Alone in the Labyrinth: I WANT TO SEE THINGS THAT I HAVEN'T SEEN BEFORE: Interview with an ECO MOFO, David Blandy

Sunday, 23 July 2023

I WANT TO SEE THINGS THAT I HAVEN'T SEEN BEFORE: Interview with an ECO MOFO, David Blandy

Portrait of the Artist as an Eco Mofo....

David Blandy is an artist, RPG designer maker, and one half of Copy/Paste Co-Op with Daniel Locke.
https://substack.com/@copypastecoop

https://twitter.com/davidblandyrpgs

David also has the dubious honour of introducing me to the world of livestream actual plays, during a 2020 run-through of his game-within-an-art-project, The World After.

Currently crowdfunding the runaway success story ECO MOFOS!! over on Kickstarter alongside Dan, David very kindly agreed to have take to give me nearly two hours of his time in a discord voice call while he went out to buy bread in the Brighton's labyrinths.

Hello? Can you hear me?

This was a long and rambling chat which I've hacked away at to make it more digestible, but I think David shares some really interesting insight into the creative process and where some of his inspiration comes from. It was really enjoyable, despite being done over discord chat: hopefully we'll reconvene again, next time in the same room, and record our next conversation to broadcast quality!

Eco Mofos!!

How did your partnership with Daniel Locke emerge?

I know him as Dan, but his professional name is Daniel. We've been friends for 20 years: we met at art school in London and we have actually worked together on other projects. We made a graphic novel together called Out of Nothing... and yeah, recently he was a big part of me getting back into tabletop role playing. Actually, it was him who dug out the Red Box when I mentioned how interested I was in getting back into gaming. This was around 2014/15, and it was that moment where I saw some of those illustrations from the red box, the cleric and the dwarf and stuff, and just had this real rush of.... wow! These images! It's not just nostalgia: there's something quite powerful about the way that these images work. Why have these become seared in my brain, on my retina? And it was Dan who persuaded me to run a little session for him, a one-on-one D&D session in a pub as his birthday present... and he died at the end of it!

We were playing 5E: I'd been running fifth edition for my kids for a little while as I'd wanted something to do with my kids that wasn't screen based and it seemed like a fun thing to do. They both got really into it, though they're not playing so much these days, but they're showing a lot of interest in ECO MOFOS!! I may try and spring that on them this summer...

Then, I was working on Lone Eons [the solo version of Lost Eons ] and had a version I was quite happy with, generally, for the writing. But I had a thought that I wanted some new images to go with it, because I didn't want to just regurgitate everything that I did in Lost Eons. And so I did a little Itch funder, basically: I put it up on itch.io with all the proceeds going towards paying Dan to do some art. That went ok: it was during zine month and I managed to do well enough to get him to do some drawings. Dan's a professional illustrator, he needs to be paid for his time, which is as it should be! It's just that thing of justifying using his time for doing something silly like role playing games rather than earning his crust making new graphic novels and things.

So we had that experience of working together a bit, and then I started on this new project, ECO MOFOS!! and he was interested, kind of like a friend is: like "oh, that's a cool thing you're doing"! Then about six months ago or something he actually got around to reading it [while ill in bed with covid or something similar] and I suddenly got this flurry of discord messages like: "David, this is really good! I really like this!" and then he started making some things for the ecomofo jam, to create adventures. Lots of people got involved and some really great adventures came out of it. But Dan made a couple of pamphlets for that, drawing his own stuff for this world.... and it was like: "Dan, we could do something together properly! You don't have to just make these little adventures! We could transform this book and make it our thing, rather than my thing". We've formed a co-op, effectively, meaning everything that happens with Eco Mofos!! is going to be split 50/50, once we take off the costs.

It's a very straightforward arrangement. I guess it disrupts that idea of the artist and the writer being separate entities in a way, and I think it just reflects how we actually work together, which is very collaborative. Dan will come up with an image, I'll write a thing for it, he'll be inspired by the text... then it's more of a back-and-forth thing than just me giving a few notes and him illustrating from those words, because I don't think he really likes to work like that anyway. So it suits both of us for it to be more of an artistic process, more organic. That's how we came to put the Co-Op together.

