator. He's kept his life on an even keel, denied his actual aliveness much more successfully than Lucas, and he'll never find the Coeur or understand that there was something to find. I'm interested in how these dichotomies translate to the newer stuff--the <i>KT</i> novels, for instance, where the struggle to experience profane ecstasy is sidelined, even satirised, in the self-parodic fates of characters like Paulie deRaad and Ed Chianese. Anna Kearney decides to live 'for herself' but despite her narcissism doesn't know how. And in characters like RI Gaines and his daughter Alyssia, the issues have begun to shift elsewhere. This is visible in the eponymous characters of the short story "Cave & Julia". I don't know what it means yet, but I dare say the fiction will tell me in the end.<br />
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<b>TF: It's definitely moving. At the end of <i>Light</i> - and I mean into the very last words, which I won't spoil for readers of the interview who might not have read the book - there was an immense sense of forgiveness and possibility as the characters realise their transcendental possibilities in a cosmic event. It was exhilarating and, ironically for something with so much narrative possibility, it feels like a conclusion. Then in the next <i>Kefahuchi Tract</i> novels the sublime and the drive to find it moves sideways, still present but not at the narrative knot in the way it is in <i>Light</i> or the earlier <i>Signs of Life</i> or <i>Course of the Heart</i>. Did that culmination and change have anything to do with your return to capital letters Sci-Fi in <i>Light</i>?</b><br />
MJH: Not directly, I think. But those books were liberating in all sorts of ways. Curiously--given that we're talking about space opera, with its stress on movement, colour and imagery--the major liberation was in terms of character. Much of that was to do with elbow room. You have a lot of it in a space opera, and if I had more, I felt as if I could allow the characters more, too. Anna, Liv Hula, Helen Alpert, all got free and did interesting things. Some of the minor characters, like Anna's daughter (who was intended originally to be just a voice on the other end of the phone--a kind of invisible chorus commenting on Anna's ditziness), got free and did interesting things. Even the Assistant, that robot adolescent wet dream of sci-fi gaming, got free and did some interesting things. I took a lot of the impulses that lay behind the material and started to try and understand them through short stories like 'Animals', 'Cave & Julia', and 'Getting Out of Here'. The new short story volume, if it ever gets published, will show this as a process. (Although other processes were involved there too: my blog, for instance, has been a massively valuable halfway house between fiction and nonfiction, which run in and out of one another throughout the collection.)<br />
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<b>TF: Reading several of your stories, a reader is likely to find repeated scenes and archetypes and imagery which return in different arrangements, with different significances, as though your writing is a long and dreamy thought process picking at problems - not necessarily to solve, but to find some of the edges. Are there any problems that you've so exercised they no longer feed into that process? And what are the main feedstuffs at the moment?</b><br />
MJH: I don't think they're problems, so much as images that my head won't let go of until I've attached them to a concept (philosophical, scientific, political) and a character-- then via the character to some aspect of being alive. They occur and recur, combine and recombine, switch one another on and off like genes, reverse their meanings, invert each other's meanings. It's less a thought process (though plenty of thinking goes on) than a process of imagination. The biggest kick I ever get is to find myself pursuing some group of images without knowing why, so I look at the story I've produced and haven't the slightest fucking idea who wrote it. It's like being reborn again and again. Since 2008 I seem to have been obsessed with water; archaic hominin introgressions in the 'modern' human genome; a kind of bloodless mystic butchery; tainted business cults; shadowy UKIP rites that make Freemasonry seem sane.<br />
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<b>TF: I'm not sure if I'm reassured or nervous that your stories are as mysterious to you as to the rest of us. It makes your meticulous prose (I think it was China Mieville who called it 'writing with a scalpel') and disarming ability to convey life and the world a little easier to reconcile with a human author if the writing process didn't all go through the forebrain; conversely it suggests the intrusion of dangerous metaphysics (non-euclidean geometries, chthonian intellects, etc.) in the gap. Assuming that you don't wake from a fugue once every few years to find a manuscript on your computer desktop, how do you train your imaginings into satisfying stories?</b><br />
MJH: If everything 'went through the forebrain' we wouldn't have imaginative writing of any kind; but, yes, once the mass of material has suggested the direction it wants to take, and perhaps even fallen into pre-written units, it needs to be encouraged into shape. That can take a lot of work, or it can happen across a couple of hours. I look for connections between levels, opportunities for parallel and contrast. Echoing. Shaping rather than plot, but plenty of narrative push-through. Syntactical connections between scenes, just as you'd have between the elements of a sentence, are very important, because they manage the emotional, the political, the human logic. Then a few simple formal rules about when you make a reveal, how you prepare for it--because most of the short fiction is revelatory and epiphanic (though often enough the reveal is that nothing is revealed, and the epiphany is fairly oblique). I'm interested in scale and narrative grain. I use the iterative a lot to manage time, and to control the reader's distance from the events as they 'happen'. One of my favourite structural units is the two-line drop: you can cram a lot into that. If I use a traditional form or trope, that's usually to break it in some way, or refuse the closure it suggests. I often use structures out of nonfiction. I often use a 'character study' as the basis of the structure. All that is controlled through the surface. I often use a surface from one genre to control content from another.<br />
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<b>TF: I'd like to pick up on the idea of refusing closure. Your stories are not conciliatory, sometimes even antagonistic - I'm thinking of some of the <i>Viriconium </i>stories. What does that offer you?</b><br />
MJH: To begin with it was a bare-faced trolling of the f/sf reader, a way of seeming to offer what f/sf normally offers, then snatching it away by allowing the story to fall into a kind of absurdism. That was an act of metafiction, a criticism of the genre. From there, it became a way of exploring the refusal of closure as an act in itself--really, as a matter of technique; then of its potential as a political act. Now I'm interested in using it to look at individual emotional experience (which comes with an automatic political component anyway). When I began writing flash fiction and nonfiction on my blog in 2007, I realised that I could bring method and content together by making the fiction a kind of lost property department, or missing persons department, in stories of self-storage units or of people who make the decision to 'become lost in their own life'. Around then I finally felt that I had shed the original trolling dynamic of the technique, and discovered a less limited, perhaps more positive purpose for it. Probably the best way to define what I'm doing now is to quote the piece I put up on my blog today--<br />
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'The structure of the story, as it is engaged by the reader, should have a similar effect to that of discovering a selection of items in a container of unlabelled material from someone else’s life. The end of the story, instead of providing closure, tries to recreate the moment in which some fragments of evidence–which might not actually be evidence–flicker together to suggest the possibility of a pattern that might never have been there anyway. Glimpses of emotional meaning that shift with the light, framed by uncertain nostalgias. The sense of briefly understanding or failing to understand emotional states that you might, anyway, have invented. The aim of the writer is not to become an exhibitor of found objects, but instead to not quite succeed in curating that which might or might not have been there in the first place. There is, obviously, a politics to that, and it always produces, by definition, a story of ghosts, if not an actual ghost story.'<br />
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<b>TF: 'Bare-faced trolling of the f/sf reader' would have been a fun cover blurb for the Masterworks <i>Viriconium</i>. You've been telling stories with ghosts, echoes, apparitions for decades; the Shrander, the manifestations of/from the Pleroma, the Shadow Boys, even the Reborn Men and New Men if I'm stretching the definition. Humanish presences that linger, or (at the more MR Jamesy end of things) inhuman shades that pursue (though not for Jamesian reasons). Then there's <i>Empty Space: A Haunting</i>. For want of a better way to put the question: what is it with you and spooks?</b><br />
MJH: Ghosts, hauntings, accidental interleavings of time or continua, faux retro, the slipperiness of perception, things which might be there or might not--all part of the armoury of the uncanny. In the <i>KT</i> trilogy, everything, from Shadow Boy to advertisement to human being, is made of information, and information is always slipping away into new combinations and meanings. It's another way of asking the reader, 'Is there anything on this page but letters? Is there anyone to read it who isn't made of slippage?' Then hauntology, of course: 'that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive'. And there's pure nostalgia--the haunting by an old photograph, or by a photograph not yet taken, a condition not yet reached, letters not yet written on pages. An old building is already a kind of haunting, an outcrop of the past into the present. As you say, ghosts or something like them are central to my stuff. I can't say I believe in them per se, though. They're grist to the mill, they facilitate certain kinds of fictional structures, which are in turn the best way of handling ontological or epistemological issues, the big question to myself as well as the reader: knock knock, is anyone there?<br />
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<b>TF: There's a comparison back to the numinous (and Lovecraftian) there - a panghostliness, a cosmic haunting. A world-as-specter. I'm writing this the day before you talk at the Twisted Tales of the Weird event in the Manchester Gothic Festival, and as a parting question, I wondered if you could talk a bit about the weird and maybe how it relates to the other characteristics of your work we've covered - absurd, inconclusive, sci-fantastical, ecstatic haunted, romantic, surreal, et al. Maybe your thoughts going into or coming away from the panel? Also, can we plug your next book? Does it have a street date yet? I'm really really glad to see that <i>Course of the Heart</i>, <i>Signs of Life</i>, and <i>Things that Never Happen</i> are set for reprints in September 2016. </b><br />
MJH: Aickman's 'Bind Your Hair' shows the obliquity and reserve I'd associate with a sort of English Weird; symbolism that doesn't quite mesh with--or even entirely admit to--its own subject matter. For me the Weird was always a kind of perverted or broken Imagism. It was also, for instance, permission to write SF on a philosophical chassis that the Church of Sci-Fi would consider bad or heretical theology, ie the proposition that the universe is not innately knowable.<br />
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As I said above, I like it best when I'm producing work I don't yet fully comprehend: writing then becomes a way of working towards that comprehension. I was pretty much finished with the <i>KT</i> trilogy in those terms by 2008, although I'd only just started the third book. That phase was closing; at the same time, new material was turning up. My intention was to take a break from space opera and explore that, but circumstances didn't allow. So since I finished <i>Empty Space</i> I've been working my way back into that material, trying to recoup it and beat the exhaustion that came from not dealing with it while it was fresh.<br />
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New work: there's a collection of short stories which, though it goes back as far as 2001, is primarily made of this new stuff, including flash fiction from the blog. It's finished, it's with my agent, but I haven't a clue when--or even if--it will be published. And there's a new novel grinding its way into the same seam of ideas. Neither of them have titles yet. The novel is Weird, set in the present--uncompromising but, I hope, funny.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-1138949740372859862015-09-30T12:29:00.003+01:002015-09-30T12:33:19.538+01:00Twisted Tales of The Weird<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Twisted Tales of The Weird</b></div>
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<b>5-8PM Friday 23rd October 2015</b></div>
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John Rylands Library</div>
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Manchester</div>
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M3 3EH</div>
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With the seemingly unstoppable rise of Lovecraftian cosmic horror across twenty-first-century media, as well as an array of superb literary fiction spearheaded by prophets of the New Weird such as China Miéville and Steph Swainston, The Weird has never been so popular. But what is it? Ann and Jeff VanderMeer characterize it as representing ‘the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane’. For Michael Moorcock, The Weird appeals because ‘it is designed to disturb’. Drawing on avant-garde narrative practices and elements of Gothic horror, science fiction, and fantasy, The Weird defies classification while simultaneously commanding a devoted following; its anarchic defiance towards generic classification lends it great imaginative freedom. The John Rylands Library will provide the neo-Gothic setting for Twisted Tales of The Weird, an evening of readings by some of the finest writers in the contemporary scene, a panel discussion about the mode, and a Q&A with the audience.<br />
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<a href="https://cdn.evbuc.com/eventlogos/16985621/mjh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://cdn.evbuc.com/eventlogos/16985621/mjh.jpg" width="200" /></a><b>M. John Harrison</b> is one of the most influential writers of weird fiction that the UK has produced. Perhaps best known for his <i>Viriconium</i> sequence (1971-84) and <i>The Kefahuchi Tract</i> trilogy (2002-12), for which he won the James Tiptree, Jr Award, Arthur C Clarke Award, and Philip K Dick Award, he also coined the term ‘New Weird’ and remains an innovator in the field.<br />
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<b>Helen Marshall</b> is an author, editor, and medievalist. Her two collections of short stories, <i>Hair Side, Flesh Side</i> (2012) and <i>Gifts for the One Who Comes After</i> (2014), have been up for the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Aurora Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. She lives in Oxford, England.<br />
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<b>Timothy J. Jarvis</b> is a writer and scholar with an interest in the antic, the weird, the strange. His first novel, <i>The Wanderer</i>, was published in the summer of 2014. His short-fiction has appeared in <i>Caledonia Dreamin’</i> and <i>Leviathan 4: Cities</i>, among other places. He lives in East London.<br />
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<br />Twisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-51181916172001230212015-06-15T15:50:00.001+01:002015-06-15T15:50:44.503+01:00Harold Schechter interviewed by David Schmid<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YZHgT5Lteww/VX7f911ybcI/AAAAAAAAALU/LuMHRhvaxsM/s1600/Harold%2BSchechter.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YZHgT5Lteww/VX7f911ybcI/AAAAAAAAALU/LuMHRhvaxsM/s320/Harold%2BSchechter.jpg" width="211" /></a>Harold Schechter is an American true-crime writer who specializes in serial killers, with books such as <i>Depraved</i>, <i>Fiend</i>, <i>Deranged</i>, and <i>Deviant</i>. He is Professor of American Literature and Popular Culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. His most recent book, <i>The </i><i>Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation</i> (2014), was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America in the ‘Best Fact Crime’ category.<br />
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For more information, visit: <a href="http://haroldschechter.com/">http://haroldschechter.com/</a><br /><b></b><br />
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<b><br />DS: How do you define true crime?</b><br />HS: As I understand it, true crime is a genre of narrative nonfiction whose typical subject is (to use a popular Victorian phrase) 'horrible murder'. While it is common among moral crusaders to see our current infatuation with true crime as a dispiriting symptom of the debased sensibilities of our sensation-steeped culture, the truth is that the appetite for tales of real-life murder, the more horrific the better, has been a perennial feature of human society. In the old days, before the invention of movable type, accounts of shocking homicides were disseminated among the peasantry in the form of orally transmitted crime ballads: versified narratives of real-life stabbings, stranglings, bludgeonings, dismemberments, and the various forms of familicide. Gutenberg’s invention made it possible for his successors to profit from the undying human need for morbid titillation. Whenever a particularly ghastly killing occurred, it was promptly written up in either doggerel or prose and printed on broadsheets or in crudely made pamphlets to be sold by itinerant peddlers. From those primitive beginnings, the genre evolved into the illustrated proto-tabloids of the Victorian era, the pulp magazines and dimestore paperbacks of the early twentieth century, and the legitimately literary works of the post-Capote era. <br /><br />
<b>DS: You’ve had a prolific and very successful career as a true-crime writer. What attracts you to the genre? Are there any writers or texts that are particularly influential on how you write and what you want to achieve?</b><br />HS: I suppose to fully answer that question, I'd have to consult with a shrink. Putting aside the issue of my personal psychology, however--guilt-ridden fantasy, unresolved Oedipal conflict, that kind of thing--I have, as an academic myth critic, a professional interest in true crime. Specifically, I have always been intrigued by the human need for stories about archetypal monsters. To me, true crime is essentially fairytale horror for grownups. You see that clearly in the kind of supernatural nicknames tabloid writers invent for certain homicidal maniacs: ‘The Night Stalker’, ‘The Vampire of Sacramento’, ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson’. These real-life criminals awaken infantile fantasies of supernatural demons lurking in the shadows, turning us all into awe-struck children again. It's why certain criminals--Ed Gein, for example, the model for <i>Psycho</i>'s Norman Bates and Leatherface of <i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i> and the subject of my first true-crime book, <i>Deviant</i>--achieve a mythic status in the culture. Those are the particular kinds of killers I'm interested in writing about. In fact, when I first started out, I thought, immodestly enough, that I was creating a new genre, not 'true crime' but 'true horror': nonfiction accounts of actual criminals who seemed like the flesh-and-blood incarnations of the kinds of ogres encountered in myth and folklore.<br /><br />As for the second part of your question, I have, like virtually everyone working seriously in the genre for the last fifty years, been deeply influenced by <i>In Cold Blood</i>. But I have also been influenced by my lifelong immersion in horror cinema. To create certain narrative effects in my books, I consciously look at the ways specific scenes in my favorite horror movies have been shot and edited in order to produce tension, suspense, shock, etc. And then I try to replicate those effects in prose. What do I hope to achieve in a larger sense? In addition to producing compelling narratives--transforming newspaper articles, trial transcripts, prison records, and other primary source material into (hopefully) page-turning stories--I like to think that I am creating definitive accounts of some of our nation's most historically significant murder cases. Since I also believe that you can learn as much about a particular era from its signature crimes as from its politics or pop entertainments, I also see my books as a form of social history.<br /><br /><b>DS: Do you think that true crime can or should have any kind of social utility in order to be successful? If so, what is true crime useful for?