Rescued from storage: Chill invitation

When I was visiting my family a couple weeks back, I delved into my grandmother’s musty garage, stuffed to the gills with storage boxes from my family’s past. There are tons of my old toys, books, etc., and it’s always something of a mystery just what I’ll find. I might report back later on some of the books and toys I uncovered, including a few things I shipped home, but for now I thought I’d share this one piece of paper I found, an invitation I crafted 23+ years ago (yikes!) for a game of Chill.

I remember the game session well, and for the rest of my high school days, those friends and I would sometimes say, “Ahhh! Fear check!” (a game mechanic when a character encountered something frightening or unusual). Lots of fun.

A few random thoughts:

• Dig that lightning bolt motif for the word Chill!
• I’m pretty sure I photocopied this, so I actually did it in red ink less for the scare/blood factor and more because I thought it would scan better than black or blue ink would.
• The language in the bottom left cracks me up: “you possess,” “you can conceive.” I was a pompous guy, wasn’t I?
• S.A.V.E. was a sort of anti-monster organization that all the PCs in Chill ended up belonging to. It was useful, I guess, as a way to get all the PCs together. I used it because back then I was nervous about deviating from game backgrounds and module info, but I think in general the game would have been better off without it. Let the PCs be people caught up in the craziness somehow without an organization, and you can ramp up the fear. Not that the concept itself was all that bad, but it wasn’t developed in enough detail to make it worthwhile, as I recall.
• If you go here and scroll down, you can see the module I ran that session, Isle of the Dead. I’ve got very fond memories of Chill in general and that one in particular.
• Part of what drew me to the module was the freakiness of the various carnival characters, a fascination that continues today and that showed up in Devil’s Cape.

Technorati Tags: RPGs,games,Chill,nostalgia

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Devil's Cape review at Horror Reader

Devil's Cape has received a largely positive review by Daniel Robichaud at the Horror Reader web site.

Here's an excerpt:

The writing is quite good. The characters are layered and intriguing, the setting is well defined, the supernatural and the paranormal powers and their uses are imaginative, and the language is of that "invisible" style, which communicates without calling attention to itself. Rogers is a gifted storyteller, and the tale he weaves is one that probes the darker corners of its subject matter as well as the hopeful, inspirational ones.

Check out the whole review here. Robichaud also discusses the book on his blog.

I'm grateful for the review and enjoyed it. I wanted to response quickly to two points Robichaud makes:

• As he quite correctly points out, Devil's Cape isn't really a horror novel. It's got some dark aspects, but at its heart, it's about superheroes. I'm grateful to whoever at Wizards sent the book out to horror reviewers, because I wouldn't have thought of doing so and it's gotten the book some additional exposure. And someday I might like to take a stab at horror writing, so to speak. But for the most part, Devil's Cape does fall outside of the horror genre.
• The main reason I didn't address Hurricane Katrina in the book is timing. That's worth a whole post in itself, but by the time Katrina happened, a lot of the book was already written, and I completed the first draft within a couple months after the storm. I didn't want to shoehorn in a reference at that point. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's fodder for another post.

Thanks, Daniel Robichaud, for taking the time to review the book.

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Interview with Richard Dansky

One of the nicest aspects of getting a book published is the chance to meet new people. The talented Richard Dansky is the author of Firefly Rain, the first book to be released as part of the Wizards Discoveries imprint. Richard's web site describes him as a "horror writer, game designer, and general cad." Richard has several other books to his credit, but Firefly Rain is his first original novel (the others have been in shared universes or with existing properties). Richard is a game design manager for Red Storm Entertainment where, I was delighted to find out, he has played softball with my cousin-in-law. Small world.

At any rate, Richard agreed to an interview on this blog. So here goes. Read this and then go pick up Firefly Rain. It's a good read.

Richard, I just finished reading Firefly Rain, which I enjoyed a good deal. Can you tell me what sparked the idea for the book? Was there a particular concept or image or thought or incident that led to this story?

The image that really sparked the book came from visiting my wife's family farm for the first time. It's out in the middle of nowhere in Missouri, and the closest I'd seen to something like that growing up was the golf course across the street from my parents' house. So that first night out there, when we went for a walk, there was a full moon and the light in the fields was so bright you could read by it. Off in the distance, you could see the treeline, and that was absolutely pitch black. And it was that image, that stark juxtaposition of light and dark, that turned into the core image at the heart of the book. I ended up reversing it – in the novel, it's Jacob Logan's land that's dark, and everything around him is lit up – but the sense of that clean cutoff is still there.

In the acknowledgments for Firefly Rain, you mention one person "for much-appreciated assistance with shotguns." I ended up getting assistance from a friend for a scene in Devil's Cape involving a shotgun, so this one caught my curiosity. What kind of shotgun wisdom did you receive?

The shotgun in Firefly Rain (not to give away a plot point or anything) is a far cry from the sorts of guns I usually end up referencing in the Tom Clancy video games I worked on. Those guns, I can write about with a fair degree of confidence, but the sort of shotgun you'd find out on a farm, well, not so much. The gun in the book is actually based on a shotgun that my father-in-law had owned, and Geoff Grabowski was kind enough to double-check what I'd written about it to make sure that it actually behaved and was built the way I thought it was.

What's your favorite moment from a video game? This can be either a favorite moment from a game you played or a game you worked on.

I think the video game moment that resonated most with me actually came during the development process for Ghost Recon: Desert Siege. I was playing the Ghost Town map, which had a deserted shantytown of corrugated tin and whatnot in it, and we'd just put the full sound treatment in the level. So there I was, creeping through the abandoned shacks, pretty sure that I'd cleared the area out, when suddenly a sniper took a shot at me. The shot missed and hit the sheet of tin next to my guy, and it made this tremendous, shocking SPANGGGG sound that spooked the hell out of me. I think I went about a foot straight up in the air. Mind you, I kept my hands on the keyboard & mouse and managed to take out the sniper, but even so, that was just an amazing moment, one that really brought home how immersive video games can be.

With a background that touches on role-playing games, computer games, book publishing, horror, and beyond, you must end up at a variety of conventions. What's your favorite convention story?

The best thing that ever happened to me at a convention is that I met my wife at one. If the folks who organized Gateway, in St. Louis, back in 1999 are reading this, thank you. I owe you one.

On a lighter note, I have a ton of great memories (and wacky hijinks) from various conventions and conferences over the years, some of which are barely printable, illegal in fourteen states, or the sort of thing that involves jumping naked into a large body of water in Scandinavia. If I had to pick just one, it would probably be driving Gahan Wilson to a miniature golf course at NECON a few years back, and then playing 18 tiny, astro-turfed holes with him. We had a wonderful conversation about synagogue architecture and how the air conditioner may be responsible for the decline of the American neighborhood, and all the while a little piece of my brain was screaming "Oh my God! I'm talking to Gahan Wilson!"

And for what it's worth, he's not half-bad on the putting green, either.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Just that I'm very much looking forward to reading Devil's Cape - it looks fantastic.

Thanks, Richard!

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