I've been interested in doing a Kickstarter for a little while, but I've never quite known how to handle it. I don't know what to focus on. It's a very anxious-making thing as well: what if it doesn't fund? Or what if you put it into the public arena—and it's a different sort of public arena in that place than when it's on itch or whatever—and not knowing how it's going to go down. Dan really wanted to do one, and I kind of followed that impulse. So we tried to make it the best we could, really. It's one of those funny things where you learn from the process. Maybe we should have had a completely finished thing before we started... that often it seems to be kind of quite a successful strategy for that particular space, but I guess we took it on its premise, which is that you're crowdfunding an idea of something based on the fact that there's something that exists, which is the text and this layout, that wants to become a more considered thing. But now with this funding, we're going to be able to actually turn it into quite a different text and quite a different book. Maybe that'll help for the future.

An Eco-Mofo

Could you elaborate on how crowdfunding has transformed/will transform Eco Mofos!!?

Primarily it’ll be the integration of art and text. Dan's talking about there being sequential images in it: not as in ten panels to a page, but maybe the same characters recurring... [it's become a] journey through a book, through a landscape... with that journey being integral to the "thing".

The process has also heightened my attention to detail, and changed my idea of who the audience might be. Eco Mofos!! was effectively an Into the Odd/Cairn hack: I knew the people that I was showing it to, or it was being played by, were people that were very aware of that system or style of gameplay. I took the liberty of getting rid of sections like the Principles for Eco Mofos!! because I wanted people to get straight into the game.

In the beta version, there's three paragraphs of very basic rules, followed by character creation, a bit more about the rules... and then all the kind of chunky stuff, the things that are more unusual about the game. The 36 different adaptations. The procedural adventure bits. Different kinds of terrains and different locations, each of the procedural tables that can help you to create an interesting adventure on the fly so you don't have to prepare too much. That was the basis of what I wanted to create through the tables and flavour text: to capture all of the lore from my previous games like Lost Eons and Lone Eons rather than dumpling lots of explanatory text about where everything comes from. So the lore seeps into the things that you find [in the game] and the people that are there [in the game's environment]: it becomes more experiential.

I suppose now, with the crowdfunding, I'm thinking about the people who don't have that prior experience of this different approach to gameplay, where it's not all about rolling for every single action you do. Play becomes more about thinking about a situation; is anything at risk? There’s also a kind of mutual trust that exists in that sort of game. So I started thinking: I better put the principles [from Cairn] back into this game, because this is just going to land on a doormat in Albuquerque and this person might not have ever even heard of these other games, or FKR or any other role play system apart from maybe D&D. And I think it's important that this play-style is set out clearly: Cairn does that so well, it makes it really a powerful document. It sets out the principles for everyone playing: principles for the warden [the GM in that game] and then the principles for the players... you can just show everyone that first page and then show the players just that second page. I've taken that structure and I've given it my spin: I've pared it down and made it very digestible and filled it with the Eco Mofo!! spirit, I hope.

So that's one thing I’m changing: and now I'm just thinking about the magic system. At the moment, it functions, it's good. Basically it's Cairn magic and it has all of the open source spells that Yochai Gal's put out there. But now I want to actually get into that, generate my own list of spells, because I think I could put a tweak into the universe and again, use it as a way of shaping that space. Now that I've played the game quite a number of times, I have a feel for which things are more on the edge of what you want to be part of the experience.

I've already made a D66 list of NPCs which are going to be dropped in as just people that populate the world. It might not be enough: I might have to make some more, but each one contains a little hook or kind of a quirk. And they're very light... but tight. I'm quite pleased with that small bit of writing.