</b><br />HS: That crime is inseparable from civilization--not an aberration but an integral and even necessary component of our lives--is a notion that has been advanced by various thinkers. Picking up on Plato’s famous observation that the virtuous man dreams what the wicked man does, Freudians argue that violent lawbreakers make it possible for the rest of us to adapt to the demands of normality by acting out (and getting punished for) our own forbidden impulses. In the view of Émile Durkheim, the criminal contributes to civic well-being not only by promoting a sense of solidarity among law-abiding citizens--who are united in their condemnation of the malefactor--but by providing a cathartic outlet for their primal vengeful impulses. If such theories are valid (and they have much to commend them), then it follows that criminals can only fulfill their social function if the rest of the world knows exactly what outrages they have committed and how they have been punished--which is to say that what the public really needs and wants is to hear the whole shocking story. And this is precisely what true-crime literature provides. <br /><br /><b>DS: With texts like Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ in mind, could you comment on what you see as the role of the Gothic in true crime? Is true crime intrinsically Gothic/horrific, or does it depend on the case and the author’s perspective?</b><br />HS: To give a somewhat roundabout answer: as we all know, there are a dismaying number of ghastly homicides more or less on a daily basis. The vast majority of these generate nothing more than a day or two's worth of coverage before disappearing from the news. A tiny fraction, however, maintain an ongoing grip on the public imagination; some even become a permanent part of our cultural mythology. I've always been interested in why certain crimes--the Leopold and Loeb case, to take one example--exert such lasting fascination, while other equally sensational crimes (e.g., the horrific 1927 abduction-murder of twelve-year-old Marian Parker by William Edward Hickman) quickly fade into obscurity. One of my favorite observations about this very issue was made in 1836 by James Gordon Bennett, publisher of our nation's first sensationalistic ‘penny paper’, the New York Herald and the acknowledged father of American tabloid journalism. During his coverage of the famous case of the murdered New York City prostitute, Helen Jewett, Bennett wrote: ‘Men who have killed their wives, and committed other such everyday matters, have been condemned, executed, and are forgotten, but it takes a deed that has some of the sublime of horror about it to attract attention, rally eloquence, and set people crazy’.<br /><br />Bennett’s insight that the murders people are interested in reading about are those which provide an experience of ‘the sublime of horror’ makes the connection between true crime and the Gothic very clear. It’s why Poe used Bennett’s paper as a source not only for his crime fiction but for certain of his horror tales as well. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, for example, was partly inspired by the Herald’s coverage of the 1840 case of Peter Robinson, who murdered his creditor, Abraham Suydam, and interred the body beneath the floorboards of his basement. <br /><br /><b>DS: What’s your take on the mixture of fact and fiction in true crime? In your own work, how do you balance fidelity to historical fact on the one hand and the need to craft a compelling narrative on the other?</b><br />HS: While <i>In Cold Blood</i> elevated the book-length true-crime narrative to the rarefied heights of serious literature, its author also set an unfortunate precedent by indulging in the kind of novelistic embellishment (not to say rank fabrication) that has become endemic to the form. People who write true crime, of course, aren’t the only authors of creative nonfiction who have been known to improve on the truth. Given the promise of absolute veracity that is embedded in the very name of the genre, however, I believe they have a particular obligation to stick to the facts.<br /><br />Not that I’ve always done so myself. Early in my career, I occasionally allowed myself a bit of what I referred to as ‘extrapolation’ (less euphemistically known as ‘making stuff up’). My unacknowledged credo (cribbed from the first chapter of Ken Kesey’s <i>One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest</i>) was, ‘It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen’. In my own defense, I restricted myself to fairly minor atmospheric details. For example, there's a scene in my book <i>Deranged</i> in which the main character--the wizened cannibal pedophile Albert Fish (using his pseudonym, Frank Howard)--dines with the family of his future child-victim, Grace Budd. Here's how I describe the meal:<br /><br />
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The men retired to the kitchen, a clean but dingy-looking room illuminated by a single bare bulb that tinged the whitewashed walls a sickly yellow. The long wooden table, covered with a plaid oilcloth, held a big cast-iron pot full of ham hocks and sauerkraut--the leftover remains of the previous night’s dinner. The sharp, briny odor of the cabbage filled the room. Arranged around the pot were platters of pickled beets and boiled carrots, a basket of hard rolls, and two ceramic bowls into which Mrs. Budd had transferred Frank Howard’s pot cheese and strawberries.</blockquote>
<br />Now, while this lunch really happened, I took the artistic liberty of inventing the menu. I hasten to say that I did some research into the kind of food a working-class family like the Budds might serve a guest for lunch in the late 1920s. Still, I didn't actually know what they ate--I just wanted to make the moment seem real for the reader.<br /><br />I no longer permit myself even such minor bits of imaginative re-creation. My field is historic true crime--I've covered cases from the Civil War era to the 1950s--and I've come to see the genre as a legitimate branch of American historical study. After all, the Leopold and Loeb case tells us as much about the Jazz Age as Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, just as the Manson murders shed as much light on the culture of late-1960s America as Woodstock. To be taken seriously as history, however, a true-crime book must adhere strictly to documented fact (which is why my last few books have included copious endnotes). There's no reason why a book-length narrative about a nineteenth-century serial murderer shouldn't be held to the same rigorous standards as, for instance, a biography of Teddy Roosevelt.<br /><br />My task, then, as I see it is to produce a serious work of historical scholarship that stays true to the sensationalistic roots of the genre by providing ‘murder fanciers’ (as Edmund Pearson called true-crime lovers) with the primal pleasures they crave. Once I’ve settled on a subject, I launch into my research, a process that generally takes anywhere from a year to a year-and-a-half and involves many long hours of digging through various archives, copying old newspaper-stories from microfilm, getting hold of legal documents, police reports, trial transcripts, and psychiatric records, tracking down and interviewing relatives (of the perpetrator and/or and victims), etc. Before I’m done, I’ll have accumulated several thousand Xeroxed pages plus a small library of books.<br /><br />Shaping this sprawling mass of raw material into a readable narrative is, of course, my main creative challenge. While I'm scrupulous about keeping the content strictly factual, I feel free to manipulate certain formal elements--mostly story structure and point of view--for maximum dramatic effect. <br /><br /><b>DS: Thanks to podcasts like <i>Serial</i> and documentaries like <i>The Jinx</i>, we’ve seen a recent resurgence of interest in true crime. Why do you think it remains a popular genre? </b><br />HS: Simply put: we all, in the darkest recesses of our psyches, want to commit murder. True crime permits us to experience in fantasy what we would never allow ourselves to do in the flesh. It provides a safe, socially acceptable way to satisfy what the art critic Erwin Panofsky calls our ‘primordial instinct for bloodshed and cruelty’. It’s the same reason that Poe remains the most popular of nineteenth-century American authors. <br /><br /><b>DS: What do you see as the future of the genre?</b><br />HS: The only real changes I see have to do with technology--i.e., the ways the stories are transmitted and consumed. There are now entire cable TV channels devoted to true-crime shows, many of which rely heavily on dramatized recreations. I suppose the next step will be virtual reality true crime, where the audience will feel they’re actually wielding the hatchet while administering forty whacks to Andrew Borden’s skull.<br /><br /><b>DS: What are you working on at the moment?</b><br />HS: At this particular moment, I’m working on this interview. I also have a new book coming out in August--<i>Man-Eater</i>--on the legendary Colorado cannibal, Alfred G. Packer (at whose 1883 trial the sentencing judge reputedly said: “Packer, you voracious sonofabitch, there were seven Democrats in Hinsdale County and you ate five of them!”). As for my next project, I’m contemplating a book about Belle Gunness, the infamous, ‘Lady Bluebeard’ of LaPorte, Indiana.<br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YZHgT5Lteww/VX7f911ybcI/AAAAAAAAALU/LuMHRhvaxsM/s1600/Harold%2BSchechter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-3777322657984601372015-03-30T18:54:00.000+01:002015-03-30T20:59:43.745+01:00American Horror Story: Asylum reviewed by Eleanor Beal <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>American Horror Story: Asylum</i> (2012-3)<br />
Created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk<br />
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Brad Falchuck and Ryan Murphy’s <i>American Horror Story</i> aired in 2011 and played out to both criticism and critical acclaim. While <i>Murder House</i> exhibited an astonishing range of horror ingredients from <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> and <i>The Shining</i> to <i>Rosemary’s Baby</i>, likewise, the eagerly awaited second instalment to the <i>American Horror Story</i> anthology, <i>Asylum</i>, plunders from American anti-convent mythology and paranoid conspiracy narratives. There is no doubt that <i>American Horror Story</i> is a masterful lesson in American fictions that make monsters. Yet, the show’s monstrosity is not merely a fictional projection. Instead, it offers demonstration after demonstration of the making of real contemporary monstrosity: gimps, lunatic ex-girlfriends, phantom pregnancies, evangelical scientists, suicides, rapists, Nazis, rednecks, calculating and cruel clergy, maniacal mothers, corrupt fathers, child abductors and serial killers abound.<br />
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The unarguable popularity of <i>American Horror Story</i> shows us that television has come to serve as a convenient vehicle for the articulation of what American society finds truly monstrous in the twenty-first century. <i>Asylum</i> is set in Briarcliff Manor, a sanatorium set up by the Catholic Church for the criminally insane and continues to pose questions of the ‘monsters’ that American culture creates. This includes holding a mirror up to the audience’s voyeurism and seemingly obsessive appetite for the monstrous. <i>Asylum</i> initially opens in the present day and focuses on a couple of sexy, young newly-weds called Teresa and Leo (Jenna Dewan Tatum and Adam Levine) as they honeymoon on horror. In the opening shots, these thrill seekers venture into the abandoned sanatorium and, with much heavy panting and dirty-talk, get-off on the building’s gruesome past. Teresa, reading from a history book, reveals that one of the more notorious inhabitants was a serial killer called ‘Bloody Face’. A diabolic murderer of women so named because he likes to skin and then wear his victims’ faces. The couple are obviously thrilled by the building’s history of violence and mayhem, that is, until fantasy becomes a reality and a psychotic masked killer begins to stalk them through the asylum, ripping them limb from limb.<br />
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How, according to <i>Asylum</i>, did a dubious taste in foreplay, manage to get the hapless young couple violently dismembered? Well, as with all things in <i>American Horror Story</i>, the answer is bound up in the dark, dark past. Subsequently, the series explores the historical events of Briarcliff Manor. Beginning in the 1960s, it follows the stories of several misfits employed by the institution along with the inmates committed to its labyrinthine wards for crimes against normality. The fierce Sister Jude (Jessica Lang) and her sweet-tempered novice, Sister Mary Eunice (Lily Rabe), are charged with the everyday running and maintenance of the institution and with upholding the religious standards set out by its founder Monsignor Timothy Howard (Joseph Fiennes). While the nuns attend to the patients’ spiritual health, their mental and physical care is the domain of Psychiatrist Dr. Oliver Thredson (Zachary Quinto) and scientist Dr. Arthur Arden (James Cromwell). Briarcliff’s latest patient, Kit Walker, aka ‘Bloodyface’ (Evan Peters), is an alleged serial killer and mutilator of women. Walker has been sent to the asylum deemed unfit for trial due to his apparent insanity after claiming that aliens committed the crimes he is accused of.<br />
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Kit’s insane alibi aside, <i>Asylum</i> gives clear indication of his innocence early on and, instead, sets him up to be the focal point through which we experience the fear and injustices perpetrated by institutions of mental health during the 1960s. Yet, despite this <i>Asylum</i> is very much a women’s horror story. As David Simmons pointed out in his <a href="http://twistedtalesevents.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/american-horror-story-reviewed-by-david.html">review of the first season</a>, ‘<i>American Horror Story</i> places an unusual degree of emphasis on its female characters’. The second season continues this trend, reprising key roles for many of season one’s central female actors, including Lange, Rabe and the queen of weird TV, Frances Conroy, as the angel of death. It also introduces a new cast of female monsters and madwomen whose alleged mental disturbances and past crimes are the means through which the series explores a number of social issues related to what we fear. At Briarcliff, Walker meets many other patients with allegedly violent and twisted backgrounds including Pepper (Naomi Grossman), a microcephalic woman who killed her sister’s baby and cut its ears off, Shelley (Chloë Sevigny) a diagnosed nymphomaniac, and Grace (Lizzie Brocheré) an axe-murderer. The standout female performance, however, goes to Sarah Paulson whose vague and unconvincing role as a clairvoyant-for-hire in season one is more than redeemed by her new role in <i>Asylum</i> as ambitious lesbian journalist Lana Winters. Winters infiltrates the formidable Briarcliff determined to expose the wrongdoings being carried out inside its walls. However, when her relationship with a female school teacher is uncovered by Sister Jude, Lana finds herself incarcerated as a patient and referred to Dr. Thredson for help with her ‘affliction’.<br />
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As in the first series, a dominant theme of <i>Asylum</i> is the twisted morals and psychosexual disorders underpinning definitions of normative identity. Along with staple horror figures, the series examines public figures as diverse as the psychiatrist, the doctor, and the priest, representing them as authorised predators at their most imperious, ambitious, and downright evil. As the series progresses, the professional and personal lives of its authority figures are revealed to be adventures in sadism, masochism, self-hatred and perversion. Cue scenes of prolific cruelty including electroshock treatment, ice baths, emotional and physical abuse all delivered with a barely concealed sexual tension. Sister Jude harbours a secret lust for Monsignor Timothy and enjoys punishing the angelic Kit by bending him over a desk and caning his naked backside. Dr. Arden is a Nazi Eugenicist with an obsessive hatred of impurity; particularly it seems of the female sex. This fear guides his mysterious experiments in the basements of Briarcliff and his own dark desires for the innocent and chaste Sister Eunice.<br />
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<i>Asylum</i> preempts the accusations made by some critics that <i>American Horror Story</i> is a ridiculous pileup of mindless sex and cruelty, hard to stomach. From the season’s credit sequence, a montage of strapped-down bodies, heaving bosoms and tear-soaked faces, to the introduction of sex and horror tourists Leo and Teresa, to Kit Walker’s ‘probing’ by ETs, it unashamedly points out that the theme of scary and deviant sex is the series’ dominant metaphor for horror. In pursuit of these ends, <i>Asylum</i> continues to push the boundaries of what is acceptable to air on television. There are horrors upon horrors, brutality upon brutality, humiliation upon humiliation and every twist and turn is set up to both shock and shamelessly titillate. Nonetheless, there is also a deftness with which <i>Asylum</i> pursues some of the seemingly conflicted but entangled cultures that form modern American identity, including its voyeuristic embrace of celebrity, psychiatry, and fundamentalist religion.<br />
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Lana’s story is, in part, about the plight of gay people who historically have been ‘treated’ through medicine and psychiatry in a way that amounts to physical and mental torture. Instead of Thredson ‘curing’ Lana of her lesbianism, he subjects her to a cruel bout of aversion/conversion therapy that involves administering fellatio to an awkward but willing male volunteer as the psychiatrist looks on. As if this upsetting scene were not enough, the plot thickens when Lana becomes the object of Thredson’s own obsessive love disorder causing him to lock her in a basement/dungeon under his house. In one of many plot twists, the handsome and progressive psychiatrist is revealed to be more dangerous than simply a misguided practitioner; he is none other than the serial killer ‘Bloody Face’. In Thredson’s dungeon, we witness him taunt Lana with the dismembered head of her dead lover before enduring queasy scenes of her subjection to violence, rape and the enforced suckling of a grown man. Eventually, Lana escapes only to find she has been impregnated by her sadistic captor. <br />
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There is no doubt that <i>Asylum</i> tackles issues of homophobia, sexism, racism, and disability with a signature heavy-handedness that will not redeem it with outraged moralists. Nevertheless, the premise of the entire <i>American Horror Story</i> anthology is to test the limits of horror and morality by pushing every situation or relationship, real or unreal, to its absolutely worst-case scenario. Others will not fail to see through the layers of violence and horror and recognise the irony of a mummy-fixated psychiatrist or the underlying social commentary about a career driven, homosexual woman enduring the horror of misguided psychiatry and enforced motherhood. Like Lana, all of <i>Asylum</i>’s characters are monstrous, in that they are burdened with behaviours that are deemed to threaten society. However, as the series unfolds within the confines of the asylum walls, it digs into the pasts of patients and employees, making the audience question what monstrosity is. Is Shelley’s excessive lust really a sign of insanity or is she, as she claims, a gendered victim of double standards? Did Grace slaughter her father and stepmother because she is criminally and irredeemably violent, or was it really the desperate act of an abused child? Does Sister Jude really believe that all sex is sin, or is she merely acting out an absolution of her own guilty past? The further the series delves into the origins of its characters’ monstrosity, the more it appears that it is the product of other evils.<br />
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The berserk and vaguely satirical attitude of the series allows Murphy and Falchuk to slip other cultural controversies under the radar and develop sympathetic bonds with the monstrous, often capturing the humanity of those characters that inflict the worse kinds of cruelties. Monsters, in <i>American Horror Story</i>, are very human. Furthermore, they act as mirrors to our own cultural obsessions with the monstrous. As Sister Jude warns ‘if you look in the face of evil, evil is gonna look right back at you’. At the heart of this is a commentary on the grotesquery of our own fascination with violence and monstrosity, a commentary that began with Leo and Teresa but surely finds its antithesis in Lana’s reinvention at the end of the series. Lana more than survives her ordeal; it makes her a star. In 1969 we revisit Lana a year after her escape and witness her reinvention as a celebrity author, peddling in sensationalised and salacious versions of her own heroism and victimisation. As she entertains her fans at a reading of her acclaimed book <i>Maniac: One Woman’s Story of Survival</i>, the camera pans the audience as they sit like evangelicals at a Revival, communing with Lana and her trauma as well as devouring every morbid detail. We cannot help but notice the self-conscious allusion to our own macabre fascination with horror; the same fascination that keeps us glued to our seats throughout <i>American Horror Story</i> and seen the show garner several Emmys, a People’s Choice Award and, for one of its returning actresses, Lange, a Golden Globe. Rather than a criticism of its audience, Lana’s narrative is an exploitation of the public and social ceremony of monstrosity that offers an accomplished and insightful response to the outrage and affront aimed at it by some critics. Horror, it suggests, is an extreme form of art but it is also something from which we take comfort as well as fear, re-evaluate meaning and shape the boundaries of morality.<br />