But all of that is inspired by the fact of doing this Kickstarter. Because without feeling like there's that pressure of that audience who's put faith in you, I wouldn't have been probably motivated to keep developing it, because I do get easily distracted, and I probably would have just gone onto the next thing and put my energy into some other thing. In a way, it's a bit of a gift that this has happened: I can really try and put in even more of what I've been thinking about since I got into the indie sphere, which is about three or four years ago, and really started discovering blogs and discovering your work (thank you!) and Chris McDowell and the whole FKR discord. It just really changed my ideas about what was possible: games like Cthulhu Dark, really stripping things down to almost nothing and seeing what's left. And I just find that it's amazing how much you can do with just so little, so few words, really. It's what's so inspiring about someone like Zedeck Siew: with one sentence, one character, you can create a scene, a world. And it’s such an incredible feeling that he agreed to do an adventure for Eco Mofos.

I was really impressed that you'd persuaded him to get involved and think, I haven't checked your total, but I guess you must be on course or you've hit that stretch goal now or not hit it just yet?

I think we're about 1000 and something away [Update: they've sailed past this total] What was it? Each of our stretch goals is a stupid number: I don't know whether our American friends realise, but all the pound amounts are silly numbers: they all have sixty-nine or four-twenties and stuff in them. That'll be a relief, to be honest: in an ideal world we wouldn't have even had any stretch goals. We would have done the sort of thing that Chris McDowall did with Into the Odd: this is the book, buy the book; you have everything in advance. You can show people what the amazing layout is going to be and all the art is there... and it's just an advertising and distribution system, and I think it works really well. But we were in that middle space where we just couldn't just take a month off normal work to make enough art for us to make the book that we imagined.

Image description at https://twitter.com/DanielULocke/status/1679131885572616193

With regard to that strategy, it's obviously the best, but like you say, it's not practical for most people who are working: you need to have capital to pay people up front or commit the time yourself to do that upfront...

Exactly. It's a luxury to be able to work in that way. Chris has worked really hard to get to that point, so I do not begrudge him having such a fine book!

It feels like a really strange moment for me right now. The thing is ridiculously funded. Our funding goal was basically to make it viable. We put the calculations into Mixam; What's the least that we could do in order to pay the people that we have to pay? Because we were paying all of the collaborators upfront, half of their fee, and then we'll pay them the other half if their stretch goal happens. So that's all happening. So they put in a precis of what it was going to be, a title and a little synopsis. And each of them... I just can't wait to play them, actually. They really take the game in really different directions. So, yeah, they're going to be fun. Somewhere between old school fantasy and science fiction, I guess, literally that's what science fantasy is really, isn't it? Having that sense of fantasy, but also the weirdness of science fiction adding into it. I think the post-climate apocalypse, the idea of New Hope as things are rebuilding has filtered through into quite a few of them. There's a sense of wonder, but also a moral sense. It feels like this moral quandary has been central to quite a few of them, which I think is key to the game and space.

So yeah, so we just had all of that as our costs. And then how much would it cost to print up the books to raise that amount, and then paying ourselves a very small amount for just our time from that point. We’re just seeing all the time that Dan and I have put into everything so far, we've spent that time. We're not getting that back. No, it's ever the way now, it's like a viable thing where it's like I can say, right, I don't need to fundraise for the art I'm making. I'll do this thing for a little bit because I've earned this time to do it. It's kind of exciting to be able to concentrate on it and take it seriously in a way. I mean, it's not like I don't take it seriously while I'm doing it, but it's more like it's my fun hobby job, rather than my "job" job.

What can you relate about the experiences you've had running games of Eco Mofos!! a in terms of what's fed back into the design process, but also what's just been just really fun?

The thing that's really surprised me is that some of my design tactics have worked! It's always quite gratifying. You have some kind of silly ideas about if you put this mechanic in, it will have this sort of effect on the play space. Here’s an example that's actually in the beta, the next iteration. When you're creating a character while you're rolling up the character, all with d6s, every time you roll a one, you note that down, rolling an extra item at the end. Recently, one of the characters rolled up a USB stick as one of these extra items, and on the USB stick, which is, again, randomised, was an AI that wanted to be implanted into a Droid. And that became an obsession of this player, to try and find a Droid to put this AI into. And he found one and yeah, gave me a moment to create a very silly NPC, which was fun. But just the fact that that little mechanic led to that moment in the game was really quite satisfying and interesting.

I've also got this mechanic, Burdens, which is something that Chris McDowall created for Mythic Bastionland (and has since removed). Sometimes you gain these burdens, emotional effects which take up spots on your inventory. So your inventory is only ten slots, and it's a bit annoying to have one occupied by sadness or something... but in order to get rid of this thing, there's two conditions [that have to be met/addressed such as]: you divulge a deep secret or you indulge in a secret vice. It's one of these choices. But what I've found is that people use that as almost an indicator of their overall character. I hadn't thought that it would have that effect in character creation, I just thought it was an annoying thing for people, an impetus to play, basically: How do I interact with the world in order to get rid of this?

One of the other things I like about this mechanic is that you can be drawn into playing these sorts of games in a very safe way. You try to always play optimally and solve the puzzles in a very logical way. I think that's great, and it's about playing the situation and using the tools at your disposal. But the burdens put a little bit of a spanner in those works, and give you an impetus to do something a bit stupid or maybe disadvantageous. And it can be those moments that create the fun stories. So that was partly why I decided to not only keep them in, but double down on the idea and make [burdens] essential to the game. They mark the game out significantly from some of the other hacks [of Cairn and Into the Odd], I think.

These small elements (burdens and additional items) can have such a massive impact in rules-light games, can't they?

Yeah, especially in lighter games, every single little mechanic that you put in there becomes super highlighted, really integral to play. So they have to be thought about really carefully, how they're written. In fact, the phrasing of everything has such a profound effect on how they're received. It's such an interesting form of writing, really, tabletop role play. It's writing as a proposition, creating a space for someone else to take hold of and turn into something that they believe in, in a way that evokes a setting they want to be a part of in some way.

It's a very weird space: I think the only thing I've ever really been able to compare it to in terms of you have a text and then someone goes away and does something with it is like I don't know, like a recipe... but it's not like that because the elements aren't always as prescriptive as they might be in a recipe and players certainly have more room to mess around with it...I don't know...

Absolutely. It's not a script for a play: it's so far away from that. It's more like maybe some scene directions. This is kind of how you set up the stage and this might be the sort of story that you could tell, but feel free to disregard all this and just do your own thing! But then it's giving enough that it's not just, like, kind of loosey-goosey, you can do anything in this world... because that doesn't get anyone playing. It has to have a kernel of something to be an impetus to sit down and actually arrange for four people to be around a table and do it. It's a really interesting kind of puzzle as a maker, to give enough, but not to overburden.

That's one thing that took me away from traditional D&D and trad games, just the sheer volume of things that you were expected to read and take on just to sit down and play. The anxiety of playing Forgotten Realms with a player that might know more of the lore than I would, and then start correcting you on dates or names of people that slew something. And that side of things just got me so anxious: and if you're anxious, you don't want to play. It's always slightly stressful taking a game to the table, because you want it to be a space of exploration and discovery rather than... doing a job! That's how I fell into all of this stuff, really.

I think another game that really shook up my ideas of what games could be was probably Jason Tocci's 2400, which is just so tight. Two pages of A4, and it's got everything. It's got a whole world there. It took me so long to realise quite how much was contained inside. At first, it was like, wow, they managed to fit the system in this little space. But actually, it's not just a system. It's a whole adventuring environment. He's a really great designer. I love all of his Into the Odd hacks well. I think if there's one game that I probably show people and say, you can make your own space in this, it probably would be 24XX SRD because it suddenly makes game making feel very possible; By just writing a list of ten things, suddenly a world is starting to emerge and that's really incredible.

I's a really good design exercise as well, just to take an existing game and try and "24XX".I've tried with my own game, PARIAH but also with Rowan, Rook and Decard's Spire, too. It was a good exercise to do, trying to reduce a game to a world to its fundaments... because I think once you do that then Jason's kind of already taken care of the rest!