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Eleanor is Television Editor for Twisted Tales and recently completed her doctoral thesis in English Literature at Lancaster University. Her research concerns the conjunction of Catholicism and sexuality in Gothic fiction and horror film and focuses on its trans-national and contemporary contexts. She is especially interested in the post-secular theologies of transgressive texts and their relationship to history, nationalism, politics and gender theory. Eleanor has published on the topics of religion, female sexuality, cinema and spectacle in relation to postmodern Gothic writing and has previously held the post of postgraduate representative on the editorial board for <i>Gothic Studies</i>.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-18185140176552921462014-10-25T11:57:00.000+01:002014-10-25T11:59:50.537+01:00David Hill Jr interviewed by David McWilliam about 'V20: Dark Ages'<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Iux6hqIAPTU/VEt-scDYzWI/AAAAAAAAAH8/0QoeEGyz6aI/s1600/David%2BHill%2BJr..jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Iux6hqIAPTU/VEt-scDYzWI/AAAAAAAAAH8/0QoeEGyz6aI/s1600/David%2BHill%2BJr..jpg" height="193" width="200" /></a>David A Hill Jr is a writer, game designer, editor, and whatever else people will pay him for. He's currently developer for the <i>Vampire: The Dark Ages</i> line for Onyx Path Publishing, as well as <i>Changeling: The Lost </i>developer. He's worked all over the place, on <i>Shadowrun</i>, <i>Dragon Age</i>, <i>Marvel Heroic Roleplaying</i>, <i>Leverage</i>, <i>Pathfinder</i>, and all manner of stuff. Some of it won Ennie and Origins Awards. He lives in the mountains of Japan with his wife and an absurd number of Gundam model kits. He thinks that makes him a cyberpunk. You can check out his independent games at <a href="http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/2898/Machine-Age-Productions">Machine Age Productions</a>.<br />
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<i>V20: Dark Ages</i> is currently on <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/deluxe-v20-dark-ages">Kickstarter</a>.<br />
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<b>DM: What is <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> and how does it relate to <i>Vampire: The Masquerade</i>?</b><br />
DH: <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> is a spinoff of <i>Vampire: The Masquerade</i>, and <i>Vampire: 20th Anniversary Edition</i> in specific. It's a complete, standalone game set in the mid-thirteenth century. You're playing at a time of impending upheaval and change. In <i>Dark Ages</i>, we're looking over the hills ahead to the Anarch Revolt and the events that cause the formation of the Camarilla and Sabbat. In the modern nights, the Camarilla represents a sort of cultured, ‘proper’ order, whereas the Sabbat represents fanaticism and chaos. The Camarilla is a conspiracy to deny the existence of the impending end of the world. The Sabbat fights that impending end with fire and fury. Without those inherent structures, <i>Dark Ages</i> characters have a lot more room for individual interpretation of our world. We're in a time that redefines what it means to be a vampire clan, because old clans are falling, and new ones are rising. <br />
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1243 is a good time to be a vampire. Of course there are no cell phones or mirrorshades, but the lack of modern forensics and mass media empower vampires to make really hard choices. <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> isn't about whether or not you can kill those that cause you problems; you can. But should you?<br />
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<b>DM: Does this create a sense of impunity with regards to the treatment of mortals? For instance, can vampires openly rule cities and raise armies with which to wage war?</b><br />
DH: It can mean that. What it really means though is, humanity is able to shepherd itself. If you do something egregious and obvious, you’d better have the might to back it up, because there’s always someone ready to knock you down. Maybe it’s a rival vampire. Maybe it’s a witch hunting organization. Maybe it’s just an unruly mob. So yes, some vampires openly rule. But those are typically exceptions, and typically very temporary. The human spirit does not like being broken. <br />
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<b>DM: How did you become the developer for the new <i>Dark Ages</i> line?</b><br />
DH: I've been working with White Wolf/CCP/Onyx Path as a freelancer for about eight years now. I got my start with <i>Werewolf: The Forsaken</i>. Over the years, I've developed a few books, edited a few, and written a ton. There's not much of a grand story behind how I became <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> developer. I've just always had a passion for <i>Dark Ages Vampire</i>, and for <i>Vampire: The Masquerade</i>. When our annual pitch session came up a couple of years ago, I put together a pitch document explaining my vision for a relaunched <i>Dark Ages</i> line. The powers-that-be liked it enough to put me at the helm of the project. <br />
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<b>DM: Does the historical setting fundamentally alter the ways in which vampiric society sees itself?</b><br />
DH: Our historical setting, as I noted, is different in that it redefines clans and sects. It's a time of flux and upheaval. You don't have a Camarilla and Sabbat. We're not entirely sure what clan means, or what it's going to mean. Instead of huge, world-spanning conspiracies, vampires are held together by "Roads", which are religions or philosophies that help them stave off their deeper monstrosity. For example, characters following the Road of Kings believe vampires are better than humans, and that hierarchy is the only true way to order and reason. They believe some vampires are followers, and some are leaders. They just believe they are the natural leaders. Characters following the Road of the Beast are their polar opposite. They believe structure is a way to keep down the spirit, and oppress the perfect predator within every vampire’s heart. So they eschew law and order on principle. Then we get vampires on the Road of Heaven, who believe vampirism comes from divinity, and that every vampire has a higher purpose in their god’s great plan. <br />
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Another big difference is, there's no New York. There's no Chicago. London had less than 40,000 people at the time. Half the major cities in Europe were in the Italian peninsula. This means you can't have vast cities with 200 vampires. Everything's very personal, very visceral. You can't have a gang of ten vampires hating you, because that probably means the entire city is against you. There's also a sense of wonder and exploration we can't really experience in the modern world. <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> is set primarily around Europe. But new trade routes are opening, and with them, new parts of the world open to our vampires. We see vampires coming in from places unknown, bringing their own customs and exciting stories. <br />
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<b>DM: To what extent will the core <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> book support storytellers and players who find the setting appealing but are largely unfamiliar with the historical period? Do you recommend any history books for those who really want to immerse themselves in the Dark Ages?</b><br />
DH: We actually provided some tools for building a believable, authentic-feeling world. As well, I’d consider one of our chief inspirations, Monty Python alumnus Terry Jones’s <i>Medieval Lives</i> and <i>The Crusades</i>. They did a great job of showing what night to night, day to day life in the medieval world was like for the random person, not just for the romanticized nobility. <br />
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<b>DM: Given the centrality of Christianity to European culture during the Dark Ages, does religion play a greater role in terms of threats and the mythology of the World of Darkness in that era?</b><br />
DH: Christianity is a very important element in <i>Vampire: The Dark Ages</i>. The church sometimes acts as a balancing force against the vampires. Sometimes, vampires wield the unknowing church as a weapon. The Crusades are particularly hard on vampires, because there’s a lot of fire, and a lot of daytime fighting. Vampires are urban creatures, and the Crusades destroyed cities. For example, the vampires of Constantinople aren’t that lucky in this era. <br />
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Then again, we want to express that while Christianity is a dominant force in this time and place, it’s not the beginning or end of vampiric existence. After all, many vampires in this era are old enough to remember a time before Christianity. Many have seen stark changes in church doctrine, so they view mortal religion with a cynical eye. We also have influence from pagan cultures, Celtic witchcraft, Slavic animism, classic Egyptian mythology, Islam, and numerous other topics. <br />
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<b>DM: Does vampiric magic play a greater role in a period when belief in the supernatural was far more prevalent than modern nights? </b><br />
DH: Remarkably bigger. In fact, our section on blood magic is huge, and in the Kickstarter, we’ve been able to nearly double that space into a whole glut of sorcery. If you’re interested in magic of all stripes, you can get it in the Dark Ages. From strange Egyptian rituals, to rituals for digging up the unholy blackness of the abyss, to demon summoning, to spells to mitigate problems with medieval travel. <br />
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<b>DM: What are the unique horror role-playing experiences that <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> will offer players and storytellers?</b><br />
DH: This book asks questions which evoke horror. And in places, different questions than your classic <i>Vampire</i> game. What does it mean to be immensely, frighteningly powerful? What does it mean to be alien and withdrawn from the world? What does it mean to be able to end a life the way a normal person could cut a rope? What does it mean to live without consequence? The questions we’re asking with <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> are all about immersing yourself in this terrifying body that you are both in awe of, and feel sorry for. <br />
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<b>DM: How has the release of work-in-progress chapters from <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> through the Onyx Path website influenced your design process?</b><br />
DH: It’s been wonderful. While sometimes it can be challenging to navigate signal through noise, it changes the process entirely. Usually when you develop a game, it’s a one-way street. You write, design, write, design, edit, and publish, and hand this product out to the world. With this method, it’s a back and forth process. You can gauge thematic elements and really feel out what people are interested in.<br />
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<b>DM: What are your plans for the <i>V20: Dark Ages</i> Kickstarter? How would you like to develop the line beyond the core book? </b><br />
DH: What we’re doing is building two companion books. The <i>Tome of Secrets</i> is basically a companion volume of rules and new material for the game. Right now, it features a ton of new sorcery, rules for mass combat, words on vampire knightly orders, and other weirdness. It also features letters in the game universe between characters, showing off the era and setting. The other companion volume is a fiction anthology. Every stretch goal we hit either adds a story to the anthology, or more rules content to the <i>Tome of Secrets</i>. Right now, every backer on the Kickstarter gets whatever they pledged for, as well as the <i>Tome of Secrets</i> and fiction anthology. So it’s a great buy-in, you get at least three books if you even just spring for the PDF level. <br />
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Beyond the Kickstarter, I’d really like to see <i>Dark Ages </i>grow into a full line. I have ideas for setting guides and more material for Asian and African vampires. I’d also like to build on the world with a <i>Dark Ages Werewolf</i> book, <i>Changeling</i> book, maybe <i>Mage</i> and <i>Inquisitor</i>, and other stuff. But that all depends on how successful we are. This Kickstarter’s the first real hand out to the community to find out just how viable a <i>Dark Ages</i> line might be.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-84424213552544390362014-09-08T13:01:00.000+01:002014-09-08T13:01:47.921+01:00Twisted Tales of Austerity<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sYO14nvdGRs/VA2Yljd4XgI/AAAAAAAAAHI/lXN1ksvTFwc/s1600/Horror%2BUncut%2Bcover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sYO14nvdGRs/VA2Yljd4XgI/AAAAAAAAAHI/lXN1ksvTFwc/s1600/Horror%2BUncut%2Bcover.jpg" height="320" width="214" /></a>The politics of austerity are intrinsically connected to fear. In order to redirect anger at worsening living standards in the wake of the economic crisis, scapegoats continue to be
identified and persecuted. The current rolling back of the welfare state
is justified by politicians stoking outrage at benefit fraud while a
largely complicit media distorts the extent to which this actually
occurs. Cuts to public services are combined with sanctions for those
out of work, raising unemployment while also demonizing the unemployed
as a morally reprehensible underclass. Twisted Tales of Austerity will explore how the Gothic can critique the current mainstream political consensus surrounding poverty and the welfare state.<br />
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Join us for readings by authors from <i>Horror Uncut: Tales of Social Insecurity and Economic Unease</i>, a horror anthology for our hard times, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A. Co-editor of <i>Horror Uncut</i>, Tom Johnstone, claims this anthology ushers in a ‘new era of socially engaged but entertaining and darkly funny horror fiction, which may not change the world but will, I hope, change the way we look at it’. From supernatural body horror to systemic acts of cruelty, this event will both challenge and entertain.<br /><br /><b>Authors</b>:<br />After reading stories about the dismantling of the NHS by the late Joel Lane in the magazine <i>Black Static</i> and <i>The Fourth Black Book of Horror</i>, <b>Tom Johnstone</b> suggested they collaborate on an austerity-themed anthology. The result was <i>Horror Uncut</i> (Gray Friar Press), the first book Tom has worked on as an editor. Tom will be reading the story that inspired the anthology, Joel’s ‘A Cry for Help’, which offers a darkly satirical representation of someone complicit in the privatization of the NHS.<br /><br /><b>Laura Mauro</b>’s ‘Ptichka’ offers insight into the devastating consequences of anti-immigrant rhetoric, tying the isolation and alienation created by government policy to a very intimate tale of pregnancy and body horror.<br /><br /><b>Rosanne Rabinowitz</b>’s ‘Pieces of Ourselves’ starts with a demonstration against austerity that builds to violent kettling by the police. One activist escapes with a light wound, but his growing anxiety manifests in the transmogrifying skin that peels away from it.<br />
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<b>Twisted Tales of Austerity will take place from 12noon to 2pm on Friday 24th October 2014</b> at:<br /><b>Waterstones Deansgate</b></div>
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91 Deansgate<br />Manchester<br />M3 2BW<br />United Kingdom</div>
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Tickets can be booked <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/twisted-tales-of-austerity-tickets-12854904365">here</a>.</div>
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Facebook event page can be found <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/588198621290508/">here</a>.</div>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-23125168672644482882014-09-07T19:12:00.001+01:002014-09-07T19:12:50.373+01:00Darker Days Radio (Mike Andryuk, Chris Handley, and Bryce Perry) interviewed by David McWilliamDarker Days Radio is the premiere World of Darkness (WoD) podcast, exploring the new (nWoD) and classic World of Darkness (cWoD) role-playing games. The podcast was created by Vincent Florio and Mark Hope in the summer of 2009 and, in spite of changes to format and hosts, has maintained its mission of providing gaming insight, news, and entertainment for the past five years. Darker Days is a listener-driven podcast; their Darkling series allows listeners a chance to contribute audio segments and provide their own insights into the World of Darkness. Darker Days also contributes to the World of Darkness community as a media and publishing outlet, frequently interviewing World of Darkness writers, giving them a way to inform fans of their new work, and also explain the design decisions from previous books.<br />
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For more information, visit the <a href="http://podcast.darker-days.org/">Darker Days Radio website</a>.<br />
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<b>DM: How did you become presenters on Darker Days Radio?</b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Mhr4LRhLZts/VAydyKq79UI/AAAAAAAAAGc/Pzd4CPwxJr0/s1600/Mike%2BAndryuk.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Mhr4LRhLZts/VAydyKq79UI/AAAAAAAAAGc/Pzd4CPwxJr0/s1600/Mike%2BAndryuk.JPG" height="320" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mike Andryuk</td></tr>
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MA: I began as a listener of Darker Days when the very first episode was released and soon after I submitted a Darkling episode discussing the card game <i>Vampire: The Eternal Struggle</i>. When Darker Days was going through a rough spot as Vince left the show, I stepped up to the plate to become a host.<br />
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CH: My involvement with Darker Days started initially with the forums, suggesting various ideas for WoD games, and ideas for the Secret Frequency segment. One of note was the Devil Dog myth that is attached to my home town, and is also the origin of Arthur Conan Doyle’s <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i>. When the show was undergoing some changes in host line up I contributed a number of recordings of ‘Rapid Fire Game Summaries’ which covered almost all of the nWoD games. I was going to record one for the <i>Ghouls</i> book for <i>Vampire: The Requiem</i>, but it was deemed easier if I just be a guest on the show to talk about that book. And that was the start of my own regular appearances. Since then, Mike and I have shared responsibilities with regards to recording the show, editing, and managing the social media aspects of the podcast. And, when time permits, I've done some video editing for the show, and edit the fanzine.<br />
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BP: I've been a listener to the podcast since episode 3 or 4, following a post on a White Wolf fan forum by then-host Vince. After Mike and Chris took it over, I started pestering Mike about the show needing someone with a stronger focus on the cWoD lines. Eventually, he agreed and they asked me to join as the voice of the cWoD.<br />
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<b>DM: In what ways has the podcast evolved over the past five years?</b><br />
MA: We've evolved primarily through experimentation and a lot of it has actually worked! The two most successful experiments have been the introduction of <i>Forgotten Lore</i>, a WoD ezine, and our foray into actual play episodes. Intriguingly, actual plays are role-playing game sessions released as downloadable podcasts - a format that Chris and I both dislike. However, the two actual plays we've released have been noticeably more popular than our normal episodes, so listeners can expect a few more of those in Season 6.<br />
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CH: Darker Days has to a degree diversified, both in terms of segments and topics, plus a push to be more diverse in terms of contributors to the show. It's no surprise as gamers that we dabble in a lot of things, so we share things, both games and media, that sit well with the theme of horror gaming. Plus we have done a number of Darkling shows that strive to address topics that perhaps the main show lacks the space for. But, even with all, that Darker Days has remained focused on content for cWoD and nWoD, and finding the intersection between those settings.<br />
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BP: Darker Days has grown from a tightly-focused podcast covering the cWoD and nWoD game lines to a broader and more diverse - both in terms of topics as well as guests and presenters - outlet covering gaming of all types through the various Darklings we produce while still managing to remain the premiere WoD podcast on the main show.<br />
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<b>DM: What are your views on the state of the horror role-playing scene in 2014? </b><br />
MA: Horror role-playing games are quite strong and will continue to be. Games like <i>Vampire</i> and <i>Call of Cthulhu</i> highlight the benefits of a tabletop role-playing format compared to video games, movies, and novels by providing an experience tailored to the players. Other static formats can't compete with a good storyteller out to scare his players.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W-Ifs4ov6qM/VAyfOEvB-HI/AAAAAAAAAGw/Zp9gDCUblyg/s1600/Chris%2BHandley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W-Ifs4ov6qM/VAyfOEvB-HI/AAAAAAAAAGw/Zp9gDCUblyg/s1600/Chris%2BHandley.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chris Handley</td></tr>
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CH: Given the large amounts of indie games now available, and more popular and modern gaming systems, it is clear that horror role-play now is less about antagonistic play where everything relies purely on dice rolls, and now more about collaborative game play and the inclusion of nudge mechanics - mechanics that promote players to portray compelling drama, even at the risk of their own character.<br />