I've learned so much going through those hacking processes: in a way I've just made one setting and then I've tried to hack it into all these different systems! I made the World After which was basically a traditional setting, because I wanted it to be like an artifact like you'd find in an Oxfam [UK charity for global poverty relief managing a chain of second-hand shops]. It's like, I like the idea of someone coming across it and wondering, what is this game? And it kind of functions as a pseudo-artifact, but the system is so clunky. I love it for what it is. When I started thinking about the indie game space, I just thought, these games are so amazing, could I make the World After but using 24XX and it's like, yeah, okay, let's try that. Then I tried to add some innovations of my own: a second dice to give it more of a bell curve and stuff and lots of stats, like nine stats, which I think in retrospect is probably too many, but I was trying to make it feel more like a skill set from 5E, so it became like a crossover from a kind of 5e space to an approximation of the FKR space, like an on-ramp for a more FKR way of playing for people that are used to a more skills-based system.

I became dissatisfied with the fact that the Lone Eons system wasn't compatible with any of the modules that I was quite interested in, from old modules through to kind of new stuff, it just felt like it was just a completely different universe from that. And that's where I started getting interested in doing something a bit more OSR, and thinking about working with Into the Odd and Cairn. And that was the genesis of Eco Mofos!! It was a mashup of Into the Odd with Bastards by Micah Anderson.

Eco Mofos!! grew out of Solar Bastards, that was it's provisional title, right?

That's right, that was the provisional name, and then as it progressed I realised that with that name you'd think that it was actually something closer to the Bastard system and it would be basically a bit of miss-selling. So I thought, yeah, I can't call it that. Then it became a thesaurus-fest of scum punks or Eco warriors or all of these things until it became… Eco Mofos!!. I liked how it looked on the page, and I liked the irreverence to it, but it also has this self-censorship, which is something a bit cute about it, weird and funny.

I liked all of those things because it's also got a slight Studio Ghibli flavour, like one of the more feisty characters in Princess Mononoke or something: she may have a mouth covered in blood, but she's still cute! There's that kind of weird in-between land that seems to exist quite a lot in Japanese cultural products. It's one of the things I love so much about Japanese computer role playing games, where they accidentally slip into really serious territory. Or not so accidentally, but it just feels there's always this thin line between slapstick humour and deep philosophy. I love all that kind of movement between genres or expectations. I find it a really exciting mix. Things like Akira just blew my head off when I was young. It's coming from that sort of space, which is why I call Eco Mofos!! Mad Max meets Nausica. It's that kind of meeting point.

Regarding Mad Max and satirical futurology you've also mentioned 2000 AD as an influence on Eco Mofos!! and also Rogue Trader, which obviously took a lot from 2000 AD, too...

As a British guy growing up in London, those were both an escape, but also my satire on the world that I was living in, i.e. Thatcherite London! Things like Marshal Law, which was a spin-off thing which took the mickey out of all the Marvel characters and Judge Dredd and put them in a weird, fucked-up space, basically. It's in that sort of vein that Eco Mofos!! lives. It's in that lineage. I had a subscription to 2000 AD, I've still got huge piles of them in my parents attic... and one of my favourites was Nemesis the Warlock, which again, has a vein of satire inside it. There's a fascistic interplanetary government, I seem to remember, being ordered about from this great dictator. "Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!" It's something about that kind of media that looks like it's innocent, but actually it's really trying to tell stories that disrupt the status quo, I suppose. It's a way of sneaking people into these worlds and these ways of thinking about stuff. That's my tactic as an artist: it's my tactic as a tabletop RPG maker as well!

A bit of original art from WH40K: Rogue Trader... get to the wall, Weird-Hope Punk!

Satire and Moribund Intellectual Property

It's two pronged, like, that kind of satire, isn't it? Because there's one element which is to tell a message subtly, which one part of your audience is going to slowly get their head round and the other part is getting a nod and a wink... did you read Tim Cowill's essay on Warhammer, recently shared by Save vs.TPK?

It's one of those funny things with satire, isn't it? It's like Judge Dredd. It's like they start as pure satire and this guy is the bad guy and he's Clint Eastwood and a total asshole, and of course, he becomes the hero and he's the one that everyone's looking to emulate and becomes the poster boy for 2000 AD and it stops being a critique of fascism and becomes... This is the way... and we've just created a fascist character. It's a weird, slippery kind of space that you have to negotiate, and when it gets mixed up with the hardcore capitalism of something like Games Workshop... this is not a tiny organisation! This is a worldwide corporation that makes plastic crack! If there is any satire left in it right now, it's barely lip service, really. And that's just well, it's sad, really.

I think I was really disappointed when Games Workshop stopped selling anything else by anyone else. Basically, it was a games hobby shop and it became: this is our brand now! They're even called Warhammer shops. It makes sense "for the brand", sure....

As well as not selling other people's stuff, their own stuff has just become so focused on a couple of products, whereas they used to bring out random games all the time. They did board games and card games and just crazy miniature games..... I get that's not how you operate a business, but it was a lot more fun!

Some of the games that I played growing up, like Chainsaw Warrior. It was a solo game it's very, very cool... and also terrible. Basically Duke Nuke 'Em, but you have a chainsaw and you're going through a kind of a zombie space, but there's a set of rules for when you lose your hit points and all this stuff. But yeah, explore this kind of space. I'll have to dig it out again. I think it's probably terrible, but I have very fond memories of it as a game. And some of them are having a renaissance, like Space Hulk, like Blood Bowl. Yeah. But there's a whole load of other kind of weird things.

[There follows an extended partly nostalgic ramble about Marienburg, Dark Future, Bolt Thrower, Brian May,]

We've focused a lot on Eco Mofos!! because the Kickstarter is running right now, and it's really exciting, I think, for everybody who knows you and works with you to see that it's doing really well!

But also I wanted to bring up...

Palace of the Silver Princess

...because we've chatted previously about that, and I happened to listen to the Between Two Cairns episode about it recently... on your recommendation, actually.

Indeed.

Listen to Between 2 Cairns here...

..and after hearing that episode it reminded me that you'd been doing some work on it and you've shared some stuff as well, and... without delving into the storied history of Palace of the Silver Princess, which I think we're all very familiar with now...

Whole blog-post of its own!

Yeah, sure! What's your objective with what you're doing at the moment? Because what I read, it looked like you were taking the green cover version, but going with some of the world that was suggested in the orange cover version, if I've got that the right way round..

Correct, I think yes. The orange version is the one that Jean had more control over, and then Moldvay came and did his thing. But I also wanted to take on some of the thoughts of Brad and Yochai as well, what this adventure is missing. I put a Doom Clock in it basically, so you roll for encounters, if you get a three or something, then you roll again... and if it's a six, then the Doom Clock ascends and there's more and more effects that start happening and eventually the evil dude arrives. But it also works to give the adventure a bit of impetus, because it's such a big dungeon.

When I started on it, I was inspired by that podcast. I thought it sounds really interesting and it's a module I hadn't really come across, maybe because I'm British. Those early D&D modules weren't part of my experience of D&D until I came back into the hobby, because for me it was all about Games Workshop and Fighting Fantasy and the British side of stuff. I really liked this interesting cultural feedback that was happening with the idea that the first modules that went to Japan were Keep on the Borderlands and Silver Princess, and it was those that inspired a lot of the early Japanese role playing games and, quite evidently, Zelda. It was an exercise in seeing how I could work with that lineage and feed it back on itself. It's like you're playing through a D&D adventure but then there's also this feeling of "zeldariness" to it, which felt quite interesting.

But it was also an experiment in negotiating with kind of proper old school text, and trying to parse out from the ridiculously overwritten—if you don't mind me saying—text for this adventure. What is actually going on in this space? How can I express this in a very straightforward and table-friendly way? I guess I was taking methods on from things like old school essentials and stuff, looking at that kind of bullet point style. But then trying to build in a little bit more flavour than that [model].