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BP: We live in something of a golden age for role-playing games, both in general and in the horror sub-genre. Divorcing RPGs from the ‘kick in the door, kill the monster, loot the tomb’ of several decades ago (something White Wolf pioneered) and focusing more on the story aspects of gaming has lead to some major innovations in the community. The vampires in, for example, <i>Night's Black Agents</i> are far more horrifying and complex than the 8HD undead from AD&D’s <i>Monster Manual</i>.<br />
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<b>DM: Do you think that the rise of Onyx Path has shaken up the World of Darkness property or has it just marked the resurrection of a popular formula?</b><br />
MA: Yes and yes. The nWoD game line is being spiced up with the God-Machine Chronicle rules release, leading to more player agency in the game through Condition and Beat mechanics. But on the other hand, Onyx Path has resurrected the cWoD games, retaining the game structure that took role-playing by storm in 1991. This two-pronged approach has been very well accepted by WoD fans, allowing classic players to play as they always have, but also providing a modern game approach for story gamers. <br />
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CH: Onyx Path certainly has pushed on a lot of changes, both in terms of how the writers interact with the fans, and with the way settings are approached. Onyx Path is clearly not afraid of trying out new gaming concepts, and re-examining old and tired tropes in their settings in order to modernize them. I think this can be seen both in the <i>V20</i> and <i>Requiem </i>lines, which now more than ever are distinct settings. CWoD and nWoD could have simply just trundled on with more and more supplements, or simple reprinting of old content. But what we have instead are new treatments of the settings, while still respecting that which has gone before.<br />
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BP: Onyx Path has definitely shaken things up. To use a topic I'm familiar with from the past few episodes of <br />
Darker Days, they've taken what could have been a dull and much-gone-over-before concept like demons and made them into a supernatural espionage game of spy-versus-spy-versus-nigh-omnipotent-entity. Nobody else in the industry has had such inventive interpretations and it's a testament to the company's creativity that I look forward to each new release with such excitement nearly 20 years after picking up my first WoD book.<br />
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<b>DM: How does Darker Days link up to the growing online community supporting horror role-playing?</b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CS5ix3gz4xE/VAyfa5XvrQI/AAAAAAAAAG4/DV72Jzq3ayM/s1600/Bryce%2BPerry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CS5ix3gz4xE/VAyfa5XvrQI/AAAAAAAAAG4/DV72Jzq3ayM/s1600/Bryce%2BPerry.jpg" height="320" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bryce Perry</td></tr>
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MA: Darker Days has built up an active community on Google Plus, Facebook and other social media sites. The aim is to provide a useful place to discuss WoD games (given how almost all the writers and developers make use of G+). For gamers, the Darker Days community is a great place to discuss many questions about the games, find new ideas, or drop off ideas (Secret Frequency submissions, movie, TV and book suggestions), or to find players both locally and for online games (G+ Hangouts being a popular avenue for horror games).<br />
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CH: We are also more than happy to discuss other horror games, and people can drop off reviews for different games, highlight interesting Kickstarter campaigns, and show off other interesting horror-related media (I paint lots of toy soldiers, mainly for Privateer Press' <i>Warmachine</i>/<i>Hordes</i> war games and associated <i>Iron Kingdoms</i> RPG, plus minis for the defunct Rackham game <i>Hybrid</i> - these games having a lot of horror content).<br />
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BP: Like Chris said, we're happy to discuss other games in the horror genre or even other non-horror games (and maybe how to add a touch of horror to them), but I think we'll always want to keep our focus on the WoD game lines. That being said, personally I've begun playing a miniature skirmish game called <i>Malifaux</i> that incorporates a bit of horror along with steampunk, fantasy and wuxia elements into it's setting and minis. <br />
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<b>DM: What are your plans for Season 6 and beyond?</b><br />
MA: Darker Days is pushing for more diversity in the upcoming season. That means interviewing more of the writers and developers (given that there is another nWoD game announced at Gencon this year, plus loads of other products), while not treading much of the same ground with the same men. If we can get the right team together (because there is never enough time for just us to do these things!) it would be great to get out another issue of our fanzine, <i>Forgotten Lore</i>. It's a great opportunity for gamers to show off their ideas, writing, and also to have a go at layout and editing.<br />
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CM: Darker Days has added a new Darkling series called 'Gossip Ghouls', which is a show with content and opinions that covers horror media in general. 'Gossip Ghouls' is also different because the hosts are not the normal group of guys. That show is fronted by Samantha Handley (budding writer, role-player and my wife) and Michelle Flamm (larper, cosplayer and computer game designer).<br />
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And personally, because I have a vested interest, I would hope to do some more Darklings about <i>Fading Suns</i> (a space opera RPG with a good dash of horror that I am a freelance writer for) given it is essentially a kissing cousin of WoD. I have worked on material for upcoming <i>Fading Suns </i>books that focus on the Merchant Guild, and on the darker elements of the setting (psychics, demons, cults, etc).<br />
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BP: More Darklings, new segments in the main show, more guests from Onyx Path and other places, more everything, really!Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-84196007089228797672014-07-08T10:05:00.000+01:002014-07-08T10:05:01.856+01:00Simon Strantzas interviewed by David McWilliam<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Simon Strantzas is the author of four collections of strange fiction, including the most recent, <i>Burnt Black Suns</i>, from Hippocampus Press. His writing has appeared in numerous “best-of” volumes, been translated into other languages, and been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living.<br /><br /><br /><b>DM: In his foreword to <i>Burnt Black Suns</i>, Laird Barron claims that the new millennium heralded ‘the dawn of a new golden age of dark literature’. Do you agree and, if so, why do you think there has been such a resurgence in weird fiction? </b><br />SS: It’s not that I don’t believe this, it’s that I think it’s premature to name this as a new golden age. That’s the sort of thing best left to historians looking back on the genre. But I’ll admit we’ve had an influx of great writers over the last decade or so, and the best of them bring something new to the table, all the while mining a history that extends back further than the decade previous, and stretch outward beyond the Horror aisle of the book shop. The boom years nearly killed the genre for a number of reasons, but the biggest might be the influx of writers looking to score big producing retreads of books only a few years old. For a generation of writers, the advice was to take influence from the current bestsellers. It led to a subsequent generation who either abandoned horror for a quick buck elsewhere, or who lacked knowledge of the genre’s history. It couldn’t have been easy to rectify, either, as the past masters were out of print and no one was inspired to change that. A dead generation later, things changed dramatically. Small presses appeared to give a voice to those new voices, but also to resurrect those past voices. Suddenly, readers could see what Machen and Blackwood and all the rest were about. The proliferation of the small press gave them a home, and the internet allowed them to spread. Horror’s return has been very much a grass-roots effort, and where it will go remains anyone’s guess. I keep hoping, with the transition to electronic devices, we’ll see horror return to the mainstream. But only time will tell. <br /><br /><b>DM: China Miéville claims that Lovecraft is preeminent 'among those writers of fantastic fiction for whom plot is simply not the point. The point is the weird'. Do you situate yourself within this tradition?</b><br />SS: For me, plot is a very important aspect of storytelling (although I’ll grant that I often obfuscate that plot when it suits the story or my mood) but it’s true it’s not the point of my strange or weird stories. However, rather than the weird being the point, my stories are intended to comment on our existence, and on our personal journey through it. The weird is simply a tool to do so, a way of abstracting the trials we face simply by being alive so a story can be told about them. Ultimately, I think a lot of fiction, Lovecraftian or not, treats plot and the trappings of the genre the same way. I know very few writers whose primary goal from a story is simply be weird. <br /><br /><b>DM: Do you think that the personal journey involved in the weird is linked to the prevalence of introversion and madness in the genre?</b><br />SS: I’m not so sure madness is all that prevalent in the genre. At least, not any more so than in any other mode of writing. But writers who struggle with introversion and mental illness no doubt find much about the weird that’s comforting. The weird celebrates a paranoiac’s world view, and gives an explanation for much that can afflict a troubled mind. But I also don’t believe only those with issues can enjoy the weird, or even that they are the ideal audience. I simply think it’s attractive to them in a way other genres are not. After all, the horror protagonist tends to be an outsider, both blessed and cursed with the ability to see what others can’t. On some level, the only difference between a super-hero story and a horror story is this first ends in successfully harnessing that sight, the second in succumbing to it.<br /><br /><b>DM: When writing weird fiction, how do you balance the wonder of cosmic horror with the nihilism embedded in the genre?</b><br />SS: I think wonder and awe are vitally important tools in a horror writer’s toolbox—perhaps even more important than fear. We can all imagine the threat of physical violence against us, but we’ve all experienced that occasional sense of displacement in our world, being out of sync with it, especially when confronted with something almost impossibly beautiful. Horror taps into that space, creating a waking dream for the reader to experience, a place where the fantastic can happen, and the rules that were once immutable can no longer be trusted. Nowhere is this more evident than in cosmic horror, where we are often expected to consider the greatest “other” of the cosmos and rationalize its effect against us. It seems only natural to me that this Other be viewed through a nihilistic lens. An indifferent universe is the greatest horror imaginable to any of us, one where our lives are insignificant against it. The fact that this horror is the ultimate truth is shocking to consider, and so impossible that we fail even trying to grasp it. For me, the balance of wonder and nihilism in cosmic horror is precisely the point of cosmic horror.<br /><br /><b>DM: This notion of an ‘indifferent universe’ seems to find expression in the landscape of your stories; as Barron notes, your ‘wilderness doesn’t discriminate’ when destroying those who explore it. How important is creating a sense of place in anchoring your cosmic horror to the world around us?</b><br />SS: A sense of place is always important. My work is often about that interstitial area between planes of existence, those soft spots where one world presses in on another. In order to convincingly convey this sense of terror at the invasion of the alien, one must first convincingly convey the verisimilitude of the world being invaded. So, yes, the environment must ring true, as must those who inhabit it. Only then can we fully relate to the impossible things that are happening to them, and buy into the notions that something else has its malignant eye on its inhabitants.<br /><br /><b>DM: The monsters in <i>Burnt Black Suns</i> are eclectic and imaginative. Do you see them as forming a loose mythos, or are they created to serve the specific needs of a story?</b><br />SS: I know some contemporary authors link their tales together to form their own mythos, and I can see how it’s a tool that can help amplify certain effects and aspects of the work, adding an extra level of complexity to the stories. Peter Straub’s “Blue Rose” trilogy (and short stories) certain worked in this way, where one book, Mystery, reflected upon its follow-up, The Throat, adding unique resonances. That said, my own work does not tie together in any way beyond perhaps the exploration of common concerns and peccadilloes. Each monster in my stories is designed primarily to highlight aspects of the emotional core of the story being told, and in that sense can be viewed more as fantastical projections of those particular characters’ turmoil, a sort of reckoning that they know is coming, but flail against nonetheless.<br /><br /><b>DM: <i>Burnt Black Suns</i> is your fourth collection of short stories. Do you think that weird fiction especially lends itself to the short form and, if so, why?</b><br />SS: I’d say that horror and the weird rely heavily on mood, atmosphere, and emotion. It’s a heady brew and one that’s virtually impossible to sustain for an extended length. At least, not without cutting it with another genre. This is why most horror novels read like other novels with a horror element grafted on. The mystery, the thriller, the science-fiction adventure, these are all common partners for horror, and depending on the focus, can produce work that skews one way or the other. But the short story? The short story doesn’t need to sustain itself with multiple narratives and points of view. The short story is singular, focused, an art form that celebrates minimalism and efficiency—which doesn’t mean that short stories must be minimal and efficient, rather that they need to have a strong destination in mind. All of these things suit horror well, and stories that focus purely on the terrifying and horrific are possible in ways that almost never sustain themselves at novel length. In essence, to appreciate the weird or horrific, a mood must be set and a spell cast. Works that cannot be read in one sitting are subjected to the inference of life, and when life gets involved, those tenuous threads of atmosphere so delicately woven tend to break.<br /><br /><b>DM: The relationship between the weird and scientific discovery is examined in the collection through the disastrous consequences for those who seek to fathom the secrets of the universe. Do you consider cosmic horror to be in some ways antithetical to science fiction?</b><br />SS: That’s an interesting thought, one I’ve not considered before. I’ve often wondered if each genre could be boiled down to a single primal emotion. Obviously, Horror would boil down to horror, and Romance to romance, but what of the others? If science fiction could be boiled down (and let’s agree that by its very description this entire idea is so reductionist as to almost lose meaning) then I imagine it would be to hope. Hope for the future, for what humanity is capable of. Even the dystopian stories have their starting point in hope, albeit failed hope. Cosmic Horror is less about the absence of hope—or, rather, despair—and more about insignificance in the presence of reality. Superficially, I can see how one might view cosmic horror as the other side of the science fiction coin, but I don’t think it necessarily stands up to scrutiny. Instead, we must divorce science from Science Fiction in this case and realize that science’s quest for knowledge is instead the perfect vessel for tales of cosmic horror.<br /><br /><b>DM: Barron claims that with <i>Burnt Black Suns</i> you continue ‘a trajectory into deeper darkness like that probe sailing out of the solar system into the gulf of night’. Where do you see your writing taking you next? Are there further depths to explore?</b><br />SS: I appreciate what Laird Barron had to say in the flattering introduction he gave the book. I think, though, his comments reflect mostly my slow and steady transition from a writer of strange fiction to a writer of weird fiction. I’ll leave it to others to judge how large or insignificant a loss or gain this is, but it seems clear that my fiction has shifted weirder and more cosmic since I began publishing, and along with this mutation it seems only natural that my fiction will take a darker turn. But I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking the human soul doesn’t have plenty of pitch dark depths to plum, and I grow increasingly excited, year after year, to see how far into that tar pit I can sink. <br /><br /><i>Burnt Black Suns</i> was a book wholly interested in exploring weird, cosmic fiction, and having now done so I’m eager to branch off into another direction for a while. Horror is such a vast and boundless genre that it will take me a lifetime to explore even a fraction of it. I’m elbow deep now in a novella that I believe will make readers forget all those I’ve previously written, and I hope to supplement it with more material that’s its equal. I can’t promise what will come next from me will be cosmic—I like to believe it won’t fit any such label so easily—but what I can promise is that I will do my best to surprise readers with what I can do. I honestly believe they haven’t seen anything yet.<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-70250665255153860802014-07-01T13:59:00.000+01:002014-07-01T13:59:33.100+01:00Matthew Dawkins (The Gentleman Gamer) interviewed by David McWilliam about horror role-playing<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QjWLZfPAuaE/U7KtAIpLSoI/AAAAAAAAAFU/WygM5FBsekw/s1600/Matthew+Dawkins.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QjWLZfPAuaE/U7KtAIpLSoI/AAAAAAAAAFU/WygM5FBsekw/s1600/Matthew+Dawkins.jpg" height="320" width="192" /></a>Matthew (YouTube's The Gentleman Gamer) has been tabletop role-playing since the age of 18 and making RPG-related videos for his popular <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/clackclickbang">YouTube channel</a> since 2009. While in recent years his primary focus has been World of Darkness games, he runs, plays in and reviews a multitude of others. <br /><br />Matthew has recently entered the realm of writing for RPGs, having contributed to the <i>Book of the Wyrm </i>20th Anniversary edition for <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i>, and <i>Sothis Ascends</i> for <i>Mummy: The Curse</i>.<br /><br /><br /><b>DM: What attracted you to horror role-playing games and what sustains your interest in the genre?</b><br />MD: I've enjoyed horror in both literature and cinema since far too young an age. It's the genre that stimulates my imagination more than any other. In role-playing, fear is an emotion I love to evoke from players for their characters. When a player genuinely feels concern for the fate or well-being of their character, or NPCs connected to the character, I believe something wonderful has been achieved. With that being the case, horror role-playing is the gift that keeps on giving. I run horror campaigns, one-shots and convention sessions, but don't limit myself to it. Ultimately, I love to get a reaction from players, and horror, whether body horror, psychological torment, gore or suspense, can really produce the desired expressions and exclamations.<br /><br /><b>DM: How did you come to review games on Youtube? Why adopt the persona of the Gentleman Gamer?</b><br />MD: I was looking for an RPG review of a game called <i>SLA Industries</i> (an excellent setting by Dave Allsop) and rather than the usual search engine link that would point me towards rpg.net, I was instead directed towards a review video by a vlogger calling himself Cpt. Machine. The review was decent enough, and provoked me to look for other vloggers. I could only find two more. Tetsubo57, who mixes his RPG videos with a wild variety of other videos, and Kurt Wiegel, whose videos I found to be far too short to provide me with an adequate review. I therefore resolved to make my own channel, with my first video being an introduction, my second being a video about in-character vs. out-of-character conflict, and my third being a review, although I can't recall the game I reviewed. In any case, those videos were awful. They were also removed by YouTube due to a copyright infringement or two (I made liberal use of music in videos back then), but my earliest material was then re-uploaded onto dailymotion, should any masochists wish to watch them.<br /><br />As for the Gentleman Gamer - I dubbed my channel The Gentleman's Guide to Gaming as I never wanted to talk in anger about a game. I'd seen too many shows based around angry reviews that really took games apart for the sake of cheap laughs. My philosophy (such as it was) was that every review I did would be of a game I enjoyed, and focus on the positives of those games. If a game was truly bad, I just wouldn't review it. Why destroy a game someone has spent months or years creating, when I could just omit it from my channel entirely? Tetsubo57 was one of the first subscribers to my channel and a constant commentator. He was the first person to refer to me as The Gentleman Gamer, and the nickname stuck.<br /><br /><b>DM: Do you think that contemporary technology is changing the way people play RPGs?</b><br />MD: Definitely. I belong to a Facebook and YouTube group called the YouTube RPG Brigade (the name of which is another story entirely and has had its share of controversies since it was founded). The vloggers, viewers and commentators who post in these groups very often get together for campaigns and one-shots via Google+. I often run games via Google+ or Skype (I'm currently running <i>A Song of Ice & Fire</i> for a player in the USA and another in Finland) due to the ease of use and sheer range of players you can reach through those channels.<br /><br />A year ago I established the <i>Vampire: The Masquerade </i>YouTube Experiment, which was in essence an attempt to create a "Living City" for <i>Vampire</i> via Google+ Hangouts, with footage from all character videos going onto YouTube and being added to a blog. The proposal for the Experiment alone drew over 100 players in the first week from all over the world. Some had never role-played before, but they had webcams, a willingness to learn and a real enthusiasm for the setting. Through this, players got a chance to play for the first time and fantastic plots have played out in what is essentially a cross between a LARP and a tabletop game using the internet as our playground.<br /><br />The Experiment has waxed and waned in popularity, and my hope is that it lasts for a long time. I still appear in it occasionally, as the player-base there is excellent. There have since been numerous offshoots such as Living World of Darkness, another such game set in Westeros, others specifically devoted to <i>Mage</i>, <i>Pathfinder</i> and more. I see this as strong evidence that while tabletop is still going strong (you only need to see how many people attend the UK Games Expo and GenCon every year for proof) people are no longer limited by geography or the lack of a local store, as once they were.<br /><br /><b>DM: This last point is important, as there are regular claims that role-playing is a dying hobby. How do you attempt to broaden its appeal and bring in new players?</b><br />MD: That's a good question. I'm proudest of my channel when someone who has never role-played before sends me a message or leaves a comment saying "this motivated me to pick up an RPG, form a group and run a game." If there's a point to the channel, it's to get people to do that very thing. With this in mind, I attempt to review games across a broad spectrum but I also make videos of live play and recaps of games I've run before. Sometimes the obstacle preventing someone from investing in gaming is primarily their not knowing how fun and simple it can be. My in-game recordings serve the purpose of allowing people to see what games can be like.<br /><br />My hope is that people will post the videos widely and that occasionally someone new to gaming will stumble across them. If these things are happening, I'm confident that my presentation style is enthusiastic and interesting enough to sink a hook into the occasional potential gamer. Then I just have to reel that prospective new role-player in with videos going into greater depth on game settings, such as my <i>Vampire</i> and <i>Werewolf</i> guides.<br /><br /><b>DM: Your reviews cover a range of games, but you seem to be at your most inspired when talking about the World of Darkness (both classic and new). What do you think they offer that other lines do not?</b><br />MD: I'm not sure what it was that first drew me to the World of Darkness, but whatever it was, it's what's kept me involved in it all these years later. Perhaps it's the aesthetic - the art oftentimes being incredibly evocative. Similarly, it may be the fiction, the metaplot of classic World of Darkness or the sheer freedom of new World of Darkness. In terms of why I run so many games set in the World of Darkness and make so many videos about the same, I think it's likely due to my interests outside of the sphere of role-playing gelling so well with the games. I come up with more ideas for each World of Darkness RPG than I do for any other game, and that's often just through reading the title of a book! This isn't some attempt at a boast; I genuinely believe the World of Darkness is, for the most part, the richest setting tonally and in terms of mood-inspiring qualities.<br /><br />I'm not sure if I'm dancing around the question though. In the end I suppose I find that World of Darkness games offer a storytelling experience where protagonists are more than just travellers on a predefined path. The story is about the characters in the best World of Darkness games, and I have rarely found other games that so grab the players and make them want to tell stories about their characters’ hopes, dreams, fears and motivations.<br /><br /><b>DM: Aside from World of Darkness, can you name some of your other favourite games and settings? What do they offer that is unique and/or innovative?</b><br />MD: <i>Godlike</i> is a favourite of mine. It's a superhero game set in the Second World War. Combat is as dangerous to your characters as it should be in order to evoke the correct mood, but your superpowers can give you a slight edge. What a particularly enjoy about <i>Godlike</i> is the sense of realism imposed on to a superhero game. Sure you can fly - but a bullet can still kill you in one hit. Yes, you're invulnerable to kinetic energy attacks - but watch out for that guy with the flamethrower. The emphasis on the horrors of war, the reduction of mental stability and so on, really makes it stand out for me.<br /><br />I've recently become a big fan of <i>Numenera</i>, for its simplicity in character design and its expansive world still fit for exploration. It's post-apocalyptic but is drenched with optimism. How many other games do you get where your characters' contributions can lead to the rebuilding of civilisation, the discovery of new technology and life and the exploration of history and unknown locations? There's this feeling of awe that comes with <i>Numenera</i>. I haven't felt it in many other games.<br /><br /><b>DM: How did you make the transition from reviewer to writer? Do you think that this provides you with a different approach to games design? </b><br />MD: I was one of the Consulting Developers on the <i>Book of the Wyrm</i> 20th Anniversary edition and volunteered to write up the Board of Directors while in the position. Stew Wilson reviewed my submission, approved it, and it was added to the book. Around the same time, I submitted some fiction to C. A. Suleiman, as I fell in love with <i>Mummy: The Curse</i> as soon as I finished reading the first chapter. He was kind enough to give me my first big writing break on a chapter of <i>Sothis Ascends</i>.<br /><br />Now that I've seen "how the sausage machine works," I definitely reappraise some reviews I've produced. I have special admiration and respect for those who work diligently on systems for months on end. I'm far more confident as a writer of setting and storytelling tools than I am one of powers, rules and the like. This new freelance role (long may it continue) does of course put me in something of a position regarding World of Darkness book reviews. I really enjoyed reading and running <i>Blood & Smoke</i> for instance, but can I now positively review it without viewers accusing me of bias towards a company who are paying me for work? That's an interesting quandary, and one I've not yet surmounted. The same would apply in the unlikely event I fervently disliked a product by Onyx Path. While I don't typically produce negative reviews of any games, to do one about a game written by people I may ultimately work with would perhaps be unprofessional, or potentially make relationships frosty. <br /><br /><b>DM: Having now established a foothold in game design, where do you see your writing taking you? Would you consider working on a major project, such as developing a full supplement or even game line?</b><br />MD: I'd love to one day develop my own game line, but I'm conscious that I'm new to this and should take baby steps. I want to hone my writing before I take on a full game, take on feedback and criticism from my fellow writers as well as readers, and generally get more practice. My hope is that I will continue to freelance for Onyx Path for the foreseeable future. They're a fine and friendly company with a real talent for producing high-quality role-playing material. I'm happy just where I am for now, but in the future...? Who knows?<br />
<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-19267179670777075302014-06-23T16:02:00.002+01:002014-06-23T18:52:05.771+01:00Richard Dansky interviewed by David McWilliam about 'Wraith: The Oblivion' <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Qekj0XsPttU/U6hBaOyTJfI/AAAAAAAAAE8/jOTsOQSwz-M/s1600/Richard+Dansky.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Qekj0XsPttU/U6hBaOyTJfI/AAAAAAAAAE8/jOTsOQSwz-M/s1600/Richard+Dansky.JPG" height="320" width="220" /></a>Writer, game designer and cad, Richard Dansky was named one of the Top 20 videogame writers in the world in 2009 by <i>Gamasutra</i>. His work includes bestselling games such as <i>Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction</i>, <i>Far Cry</i>, <i>Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: 3</i>, <i>Outland</i>, and <i>Splinter Cell: Blacklist</i>. His writing has appeared in magazines ranging from <i>The Escapist</i> to <i>Lovecraft Studies</i>, as well as numerous anthologies. He was a major contributor to White Wolf’s World of Darkness setting, with credits on over a hundred RPG supplements, and will be developing the upcoming 20th Anniversary Edition of <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>. His most recent novel, <i>Vaporware</i>, is available from JournalStone, and was nominated for the inaugural Manly Wade Wellman award. Richard lives in North Carolina with his wife, statistician and blogger Dr. Melinda Thielbar, and their amorphously large collections of books and single malt whiskys.<br />
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For more information, visit <a href="http://www.richarddansky.com/index_2.htm">Richard’s website</a>.<br />
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<b>DM: As a GM and/or player, what horror games do you most admire? Can you name any that influenced the way you approach game design?</b><br />
RD: I think the best horror games - and there are a great many of them - remember that horror is about the response to the monster, not the monster. What that response is can vary - it’s a very different approach in <i>Call of Cthulhu</i> than it is in <i>Don’t Rest Your Head</i> than it is in <i>Vampire</i> - but as long as it’s about the character, not the critter and its stats and treasure type and percent in lair, then you’ve got the makings of good horror. And I’m very happy to see the ongoing trend in making interesting, challenging horror games that picks up the torch from classics like <i>CoC</i> and <i>Chill</i> - a world where we’re constantly seeing new games like <i>Night’s Black Agents</i> is one where it’s good to be a fan of horror games. <br />
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<b>DM: What would your pitch be to convince someone who has never played a World of Darkness game to try <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>?</b><br />
RD: “How’d you like to bust the Ghostbusters?” More seriously, during the years I was developing <i>Wraith</i>, there was something that would happen at every convention I went to. Someone would walk up to the booth, explain how they loved <i>Wraith</i> but couldn’t find anyone to play it with, and then walk off. Fifteen minutes later, the same thing would happen, and so on, all weekend. So I think the idea that <i>Wraith</i> is this distant, untouchable star of a game is wrong and it always has been wrong - it’s a question of getting the people who want to play in touch with people who are willing to give it a shot. Which brings us around to the original question. To that, I say it’s a game where you’re taking care of unfinished business from life while learning how to survive in the lands of death, where your dark side is your own worst enemy and an empire of the dead stands against monsters from before the dawn of time. <br />
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<b>DM: How did you first become involved with <i>Wraith</i>? What drew you to the line?</b><br />
RD: I got involved with <i>Wraith</i> pretty much toward the beginning. I'd known Jennifer Hartshorn, the original developer, in college and she was well aware of my penchant for horror. So when she had some openings in the <i>Haunts</i> book, she was generous enough to ask me to write a couple of chapters, which became The Hanging Gardens Casino and the Tillinghast Mansion, respectively. After that, I freelanced pretty extensively until Jen moved over to <i>Vampire</i>, at which point I was asked to take over <i>Wraith</i>. And that was that, apart from a small hiatus where the estimable Edward Hall stepped in for <i>Wraith: The Great War</i> and <i>World of Darkness: Tokyo</i>. <br />
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As for what drew me to the line, well, I did a thesis on H.P. Lovecraft. My first published writing was in Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction, respectively. I have a collection of rare and antique horror novels, and I have multiple statues of Cthulhu in my office. So I felt a certain resonance with the material, you might say. And, looking around at the art from various <i>Wraith</i> books that adorns my office, I still do.<br />
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<b>DM: It is interesting that you mention Cthulhu as, unlike most other World of Darkness lines, Wraith is not set predominantly in the world of the living. The idea of a whole other reality overlaying Earth, with the alien threat of ravenous Oblivion rising up from the darkest depths feels very Lovecraftian. Do you consider <i>Wraith</i>, at least in part, to be a game of cosmic horror?</b><br />
RD: The defining character of cosmic horror as I understand it is the focus on the uncaring, mechanistic universe (that just happens to be populated by giant squid-faced entities from beyond space and time because that’s how evolution rolls across the endless aeons and folded dimensions). It’s the fact that there is no agency to the universe that’s so frightening, and that underpins all the tentacles and n-dimensional angles and whatnot. <i>Wraith</i>, on the other hand, focuses on the individual wraith’s struggle - against Oblivion and against themself. It’s a deeply personal game, and that personal conflict is what’s at the heart of things - even when that conflict is thrown into the middle of a fight against a shape-shifting malevolent entity from Oblivion’s doorstep. So, ultimately, while <i>Wraith</i> may be inspired by cosmic horror and may use elements familiar to fans of cosmic horror, it is not itself cosmic because even in the face of Oblivion, it always returns to the human.<br />
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<b>DM: What difficulties did you face when writing something so melancholic with such experimental rules?</b><br />
RD: <i>Wraith</i> was and is a fantastic challenge because so much of the interesting design happens away from combat. It’s one of the very rare games where roleplaying and mechanics are inextricably intertwined: Passions and Fetters and Pathos generation, just for starters, and who your character is, are more important in many ways than what. So any difficulties are really the meat and the fun of the job - I wouldn’t call them difficulties so much as “challenges”, and very satisfying challenges to resolve, at that.<br />
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As for the melancholy, I’ll have to disagree with you there. Yes, there is an obvious dark tone to the game, but at the same time, it’s really the most hopeful of the original WoD titles. Transcendence is real, and there is something you can do instead of fighting hopelessly against the inevitable. Wraiths get a second chance to fix what they did wrong in life, and there’s something incredibly powerful about that which really doesn’t match the doom’n’gloom stereotype. Can you tell depressing stories in <i>Wraith</i>? Sure. But you can also tell stories of high adventure in the Tempest, or dungeon crawls in the Labyrinth, or political stories in Stygia, or any number of other stories that are colored by emotions beyond despair.<br />
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<b>DM: What can fans of <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i> Second Edition expect from the 20th Anniversary Edition? Are there elements that you feel must be included for it to feel authentic? </b><br />
RD: At the risk of sounding slightly obsessive, I’ve been mulling over <i>Wraith</i> in the back of my mind for nigh on 15 years now. That’s a lot of time to be pondering design and creative decisions, and to be thinking about what went right and what could have been done better. And any game designer will tell you, looking back on their work they always see things that they could have done better. Am I amazingly proud of <i>Wraith</i> Second Edition and all of the work that the writers, artists and other folks involved did? Absolutely. I think it’s a great game that did some wonderful things, and if you look at the list of creative folks who worked on it, it’s mind-boggling. So, there’s a lot there that I think is worth hanging onto and building on, because it’s damned good, original work. Stuff that Geoff Grabowski and Bruce Baugh did with the Labyrinth, for example. A ton of work people did with the Guilds. I could go on and on. A fan of Second Edition is absolutely going to feel comfortable in the setting, and hopefully the changes that are being made are ones that they’ll feel positive about - in part because a lot of the ones we’re looking at were sparked by feedback from and conversation with fans.<br />
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<b>DM: Conversely, how much creative freedom do you have to alter the setting and update it for 2014?</b><br />
RD: Rich Thomas has pretty much given me tremendous creative freedom to make changes, though I’ve discussed every proposed change with him. I think he and I are on the same page when it comes to what’s the real essence of <i>Wraith</i> and where we can make changes that will make it even better. So, no, there’s not going to be rules for all-singing, all-dancing ghost musical extravaganzas. But you will see a broader universe in the main book, and more of an emphasis on bringing players into the world cleanly.<br />
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<b>DM: I have been impressed by your engagement with fans of <i>Wraith</i> on the Onyx Path forums, taking on suggestions that work for you and explaining why you reject others. How does this level of interaction during the design process shape your overall vision for the project?</b><br />
RD: It’s always great to hear what the people who play the game are thinking - what they like, what they don’t like, what they want to see more of, you name it. That’s incredibly valuable feedback to have, and it serves as a great gut check. And really, why wouldn’t I want to talk to the folks who are most excited to see the game coming back? I mean, as Pollyanna as this sounds, we all share a love of the game. Maybe I’m coming at it from a slightly different angle than they are because I made the metaphorical sausage, but to be part of a community that loves you work, well, that’s a wonderful feeling. Without them we wouldn’t be doing this; it’s a pleasure to take the time to talk with them, answer whatever questions I can, and hopefully make them feel that the game they love is in good hands.<br />
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<b>DM: What are your hopes for the <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i> 20th Anniversary Edition Kickstarter? If it is really successful, do you envision expanding on the core book with various supplements?</b><br />
RD: First things first - let’s do the 20th Anniversary Edition, because that’s where all of my focus is right now. It’s such a pleasure to come back to this world, and, just as importantly, to come back to the people I worked with back in the day, that I’m just enjoying this project right now. Obviously, I’d hope it would be a tremendously successful Kickstarter, and I’d hope that people who perhaps didn’t get to play <i>Wraith</i> before - because they came along after <i>Ends of Empire</i>, or because they couldn’t find a group to play it with - would get a chance to find something they could enjoy. Beyond that, it’s all details - I just want to do something that lives up to - OK, surpasses - the expectations of the folks who’ve been loyal <i>Wraith</i> fans over the years, that does right by the world, and that hopefully opens things up to a whole new generation of players. If I can do that, then we’ll talk about what comes next. But let me climb the first mountain before we even start thinking about the second.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-54973804977090722962014-06-19T10:18:00.000+01:002014-06-19T10:18:39.793+01:00Stew Wilson interviewed by David McWilliam about 'Werewolf: The Apocalypse'<i><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Z7Qsh32BAE/U6KhKQ9YCgI/AAAAAAAAAEg/i8a2vD8xNYs/s1600/Stew+Wilson.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Z7Qsh32BAE/U6KhKQ9YCgI/AAAAAAAAAEg/i8a2vD8xNYs/s1600/Stew+Wilson.JPG" height="200" width="200" /></a></i>A freelance writer and game designer, Stew got his start with White Wolf on <i>Lore of the Forsaken</i>. He has worked on most of the new World of Darkness games, but finally got to sink his teeth into his first love with <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i> 20th Anniversary Edition. In addition to being a writer on the core book, he took up the developer’s mantle for supplemental books like <i>Changing Breeds 20</i>, <i>Rage Across the World</i>, and <i>Book of the Wyrm 20</i>. <i>Werewolf</i> has given him more opportunities to branch out into new fields, including the comic for <i>Changing Breeds</i>, and the <i>W20 Cookbook</i>.<br /><br />In addition to his work for White Wolf and Onyx Path Publishing, Stew has contributed to <i>EVE Online</i>, <i>Maschine Zeit</i>, and the upcoming setting anthology for <i>Apotheosis Drive X</i>. He has also self-published a number of games including <i>BLACK SEVEN,</i> the stealth-action RPG, and <i>Æternal Legends</i>, the game of modern fantasy heroes.<br /><br />For more information, visit <a href="http://www.zeropointinformation.com/">Stew's website</a>.<br /><br /><br /><b>DM: How did you become a World of Darkness games designer?</b><br />SW: I was a regular on the old, old White Wolf forums, starting back in 1999. It’s through them that I met existing freelance designers like Matt McFarland and Aaron Dembski-Bowden, and got to know Ethan Skemp. I expressed a desire to work on <i>Werewolf</i>, but as the line was drawing to a close that didn't happen. In 2004, Ethan offered me a chance to work on <i>Lore of the Forsaken</i>. I didn’t look back.<br /><br />After we finished writing <i>Werewolf 20</i>, Ethan passed the developer’s hat to me. I never thought I’d get a chance to develop <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i> when I started writing professionally; by then the Time of Judgment had hit and the classic World of Darkness ended. The 20th Anniversary Edition let me work on <i>Werewolf</i> again, and taking on the developer’s role really lets me put my mark on the game.<br /><br /><b>DM: What are the core concepts behind <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i>? What can players expect from the game?</b><br />SW: <i>Werewolf</i> is a game about getting mad at the state of the world and having the power to do something about it. You know the truth of the world — that the three great cosmological forces of Wyld, Weaver, and Wyrm are massively out of balance. The Weaver wants to cocoon the universe in a calcified web where nothing changes. The Wyrm wants to corrupt all that is, poisoning its very soul. They've forced the Wyld, the wellspring of creation, onto the back foot. Now, they're coming for Gaia ― She who is the world and the soul of the world. If the Weaver or the Wyrm is victorious, it's the end of everything.<br /><br />Gaia isn't defenseless. Æons ago, She made shapeshifting warriors to defend Her. Chief among them are the Garou, werewolves with the holy duty of defending the world. Empowered by Luna, spirit of the Moon, and driven by rage at the state of the world, they may not survive the Wyrm's assault, but they'll tear it apart from the inside to save Gaia.<br /><br /><b>DM: How do the Garou differ from other werewolves?</b><br />SW: At the time <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i> was published, werewolves in fiction were monsters. Inspired by Hollywood, werewolves changed under the full moon into ravening beasts that had to be killed with a silver bullet.<br /><br />The Garou go beyond that, redefining the werewolf as we know it. The Garou don't change under the full moon, but can shapeshift whenever they like into any of five forms ― including a bulked out human, normal and monstrous wolves, and the terrifying Crinos war-form, a hybrid of wolf and human. They're born, rather than being made into monsters with a bite, and organize into tribes based around their attitudes to how best to confront the Apocalypse. Their shapeshifting blessings come from Luna, the spirit of the moon, who also gives each one an Auspice ― a role in werewolf society dependent on the moon-phase in which the werewolf was born.<br /><br />The Garou are also half-spirit, and thus keenly aware of the animistic nature of the world. They can step into the Umbra, the spiritual reflection of the world, and gain power from those spirits that serve Gaia. They can try to strike at Her enemies long before they manifest in the physical world. Others use spiritual short-cuts to travel between different places in the physical world, fighting battles at flashpoints around the globe.<br /><br /><b>DM: The Deluxe W20 <i>Book of the Wyrm</i>, <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/deluxe-w20-book-of-the-wyrm">which is being Kickstarted at the moment</a>, details the forces of the principle antagonist in the game. What is the Wyrm and why do so many choose to serve it?</b><br />SW: The Wyrm is one part of the Triat, the three cosmological forces that underpin reality. Long ago, the Weaver ― another part of the Triat ― wanted to control everything. Though she was not successful, she snared the Wyrm in her web and drove it insane. Far from being the cosmological force of destruction, it is now the force of corruption. Destroying the world would be easy; the Wyrm wants to turn it into a twisted hellhole; a reflection of its own perverted nature, where the only things that live worship it.<br /><br />The Wyrm isn't behind every evil act ― saying that every abusive spouse or drug pusher is being manipulated by a force of corruption implicitly absolves them of their crimes. Instead, it feeds on the negative spiritual resonance produced by their actions. In the case of prolific serial killers, torturers, and other monsters who feed it repeatedly, the Wyrm may reward them with signs of its favor. While frequently disturbing or disgusting, these blessings grant supernatural power.<br /><br />Other creatures serve the Corruptor. While many spirits come from Gaia herself, each of the Triat has spirit-servants of their own. These Banes are formidable enemies on their own, but some go one further by possessing people to create the twisted fomori. A whole tribe of werewolves took it upon themselves to try to kill the Wyrm in its lair two thousand years ago. Now, they serve it as the Black Spiral Dancers. Some people join cults or organizations that worship the Wyrm, hoping for rewards in exchange for furthering its agenda.<br /><br />For creatures with free will like humans, serving the Wyrm is putting short-term interests ahead of long-term. In ten years' time, the Wyrm will rise and devour the world, leaving a radioactive wasteland where only twisted fomori can survive. But until then, you've got both money and power ― and all the trappings that come with them.<br /><br /><b>DM: What is Malfeas and will the <i>Book of the Wyrm</i> expand on it as a playable setting?</b><br />SW: The spirit world of <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i> isn’t just a reflection of our own world. It also contains Realms, self-contained places that don’t correspond to a location on Earth. Malfeas is one of those Realms, and is the Wyrm’s foothold in the spiritual world. You can’t destroy it — a Realm is a cosmological constant — but you can travel to Malfeas to beard the Wyrm in its lair.<br /><br />Malfeas is the home of the Maeljin Incarna, immensely powerful spirit-servants of the Wyrm that reflect hatred, anger, despair, and the Wyrm’s twisted forms of the elements. The majority of Malfeas is made up of a vast cityscape containing the nightmarish factories that produce everything from horrific poisons to Pentex’s stranger products. It’s also home to the Labyrinth where Black Spiral Dancers perform their most blasphemous rites.<br /><br />Malfeas isn’t easy to get in to and is even harder to survive in. That said, while it looks impossible we’ve left ways for clever players to infiltrate the Wyrm’s lair. If they’re lucky or powerful enough, they can destroy factories, seal off the Black Spiral Labyrinth, or even kill one of the Maeljin Incarna, reducing the influence of cruelty, hatred, or despair throughout the whole world. Attacking the Wyrm’s forces like that is very hard, but doing so would weaken the Wyrm immensely.<br /><br /><b>DM: Given the increasing anxieties about climate change, deforestation and pollution of natural habitats, do you think that <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i> has become more relevant over 20 years since it was first released?</b><br />SW: Definitely. At the time it was first released, <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i> presented a world that was darker than our own. Since then, the world has changed in ways that nobody could have predicted. An environmental message that was seen as doom-saying twenty years ago looks naive in light of modern developments. We're seeing the beginning of the effects of climate change now. Events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill show that we're just as capable of creating environmental disasters now as we were then. The increased use of fracking to extract shale gas is both environmentally destructive, and propagates dependency on fossil fuels.<br /><br />While people have become more aware of environmental issues over the last twenty years, humanity hasn't done enough to address them on a sufficiently large scale to make an impact. As individuals, we don't have much that we can do beyond trying to lobby politicians. As Garou, these problems are made manifest in the world, and we can take out our anger on them directly.<br /><br /><b>DM: The shadowy Pentex corporation is one of the Wyrm's most potent servants in the game, with tendrils of control reaching across the globe and hastening the corruption of all life. Bands like Rage Against the Machine were warning the public about corporate greed in the early nineties. Do you think that countercultural alt-rock had an impact on <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i> when it was first conceived? Or were they both simply responding to the growth of corporate might in the wake of the neoliberal revolutions of Thatcher and Reagan?</b><br />SW: While I can’t say for certain what influenced the original design team, personally I think that they spring from the same source. Neoliberal economics enshrined the idea that greed is good; that if you make more by breaking the law and paying a fine, your only moral duty is to break the law. It encouraged a whole new wave of corporate malfeasance that we’re still seeing today. People see that, and get angry. Anger leads to artistic expression, whether that's in the form of music or games. Different kinds of art complement one another when they come from the same source ― Rage Against the Machine and <i>Holy Bible</i>-era Manic Street Preachers make for a fitting soundtrack to <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i>.<br /><br /><b>DM: It seems as though the Kickstarter campaign will actually affect the content of <i>Book of the Wyrm</i>. How does this change the design process?</b><br />SW: Sometimes, it means that we can do things with the book that we couldn’t otherwise. For example, in <i>Changing Breeds</i> we were able to provide an introductory comic as a stretch goal. Other times, it means we can include material that we otherwise wouldn’t have room for. Especially with <i>Book of the Wyrm</i>, we’re letting people vote on what some of the stretch goals open up. This way, we can see what makes people excited and give them more of that.<br /><br />We can’t start off designing around stretch goals. If something goes wrong and the book isn’t Kickstarted, then we don’t hit any stretch goals. What I tend to do is identify places in the book that could benefit from more information. It’s a tricky process — everything in the book could benefit from more ideas, more examples, and more story hooks — but it’s easier to identify “packages” of enhancements around some topics. With <i>Book of the Wyrm</i>, we wanted to add more on the Fallen Changing Breeds, more information on how normally Gaian Garou fall and become Black Spiral Dancers, and more information on the humans and fomori that make up First Teams — anti-werewolf hit squads. We have more of these “packets” in the pipeline.<br /><br />Each stretch goal is part-designed before it goes out — I have an idea of what’s going in to the section. Once we hit it, I start working on the design process proper, and when the Kickstarter wraps we’re in a position to get the new material into the book with as few delays as possible. That said, creating new stuff for the book does take time to write, edit, and lay out, but we’ve factored that in to our deadlines where we can.<br /><br /><b>DM: What other projects are you working on at the moment?</b><br />SW: Lots of them! When this Kickstarter wraps I should be in a position to send the next <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i> book to editing. For the new World of Darkness I’m designing the <i>Idigam Chronicle</i>, a chronicle book that does for <i>Werewolf: The Forsaken</i> what <i>Blood & Smoke: The Strix Chronicle</i> did for <i>Vampire: The Requiem</i>. I’m also involved in upcoming books for <i>Mage: The Awakening</i> and <i>Promethean: The Created</i>, and I’m part of the system design team for <i>Trinity</i> and <i>Scion</i>. Finally, I’m hopeful that I can get another self-published game out at some point this year, but that depends how busy I get.<br />
<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-74756329826928059262014-06-06T11:01:00.000+01:002014-06-06T11:01:16.569+01:00Rich Thomas interviewed by David McWilliam about the World of Darkness<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S_5fi59hECE/U5GKdwQSYDI/AAAAAAAAAEM/_irazgkjdeI/s1600/Rich+Thomas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S_5fi59hECE/U5GKdwQSYDI/AAAAAAAAAEM/_irazgkjdeI/s1600/Rich+Thomas.jpg" height="320" width="230" /></a>Since 1986, when he began illustrating and art directing for <i>White Wolf Magazine</i>, Rich has been responsible for the look and feel of every White Wolf product ever
created — ranging from RPG books, fiction, board/card games and
everything in between. Assuming the role of Creative Director in 2006,
Rich became responsible for White Wolf’s writing and development as
well. His administration included the launch of multiple Ennie-award
winning product lines: <i>Scion</i> and <i>Changeling: The Lost</i>. Rich was one of the driving forces behind the <a href="http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/94815/Vampire-The-Masquerade-20th-Anniversary-Edition?cPath=20632"><i>Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition</i></a>, and has returned to the world of traditional RPGs from his stint as the Director of Game Design and Content on the World of Darkness MMO, with a renewed focus on the continued Classic World of Darkness line and as the force behind <a href="http://theonyxpath.com/">Onyx Path Publishing</a>.<br />
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Along the way, Rich contributed to the unique style and presentation of White Wolf’s products by creating the many clan, tribe, tradition, and other groups’ symbols and the alphabets of <i>Werewolf</i> and <i>Exalted</i>. But as an illustrator, Rich is best known for his work on collectible card games: <i>Vampire: The Eternal Struggle</i>, <i>Doomtown</i>, <i>RAGE</i>, <i>Netrunner</i>, <i>Shadowfist</i>, and he is regarded as a classic <i>Magic: The Gathering</i> artist where his creation the “Stuffy Doll” first appeared on the original Black Vise artwork.<br />
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<b>DM: What is the World of Darkness and how does it differ from other horror roleplaying settings?</b><br />
RT: Well, to begin with, there are two of them. There is the classic World of Darkness which was the name given to the shared RPG setting for such games as <i>Vampire: The Masquerade</i>, <i>Werewolf: The Apocalypse</i>, and <i>Mage: The Ascension</i>. This was a world like ours, but worse in every way. Those shadows in the alley behind the club not only concealed muggers, but vampires. That howl you heard hiking wasn't just a mad dog, it was a werewolf. And the darkness under your bed... well, there really was something horrific lurking there. Part of what made the setting so compelling was that all these creatures had their own societies, their own histories, and politics, and conspiracies. And they all labored under the constant threat of the much prophesied end of the world- which lent this incredible dramatic and thematic weight to their nightly activities. Then there is the new World of Darkness, which we at White Wolf created after we actually brought those doomsday prophesies to fruition and destroyed the classic World of Darkness. The new World of Darkness adjusts some of the themes, tone, and assumptions of the classic: the world-wide conspiracies have been de-emphasized in favor of local, more personal, horror, and there is a greater effort on maintaining the feeling that there are many weird and terrifying things in the world that can't be classified. In both cases, the World of Darkness tends to bring out highly emotional and personal roleplaying and stories from its readers and players.<br />
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<b>DM: How do you see your stewardship of this property through Onyx Path Publishing?</b><br />
RT: In many ways, it’s a continuation of my years and years with White Wolf, so there's certainly a happy familiarity there. At the same time, oddly enough, I actually feel like the strictures of our license from CCP (the company that owns the rights to WW's games) enable us to be more creative and to try more new things than ever before. My goal with the WW properties we are licensed for- nWoD, cWoD, and <i>Exalted</i>, as well as with the settings we bought outright (<i>Scion</i>, the <i>Trinity Continuum</i>, and <i>Scarred Lands</i>), is to refresh the games and reinvigorate the community. All of these lines have fans, wonderful, devoted, fans, but they haven't had much to get excited about for years. So the first thing we needed to do, and are still doing, is to let the community know who we are and that we're going to revive the great games they love. A 3rd Edition for <i>Exalted</i> helmed by the most absolutely devoted to <i>Exalted</i> guys I know. 20th Anniversary Editions and then continuing new releases for the classic, "we're never publishing stuff for them again", World of Darkness. And retooling the entire nWoD set of game lines with the Chronicle books. Kickstarter was an unexpected huge bonus venue for getting the word out and generating excitement, so that was nice, and I pretty much hear every day from a past fan who is thrilled to discover that their favorite game is either already getting new, improved, books, or will soon.<br />
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<b>DM: Your shift to digital releases and print-on-demand is a response to the changing nature of the publishing industry. Has this given you greater creative freedom than back in the glory years of White Wolf?</b><br />
RT: Absolutely. As much as we at White Wolf snarled and snapped and tried to push the boundaries of art in roleplaying while still being a functioning company, we were faced with limitations because of the traditional distribution set up and needing to function within it. And the bigger we got, the tighter those constraints bound us. Because if you lose a distributor when you're small because they object to your content, you're losing orders for maybe a dozen books. But lose one at our 1998 size, let's say, and that'd be hundreds or even thousands of orders. So we had to pump out the books at a pace we all agreed was brutal, and had to hit the delivery dates or we'd be hit with a penalty reduction in orders. Or books had to be this size, or this format, or they wouldn't get the same push into stores. I think Ethan Skemp coined the phrase "Production Treadmill" and that was what we were on. And our insanely dedicated and just plain crazy WW crew did it and did it and still were able to make some incredibly awesome books. But if you had to choose between adding more time to make something even better, or hitting the deadline- well, the book went to press. Which is not to say that we never held anything back to improve it, we did time and again, but it was with the idea that we were squeezing blood from a stone to do it. That all just wears creative people down.<br />
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With digital and PoD publishing (and with our Kickstarter efforts too, actually), we are now directly delivering our projects into the hands of the fans. This gives us the creative freedom to experiment and the direct feedback to know if the people we are creating for like what we're doing. There are limitations to some of what we can do, because of the still evolving nature of digital and PoD publishing, but those downsides keep getting removed as that form of publishing keeps growing and maturing. We have even managed to create a beta-program to provide discounts for PoD books for retailers, and retailer tiers on our Kickstarters, so we're even finding ways to get our books back into stores. But in ways that actually don't disrupt the business of getting cool projects out to fans.<br />
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<b>DM: Are there any challenges presented by publishing classic and new World of Darkness lines concurrently in terms of design space?</b><br />
RT: There are, but not as many as you'd think. What we've found, actually, is the rebirth of cWoD enabled our writers to allow <i>Vampire: The Requiem</i>, for example, to become much more its own setting with its own themes to explore and stories to tell. Rather than having to be WW's vampire game, now that <i>Masquerade</i> is back, it can be one of the ways you can play vampires in one version of the WoD. The toolbox nature of nWoD can now be the asset it was always supposed to be for players who love that sort of thing, and the stories that we use to immerse you in nWoD can be far more appropriate to that setting without needing to sort of feel like cWoD. And the flipside of that is that classic WoD can really explore what has happened in the deep background and setting that fans have loved for over 20 years. Having both has actually allowed us to truly focus on what makes them individually compelling.<br />
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<b>DM: Are there works of contemporary horror in any medium outside of gaming that inspire and/or help you to keep finding new aspects of the genre?</b><br />
RT: For me personally, I actually try really hard not to get too caught up in chasing genre-specific works, but to try out things as I become aware of them. That way, when a developer or writer has a horror-specific idea, I can look at it from the broader perspective of how this one idea fits into the bigger setting. I'll dip into <i>Hannibal</i>, or <i>American Horror Story</i>, but also into <i>Sharknado</i>- just to get the cultural touchstones of how we're consuming our scary stuff. That being said, I've strangely found a lot of horror in anime recently, even when I wasn't looking for it. I have no idea of how to get across the "feel" of the besieged humans in <i>Attack on Titan</i> in the WoD, but there's something very disturbing there.<br />
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<b>DM: Of the game lines that Onyx Path has released, which are you most pleased with?</b><br />
RT: Oh that killer question. Which of your kids do you love more? I'm pleased with pretty much everything we've done in the past two and a bit years, all for wildly different reasons. <i>Mummy: The Curse</i> really evoked the dusty tomb, Universal films <i>Mummy</i> for me, while <i>Demon: The Descent</i> took a very strange mash-up of classical demons, the God-Machine, and LeCarre spy novels, and delivered a very different way to think about and play demons than anything else out there. The 20th Anniversary classic WoD books have been very satisfying to get out to the community who has loved them for so long and I rejoice every time I can reconnect with a classic artist and work with them again, so anytime we can create a new cWoD book is a delight. <i>EX3</i> is going to blow people away when we get it out there, and I also have a sneaky glimmer of happiness every time we get a new fiction book or t-shirt ready for ordering. To be honest, I really just keep moving forward- and right now, the best is yet to come.<br />
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<b>DM: Do you have plans to revisit and expand some of the smaller games from nWoD, such as <i>Promethean: The Created</i> and <i>Geist: The Sin-Eaters</i>?</b><br />
RT: <i>Promethean</i> was very much a niche line, we knew that going in and were really exploring the limited series idea at that point, and <i>Geist</i> just never got the emphasis it deserved as it fell right into a very confused period at WW. Which I say just to kind of emphasize that I don't see them as smaller in a bad way. So long as folks continue to support the Chronicle concept, we will do new editions of all of the nWoD game lines. Even <i>Changeling: The Lost</i> has elements that can be tweaked now after people have been playing for years. <br />
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<b>DM: Speculation is rife about the new game line hinted at for 2015, which has enigmatically been described as 'subversive'. <i>Demon: The Descent</i> introduced science fictional elements and <i>Mummy: The Curse</i> has presented players with fascinating new roleplaying opportunities by offsetting their declining power from awakening with their returning memory. Are you looking to introduce an even bigger challenge to concepts of what the World of Darkness is and how the Storyteller system functions?</b><br />
RT: Part of the process of getting the ideas for a new game together is looking at the new ideas and arranging and re-arranging them in order to judge which ones best work together to explain the game. We run those ideas past quite a few of our dedicated developers and writers, and then pitch the game to CCP as they have to approve any book we choose to make. It was during this process as Matt McFarland (the initial proposer of the new game) and I went back and forth on his write-up, that he mentioned how "subversive" he found the whole thing. I just grabbed that quote and threw it out there, and apparently that one word is just fascinating to our community. I can't say, though, whether it was the overall concepts behind the game, or a specific aspect he was referring to, but I can say that we don't start out usually thinking about deliberately challenging assumptions. Challenging or non-challenging, what I'm looking for is an idea that tries to explore something new for the setting, and has a reason for folks to check it out. <br />
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We go through a ton of ideas during "pitch season", and it is really hard, for nWoD in particular, to find fresh ideas that can also fit into the themes of the setting. A lot of times there's an idea for a good new supernatural to play, but that "creature" is very much a niche idea because otherwise it is really already covered by previous games. One-armed red-heads with second sight! Or the supernatural idea is just fine, and fresh, but the themes along with it stretch the modern horror feel of nWoD. For example, over the years we have heard fans ask for an Aliens game line, and frankly the closest we could come to that without going way into science fiction territory was <i>Changeling: The Lost</i> and the abductions in there. So, we are really careful about going too far out of the expectations the community (and CCP) have as to "What is the World of Darkness?", but we do try and stretch the bounds like with <i>Demon: The Descent</i>- which is about as far into science fiction as we're going right now, so that's another clue as to what the new game could be like.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-53596177502486622482014-05-31T11:56:00.000+01:002014-06-09T11:52:30.592+01:00Jean Murley interviewed by David McWilliam<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-T297O0x1g0c/U4mwwuOWldI/AAAAAAAAADo/P-IMJroZK3I/s1600/Jean+Murley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-T297O0x1g0c/U4mwwuOWldI/AAAAAAAAADo/P-IMJroZK3I/s1600/Jean+Murley.jpg" height="320" width="212" /></a></div>
Jean Murley is Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. Her first book,<i> The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture</i>, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Biographical/Critical Work in 2008. She is currently working on a book about wrongful conviction in America, tentatively titled <i>Collateral Damage: The Outrage of Wrongful Conviction: Eight Families' Stories</i>.<br />
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David McWilliam will be presenting at and co-running True Crime: Fact, Fiction, Ideology, a one-day academic conference about the genre, at the Manchester Conference Centre on Saturday 7th June 2014. <a href="http://www.hic-dragones.co.uk/true-crime-programme/">Click here to see the full programme and links to registration</a>.<br />
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<b>DM: What is true crime?</b> <br />
JM: This is a great question—the short answer, of course, is that true crime is a popular genre, multi-faceted and presenting representations of real crime (primarily murder). But who cares about short answers? We’re academics! Strictly speaking, in terms of the genre, true crime is a set of narrative conventions and strategies which include the presentation of one criminal event (often a series of them), simultaneous distancing from/identification with the killer, deep contextualization of the crime(s), a narrator who is an insider in some way, and the mixing of fictional elements such as imagined dialogue or re-enactments with facts. True crime is a way of making sense of the senseless, but it has also become a worldview, an outlook, and a perspective on contemporary life—one that is suspicious and cynical, narrowly focused on the worst kinds of crimes, and preoccupied with safety, order, and justice. The cultural work of true crime is fixated on the presentation of both horror and justice, of deep rips in the social fabric produced by acts of horrific violence alongside the mending of those same rips. Different iterations of the genre—on TV, films, books, and internet materials—highlight different aspects of crime using various narrative strategies, but the basic template remains the same: crime, context, pursuit, and punishment. As with any popular genre, true crime both reflects and is shaped by its own cultural contexts, and as the genre has matured and evolved, varying forces work to shape it. At present, there is a heavy emphasis on representations of historically interesting or previously-overlooked crimes. Looking through the <i>New York Times Book Review</i> this past Sunday, I noticed a survey review of four true crime texts covering Belle Epoque Paris, Medieval Paris, Nazi Berlin, and contemporary Philadelphia. The geographical or historically-themed true crime text is seeing a slight vogue at the moment, a (welcome?) departure from the serial-killer theme of the 1980s and 90s.<br />
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<b>DM: Why is true crime so fixated on murder? There is no shortage of newspaper columns about other extreme crimes, such as child abuse, that explore motivation, pursuit, capture and punishment, but this does not carry over into true crime. Does this have anything to do with the generic conventions and/or taboos in the marketplace?</b> <br />
JM: This is a question I’ve thought about often. The simple answer is that because murder is the most serious transgression one person can commit, there is endless fascination about it. It’s the biggest, baddest thing we can do, and there’s no end to the questions about it—why? how? what was going through that person’s head when they did that? What did the victim see, feel, experience? Could I do something like this, ever? What would drive <i>me</i> to commit this kind of act? But I think the fascination runs deeper than that. Murder is finality, it is definite, and—perhaps most importantly for true crime—it <i>seems</i> to be knowable. Epistemologically, murder appears to be something eminently knowable in our precarious, uncertain, and unstable world. What could be more clear? Somebody was killed, and somebody did it. End of story. Murder presents an opportunity for us to encounter factuality, knowability, and truth. The police and our various systems of justice and punishment deal with facts, and are engaged with a quest for the truth. This satisfies our collective need not just for justice and retribution, for re-ordering the world after the serious disorder of crime, but also our need to <i>know</i>, to have a collection of facts that cannot be disputed or interpreted or argued about. True crime is fixated on murder because it offers answers. And I think this is why the unsolved cases, the ones where serious questions and doubts linger—Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Sam Sheppard, Jeffrey MacDonald, to name just a few—stay with us for so very long. On the one hand, an unsolved case presents endless opportunities for theorizing and revisiting the crime; but in another way, an unsolved or questionable case breaks knowledge in an unacceptable way, and that lingers like a wound that just won’t heal. The unknown juxtaposed with the known—a murder, but no killer identified—is deeply vexing, on many levels. <br />
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This question also makes me think about Errol Morris’s groundbreaking true crime documentary film, <i>The Thin Blue Line</i>. In addition to being a film that played a huge role in freeing a wrongfully convicted man, Randall Adams, Morris very cleverly questions the knowability of murder through repeated re-enactments of the crime itself. Even though it is clear that David Harris, and not Randall Adams, killed police officer David Woods, the “official” version of events remained entrenched and inscribed in the public record—until Morris questioned the conviction with his film, through the many and multiple re-enactments of the murder. This is the powerful work that true crime can do, in both freeing an innocent man and in causing the viewer to question what is known about any act of murder. Some of the best forms of the genre do this.<br />
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<b>DM: Mark Seltzer describes the genre as 'crime fact that looks like crime fiction'. Would you agree that some of the more explicit true crime also looks like horror fiction? </b><br />
JM: Absolutely. But this is really two separate (but related) questions. Some true crime is called “crime porn,” not unlike the “torture porn” horror films such as the <i>Saw</i> series (and many others). Exploitation or an emotionally charged presentation of the ultra-violent and graphic elements of true crime is one of those moral gray areas that we find whenever violence is represented in popular culture. The question is always one of emphasis—are we more interested in the squeamish details of what is actually done to particular bodies in criminal acts, or are we more interested in the biography, motivation, and psychology of the killer? And of course, this is morally problematic, as the victim becomes <i>just</i> a body, violated in unimaginable ways and presented for consumption by viewers/readers who hide prurience behind a kind of curiosity motivated by moral outrage. True crime operates in an emotional register very similar to that of horror, with a cast of monsters and predators endlessly violating and killing “innocent” or unwitting victims. The rhetoric of true crime echoes that of horror, and the graphic and explicit details of bodily violations are many. <br />
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However, this is also a question about the mixture of fact and fiction that is an essential element of true crime, and that raises other significant ethical questions. True crime always relates details about acts that simply cannot be known, as the witnesses are dead and/or silent. Killers—when they talk—lie, and murder victims can’t talk. So, writers put words into the mouths of people, they relate conversations that <i>might</i> have happened, place their characters into situations <i>likely</i> to have occurred, and so on. This can’t be avoided, as the demands of a good narrative call for good details. But is this something we want to do? Is it OK to imbue the cultural memory of a significant crime with fictional elements? Is it warranted to give murderers the dimensions and weight of literary characters, to make the killers more memorable than their victims? Is this even avoidable, when crafting stories about events? I don’t know. But it’s important to think about these questions and to ask them of the genre. I think that in its best forms, true crime asks these questions of itself.<br />
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<b>DM: What are true crime’s best forms? How do some true crime texts question the worldview and/or narrative techniques of the genre?</b><br />
JM: I think the best true crime asks questions—not just about murder and crime, punishment and justice, truth and lies, but about the genre itself. One of the first books to do this is Norman Mailer’s <i>The Executioner’s Song</i>, of course, and Mailer does this through placing himself squarely within the narrative and showing us the machinations of commerce attached to a high-profile case. Oliver Stone’s <i>Natural Born Killers</i> and John McNaughton’s <i>Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer</i> question representations of violence while engaging in those same representations, which is very difficult to do. I think <i>Henry</i> takes more risks and ultimately succeeds in this endeavor, by calling on the viewer to be conscious of the act of viewing. <i>NBK</i> fails in the same endeavor because Mickey and Mallory Knox are too attractive, sexy, and compelling, and Stone falls into the old trap of Milton’s Satan—that evil is often more interesting and beautiful than the good, and this is, after all, entertainment. <i>Henry</i> isn’t afraid to present ugliness in its questioning of voyeuristic interest in violence. <br />
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In TV shows, I think that <i>The First 48</i> is doing really important cultural work; although it doesn’t stick to the conventions of true crime, it does present real crimes, unadorned and without the layer of compelling interest garnered by serial or sexual murder. <i>The First 48</i> asks inherent and subtle questions of the true crime genre by ignoring the conventions, although the demands of creating narrative interest still hold, such as highlighting certain detective characters, emphasizing some of them to the exclusion of others, etc. I find the <i>LA Times </i>“Homicide Report” extremely interesting, as it does similar cultural work—presenting actual murder, in context, but without the glittering coat of sensationalism that most murder narratives still use. <br />
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I also find some of the newer murder narratives really interesting—books like Terri Jentz’s <i>Strange Piece of Paradise</i> or some of the historical true crime which seems to be trending at the moment, the movies <i>Zodiac</i>, <i>Capote</i>, and <i>Infamous</i>, and the “Red Riding” trilogy of TV shows. Each of these true crime forms indicates a different direction for true crime, a kind of “meta-non-fiction,” as they examine the larger contexts of murder and the making of murder narratives. We seem to be moving in a direction that is slightly away from the strict conventions of the genre and into uncharted territory—the Jentz book is written by a woman who was a victim of an axe-wielding killer who, luckily, didn’t succeed, and the text follows her quest to identify her attacker. The others break the boundaries of the genre by emphasizing context or the nuts-and-bolts of murder narration, to the exclusion of a concentration on the psycho-killer. I think this is a wonderful new direction in true crime. <br />
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This question is actually huge, and I could go on much longer, but I won’t… <br />
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<b>DM: How did you come to research true crime and what challenges did it present?</b><br />
JM: I’ve always enjoyed the genre, and in graduate school I turned that fascination into scholarship. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on true crime texts, analyzing major volumes in the genre and arguing for their significance. One of the major challenges in doing this work has been my own mission to gain recognition that true crime is an important genre worthy of serious and sustained study. Trivialized because it is popular, true crime has been marginalized as “trash” because of its subject matter, that of tabloid-worthy subjects and topics. But it does serious and important cultural work, and even in its worst, most sensationalistic iterations, true crime is always asking “why?” Why do we do such horrible things to each other? Why are we so interested in murder? What can be done about this? These are crucial questions about the human condition, and true crime is one of the only forms of popular culture that asks them, and sometimes even attempts answers. In my Ph.D. program, I was very fortunate to find advisors and mentors who encouraged the study of popular culture, so I didn’t encounter many hurdles in that regard. But my work has been marginalized at some inter-disciplinary academic conferences, and I can’t help but think that it’s because true crime is seen as unimportant. I heartily disagree. <br />
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Some of the more practical challenges I’ve encountered as a true crime scholar involve tracking down hard-to-find old magazines—the Library of Congress and a privately-held treasure trove in New Jersey have been invaluable in my work. Out-of-print true crime volumes are quite easy to find, thankfully, on Amazon, although some are prohibitively expensive.<br />
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<b>DM: Will <i>Collateral Damage</i> also explore true crime texts, or are you planning to look at other forms of crime non-fiction?</b><br />
JM: <i>Collateral Damage</i> will present the personal stories of eight people who experienced wrongful conviction through the incarceration of a loved one; in a way, this book is true crime of a new type, because I will be narrating real crimes (and the “crime” of wrongful conviction), but from the perspective of the people affected by it, rather than fixating on the details of the crime itself and its aftermath. Crime never occurs in a vacuum; neither do wrongful convictions. These are stories that have yet to be told, and they are an important part of the vast social injustice wrought by all-too-common miscarriages of the criminal justice system. Wrongful conviction narratives are rapidly becoming their own genre, with such texts as Grisham’s <i>An Innocent Man</i>, Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson’s <i>Picking Cotton</i>, and the many first-person narrated volumes that relate the experience of wrongful conviction. <br />
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I am also considering doing a second edition of <i>The Rise of True Crim</i>e; the genre is growing so rapidly and in such interesting directions, that I need to update the book! Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-88196370532521843092014-05-01T12:56:00.000+01:002014-06-06T11:02:44.289+01:00Ricardo Pinto interviewed by David McWilliam<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yXGK0uGp9Ho/U2Ix0Y_KgeI/AAAAAAAAADA/HXif7ZRiSQU/s1600/Ricardo+Pinto+portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yXGK0uGp9Ho/U2Ix0Y_KgeI/AAAAAAAAADA/HXif7ZRiSQU/s1600/Ricardo+Pinto+portrait.jpg" height="320" width="268" /></a>Ricardo Pinto is best known for his fantasy trilogy, The Stone Dance of the Chameleon. Since this was published, he has been working on a number of projects. A sci-fi novella is ready for publication, and a variety of collaborative work is edging towards the light of day. Most recently he has been concentrating on a novel set in ancient Persia. His earliest work was in designing computer games and now it appears that he may be coming full circle with the release of War in Heaven, a graphic novel that incorporates cutting-edge digital technology.<br />
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For more information, please visit: <a href="http://www.ricardopinto.com/">http://www.ricardopinto.com/</a><br />
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<b>DM: Both <i>The Stone Dance of the Chameleon</i> and <i>War in Heaven</i> draw on Gothic horror in order to imbue your stories with a sense of crisis and urgency. Are you influenced by writers in the field, or do you draw on other sources of darkness?</b><br />
RP: I no longer read much that could be categorised as Gothic or horror, though I did read Lovecraft, Poe and Kafka etc, and no doubt the influence of other writers has seeped into my subconscious through films - from Hitchcock to Del Toro; but in truth there’s more than enough darkness welling up in me and, perhaps, it is out from this pit within a writer’s psyche that ‘real’ terrors must crawl…<br />
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<b>DM: Why are you so attracted to the epic form, be it in the scope of <i>Stone Dance</i> or rewriting Milton’s <i>Paradise Lost</i> with <i>War in Heaven</i>?</b><br />
RP: I suppose I hadn't really noticed that I was - and that is suggestive. What occurs to me is that the epic may well be the most psychologically intimate form of storytelling. What is it after all but the internal world - especially the subconscious - writ large; the world as a projection of a person's interior reality? This may explain why epic is full to bursting with symbols - the sort of symbols, or archetypes, that Jung said were generated by that part of our subconscious that is common to us all. In <i>War in Heaven</i>, it is clear, I think, that what we are experiencing is something akin to Eve's dream - though there are indicators that it is not a dream. I wonder if we don't all, in a sense, live in an epic world - one that we make such by the way that we choose (involuntarily) to interpret the path that our lives take...?<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-N21dlAjzpAU/U2IyWFk-KqI/AAAAAAAAADI/qhgXrz4MgTc/s1600/Stone+Dance+books.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-N21dlAjzpAU/U2IyWFk-KqI/AAAAAAAAADI/qhgXrz4MgTc/s1600/Stone+Dance+books.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-N21dlAjzpAU/U2IyWFk-KqI/AAAAAAAAADI/qhgXrz4MgTc/s1600/Stone+Dance+books.jpg" height="174" width="200" /></a><b>DM: The hubris of political leaders is a destructive element in your fiction. Is this in any way a comment on twenty-first century politics, or are you more interested in mythic archetypes?</b><br />
RP: Twenty-first century politics seems to me to be the anaemic handmaiden of more shadowy corporate cabals. Having survived the genocidal autocrats of the twentieth century, we seem determined to keep our modern leaders leashed as ridiculed and oft-ignored fools. Deep into the past, and across all societies, every kind of political system threw up monsters who exploited the weaknesses of those systems, and of human nature, to wreak havoc. Today, the hubristic powers have burrowed underground, or skulk behind the glittering facades; but who among us does not feel their malign breath on our neck? So it is hardly surprising that such influences should stain a writer’s work. On the other hand, as I have said above, I believe the epic form is symbiotic with the human psyche and there the Hitlers and the Pol-Pots are adults as projected by a fearful child. Mythic archetypes have broken free of our collective subconscious to rampage across the world, and the boundary between our psyches and that world has been left flimsy. If, as I believe, we now live in a world that is co-extensive with our psyches, is not everyone interested in mythic archetypes?<br />
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<b>DM: What was the purpose of situating Eve in the present when Satan comes to tempt her?</b><br />
RP: It is a venerable tradition to explore fantasy worlds through portals anchored in the here and now. The utter degradation of Eve that we witness in the opening panels sets a necessary tone for what follows; to punch this degradation into the reader’s stomach, the judgement that the she or he makes of Eve must be real and current. Her innocence as portrayed through the story shines out against this dark ground.<br />
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<b>DM: How did your collaboration with Adrian Smith on <i>War in Heaven</i> come about?</b><br />
RP: In the early 90s we worked together and have been friends ever since. We have been talking about collaborating on something new for years. This possibility was blocked by my focus on my <i>Stone Dance</i> trilogy, and Adrian's focus on the work that he was doing for Games Workshop and others. More recently, we have been working together on a number of projects, of which <i>War in Heaven</i> is only the first to make it into the light of day...<br />
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<b>DM: How much of an influence did you exert in shaping the strikingly horrific vision of Satan found in <i>War in Heaven</i>?</b><br />
RP: I took care to locate <i>War in Heaven</i> in the dark intersection between Adrian’s and my sensibility. Thereafter we pupated it together…<br />
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<b>DM: With the idea of tapping into the collective unconscious and your movement towards collaborating on many of your recent projects, are you shifting away from the idea of authorship as a solitary art-form?</b><br />
RP: After the effort to birth the <i>Stone Dance</i> I was psychically somewhat used up and, with the relatively tepid response to those books, and the crisis in the publishing industry, I was left somewhat adrift. Without the support of a publisher, it has been rather daunting to throw myself into another demanding solitary work. Also, as a necessary antidote to the immensity of the <i>Stone Dance</i>, I spent some time experimenting with short forms - only to find that they are even harder to get published than novels. Graphic novels seemed a natural extension of this process, and I find collaboration exciting and fun. Nevertheless, I have been nurturing several solitary creations….<br />
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<b>DM: Can say anything about the unpublished projects you are working on?</b><br />
RP: Adrian and I have a few projects hanging. One that started as a graphic novel, but that has morphed into a kind of children’s book, may be finished soon. My Persian book - a novel set in the 6th century BC - will attempt to tell a story that stretches across several hundred years and that will encompass the history of much of the ancient world from Greece and Egypt to India. This book is fully researched and ‘designed’ and ready to write. When a suitable clear period comes along I will take the whale-breath and make the dive…Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-55164207317354772372013-11-29T10:23:00.000+00:002014-06-19T11:15:36.508+01:00Michael Sabbaton interviewed by David McWilliam<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9R6q_3ZqN6s/Uphmg6fOxqI/AAAAAAAAABo/3VVz-O7pxhs/s1600/Harley+Book+RGB+72dpi+A5_Web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9R6q_3ZqN6s/Uphmg6fOxqI/AAAAAAAAABo/3VVz-O7pxhs/s320/Harley+Book+RGB+72dpi+A5_Web.jpg" height="320" width="225" /></a>Michael Sabbaton is an actor continually fascinated with the workings of theatre and performance. He has been an academic, scenographer and designer as well as a performer and
creates compelling and engaging characters living in worlds both
familiar and strange. As an actor and voiceover artist, he has worked in
a diverse range of performance fields from physical theatre to
classical Shakespeare, straight drama and site specific performance. <br />
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Since 2010, and alongside other work, he has been developing, writing and producing his own brand of Dark Theatre currently in the form of one-man adaptations for the stage. Selling out to audiences including The Lowry, Salford Quays and Harrogate Theatre, it is in this work that he is currently focusing, pushing the limits of one-man performance through character, sound, music and action.<br />
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For more information, reviews, reels and photos visit <a href="http://www.michaelsabbaton.com/">www.michaelsabbaton.com</a><br />
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<b>DM: As a playwright and actor, what attracts you to adapting Lovecraft's work for the stage?</b><br />
MS: I think for both the playwright and actor in me, the attraction primarily lies in vastly exercising the imagination across the interpretation of the source material, the business of creating the production and the encouragement of the audience in extending that imaginative process in the moment that they experience the show.<br />
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I’m interested in character and theatre, which for me translates as focusing in on moments of rhythm, space and action. This is from both an acting and audience point of view. Everything becomes a character on stage. All moments. All space. All scenographic elements. All are performers and all must feel through those moments so that the audience discovers and lives them at the very same time. It’s so important. Everything is part of the action, most especially the audience.<br />
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That’s what I think <i>theatre</i> is, essentially, and with the Lovecraft work we have a great opportunity to really rev up that theatre engine to see how it ticks over. This doesn’t mean racing away with it at all... in fact the opposite. We need to let those moments grow... we need to see the thoughts of the characters and make our own observations. In this way we see beyond the surface level of ‘the horror’ or ‘science fiction’ and into something much deeper, which in turn makes the horror even more intense. <br />
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I just think Lovecraft’s work is full of great character questions to ask and this is what draws me to it as an actor too.<br />
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<b>DM: Are you influenced by interpretations of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror in fiction, film, and/or games?</b><br />
MS: Not really. To be honest, I just like to take each story as it comes and work from inside that story itself. I think that everything you need to know is in that story. The only other ingredient is your own imagination. For me, this simplicity is the key.<br />
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<b>DM: Your adaptation of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is an impressive production in which you play a number of characters relating fragments of an unfolding tale of madness and despair. What are the advantages of a one-man production and are you interested in one day putting together a larger show featuring a cast of different actors?</b><br />
MS: Well, each show is different. With <i>Cthulhu</i>, what interests me is having multiple characters coming out from a single main one; in this case, Francis Thurston. It’s specifically written from this point of view so to have other actors in this show would be wrong. In terms of working with a larger cast on a future project, I am always open so we shall just see where the future leads us. <br />
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The advantage of producing one-man shows from a creative point of view is that you are always challenged and kept on your toes! It’s a great way to keep pushing yourself and to ask all those interesting questions. <br />
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<b><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3MvIGNjOszI/Uphod-KF39I/AAAAAAAAAB0/aY1ZGQiEtxs/s1600/The+Statement+of+Randolph+Carter+Harrogate+A3+Poster+sample+LOW+RES.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3MvIGNjOszI/Uphod-KF39I/AAAAAAAAAB0/aY1ZGQiEtxs/s320/The+Statement+of+Randolph+Carter+Harrogate+A3+Poster+sample+LOW+RES.jpg" height="320" width="227" /></a>DM: I think it is fair to describe <i>The Statement of Randolph Carter</i> as an uncompromising representation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Why do you think that there is now an audience for this kind of horror theatre?</b><br />
MS: As I said, above, I think that it’s the characters that make it so. The theatre is a very intimate gathering point for human beings. We see ourselves through the horror. A cosmic or Mythos-based horror is a human fear manifest to an nth degree – it’s interesting to see how they ‘cope’ with it. <i>The Statement</i> deals with a rising ‘manifestation’ but it’s also interesting to explore an already present one. In my stage version of <i>Cthulhu</i>, we have the character of Francis Thurston living with the unthinkable terror night after night and there never is any resolution, no happy ending. <br />
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I also think these are great stories; exciting ‘epic’ journeys, which still have an intimate connection with the reader and audience. I am excited to work in this field, with this material... it makes me think and wonder. <br />
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<b>DM: Lovecraft's 'The Statement of Randolph Carter' is considered to be one of his most ambiguous tales. However, by using Abdul Alhazred to introduce the narrative and link its occult horror to the Outer God Yog-Sothoth, you explicitly situate it within the Cthulhu Mythos. How do you think this change alters the story?</b><br />
MS: Well, for me there is some connection. I love the ambiguity and I hate spoon-feeding too. Sometimes I am criticised for this but I think that an audience is intelligent enough to piece a mystery together. They can find their own way, etc.<br />
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The decision to include Abdul as a prologue to the piece was a difficult one and I was always ready to pull it if I felt it didn’t work, but I think it does now and introduces a parable-like structure for the piece. Knowledge and Wisdom: two volatile brothers who sometimes battle to be heard above the other. I think this is a familiar tale we hear and battle with ourselves every day in the news, living on this planet! I also think that there are justifications for the inclusion in the ambiguity of the original tale itself. The ‘book from India’ that Harley Warren receives is an interesting point of reference. Is it some translation of <i>The Necronomicon</i>? If so, perhaps it is a flawed translation... one that has elements missing? Who knows but I think this helps connect the work a little. Lovecraft makes these suggestions so why not use them? Also, the fact that Harley Warren is such a clinical kind of guy at the start, very controlled, with a mind that is very structured and ordered in what it wants to achieve, means that the book that never leaves his side is almost like an embodiment of that reliance on his own perfectionism – a reliance on facts, research, commitment, work, etc. But what if there was a flaw in his plan? What if the book was wrong? What happens when this world comes crashing down and it’s too late to change tack?<br />
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Stanislavsky famously uses a phrase in his acting teachings, which is known as ‘the magic if’. It’s all about opening the imagination up given certain stated circumstances in a character’s life. We may not know everything, but we will know the surrounding circumstances. These help us to consider what may happen ‘if’ we make certain decisions. Here, ‘the book from India’ might be considered as such a given circumstance and if we then allow ourselves to say, “Well, what if it was a version of <i>The Necronomicon</i> in some kind of translation?”, then this opens the door to answering part of the mystery to what Harley Warren is doing and unlocks down in the depths of the earth. For me, this makes the story more solid. The ambiguity is still there. There is still mystery, but the actions, the thoughts and the intentions of the characters become clearer and this (I think) builds a better relationship with the adaptive work for the stage. It’s also fun!<br />
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<b>DM: What are your plans for the future in terms of your Lovecraftian productions, both old and new?</b><br />
MS: Mmmmm. Well, I always have loads of ideas but the real issue for me is funding them. Being totally independently financed is a struggle and funding is highly competitive so it is a struggle to keep going. What is encouraging, though, is the response that the audience give back. That spurs me on so I will keep trying.<br />
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In terms of ideas... a few on the shelf are <i>Nyarlathotep</i>, <i>Dagon and The Shadow Over Innsmouth</i>, <i>Eric Zann</i> and perhaps more from Abdul Alhazred and <i>The Necronomicon</i>! <br />
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<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373052606488305319noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-66174684664819809702013-10-11T20:14:00.000+01:002015-03-30T21:00:25.007+01:00House of Small Shadows Competition WinnersCongratulations to the following winners, a copy of <i>House of Small Shadows </i>will be sent out to you by Pan Macmillan:<br />
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Iolanda Tanzi<br />
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Richard Baron<br />
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Anthony Cowin<br />
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Nick Brown<br />
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Jordan West<br />
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Joe Turner<br />
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Zach Cano<br />
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Gary Power<br />
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S. A. Rennie<br />
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Carlos PodaderaTwisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7971684444777589316.post-50126329305356584512013-10-07T17:51:00.001+01:002013-10-07T17:51:36.343+01:00NEW EVENT: Twisted Tales of Gothic Manchester<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Twisted Tales of Gothic Manchester</b>, a collaboration with Dr Linnie Blake and Dr Xavier Aldana-Reyes of the newly formed Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, is now a <b>FREE</b> event. Join us for readings by and conversation with award-winning writers Ramsey Campbell and Conrad Williams and new talent Stephen McGeagh as we explore why they decided to use Manchester as the backdrop for some of their most horrific stories. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">6-7.30pm Sunday 27th October 2013</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">International Anthony Burgess Foundation </span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">3 Cambridge Street<br />Manchester <br />M1 5BY</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Tickets are now going fast, so make sure you book yours <a href="https://twistedtalesmanchester.eventbrite.com/"><b>here</b></a>.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bbQFxmQ-zgI/UlLjgmQweDI/AAAAAAAAAIA/R_XSrEPmSuU/s1600/Ramsey-Campbellweb-300x224.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="148" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bbQFxmQ-zgI/UlLjgmQweDI/AAAAAAAAAIA/R_XSrEPmSuU/s200/Ramsey-Campbellweb-300x224.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://twistedtalesmanchester.eventbrite.com/"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></a><a href="http://www.ramseycampbell.com/"><b>Ramsey Campbell</b></a> is Britain’s most respected living horror writer, according to the Oxford Companion to English Literature. He is author of, among many others novels, <i>The Nameless </i>(1981), adapted to film in 1999,<i> The Hungry Moon</i> (1986), <i>The Darkest Part of the Woods</i> (2003) and, more recently, <i>Ghosts Know</i> (2011) and <i>The Last Revelation of Gla’aki</i> (2013). Ramsey is based in Liverpool, but has written about Manchester and the North West more generally. His multiple awards for short stories and novels can be found <a href="http://www.knibbworld.com/campbell/awards.html">here</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://conradwilliams.wordpress.com/"><b>Conrad Williams</b></a> is a horror writer from Warrington. He is the author of seven novels, four novellas and a collection of short stories. Conrad won the August Derleth award for Best Novel with <i>One</i> (British Fantasy Awards 2010) and his <i>The Unblemished</i> won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel in 2007. He has also won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer (1993) and a British Fantasy Award for Best Novella with <i>The Scalding Rooms</i> (2008). In 2009, he was Guest of Honour at the World Horror Convention.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dMNb6LkEKjo/UlLllezQphI/AAAAAAAAAIY/N6Ma0oFhnN0/s1600/Stephen-McGeaghweb-300x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dMNb6LkEKjo/UlLllezQphI/AAAAAAAAAIY/N6Ma0oFhnN0/s200/Stephen-McGeaghweb-300x200.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://twitter.com/SJMcGeagh"><b>Stephen McGeagh</b></a> is a horror writer and former MMU student. His debut novel <i>Habit</i> was published in 2012 by Salt and takes place in contemporary Manchester. It has been
praised by writers such as Ramsey Campbell and Nicholas Royle, and has
been selected for the first term of the <a href="http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/gothicmmu/contemporary-gothic-reading-group/">Contemporary Gothic Reading Group</a> at MMU. Stephen is currently writing a new novel, a horror tale set in Salford.<br />
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<br />Twisted Taleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04457418792242104681noreply@blogger.com0