I had a lot of fun making the hexmap for it, and love the simplified dungeon map that was made by Peter Eijk, who made A Visit to San Sibilia. I think there was a lot of excitement around the module after that podcast, and there was someone doing a conversion on the Cairn Discord, Richard Markert, and I asked to team up, and see if we could make something together. He wrote that flavour text that's at the beginning and then we had plans to make it more Zelda-ish.

Hey! Listen! You kids are the Princess’ only hope! An ages old enemy is rising to power, and has kidnapped the Princess Argenta for his nefarious schemes! No adults can see or hear me, so you’ll be on your own! The castle and valley beyond these woods are in ruin! Turmoil is spreading across the lands! Find your courage, seek out the Tinker, and brave the ruins of the palace of the silver princess and rescue her!
Oh! And one more thing!
Beware of Travis

https://davidblandy.itch.io/palace-of-the-silver-princess-cairn-edition

But Richard's been really busy with his job so he hasn't had much time to do much stuff on it. So we just put out an unfinished version, but it's playable. All the rooms are in it. It's got a loose surrounding environment. There's all the villages around the area from that original orange version. And I think it's a fun little space, and I was trying to use the factions through encounters.

There's various factions that are implied more by the orange version than the green version and just getting those to meander through as you come across them, almost like rival adventuring parties. There's a really weird character who reminds me a lot of Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke, you know, the lady who runs the kind of metal smelting—

I do! I know the film so well... it's one of my favourites and totally informed everything I've done with Pariah! Yeah, it's a brilliant source of inspiration..

Yeah, and I think it is brilliant because they're so complex, all of those characters. It's like you fear her and also really respect her and... kind of think she's evil, maybe, but at the same time she's kind of incredible. Anyway, there's a character like that called Lady D’hmis in The Silver Princess that runs one of the towns with an iron fist, and is very matriarchal. All the men have to cower indoors unless they're escorted by women or something, which I thought was quite a funny thing for Jean to put in, as the first published female author for D&D. And the Lady is sending spies out to try and reclaim the jewel. So they're running about inside the Palace along with these notorious couple of thieves that exist in the adventure... but they were very trope-y. I just tried to take out all the "trope-iness". In Moldvay's version, these two ladies who are actually secretly thieves will try to befriend or seduce the party and then steal their stuff, in a typical early 80s standard misogynistic sort of way.

Likewise, I wasn't going to put orcs in there. They're more like pig men, like you have in Zelda. They're these strange large, monstrous humanoids... which is kind of what orcs are, but orcs come with so much baggage, racist baggage, that I didn't want, so I made some editorial choices. I took the conversion on as an exercise in understanding the old D&D space more, and understanding the kind of construction of adventures, but also trying to understand that period of time. But it became such an epic job because it's 66 rooms and it's practically a mega dungeon, basically. And yeah, it's not a light undertaking... and then adding on the hexes around it....

There's still more to do, but it's out there and it's had a nice reception, so I'm really pleased about that.

The flavour text that Richard Markert wrote really did capture the Zelda-ness!

Yeah, it's totally like Navi speaking to Link in Ocarina of Time!

Creative Endeavours as Play

[I rambled on a bit about the unkeyed dungeon in the Redbox, and my half-un-played adolescent attempt at filling it]

...and no-one wanted to play my dungeon!

Yeah. It's always the difficult moment at that age. It's that different impetus of what to do with your time, I guess the number of miniatures I painted - probably a few hundred miniatures, I'd say. But I probably played about two or three battles! Just organising things with people who actually were interested in it or had their own stuff. It was just pre-Internet days. It felt impossible.

I don't think I ever played any Warhammer... I had quite a few Dark Angels and Tyranids... but I know I never got to play that. Hours and hours painting and 0 hours playing... I think that was probably for the best, actually, because that was probably more fun!

Yeah, that's the irony of that, really. I'm sure there is a fun mini skirmish game, but I haven't played one yet.

It would be easy to make one, I think... and I think Chris McDowall's skirmish game looks pretty good.

Yeah, it does look good.

Grant Howitt's done one called Plastic Bastards or something like that. Which is just like you get like three even just whatever, and then just go, like, what are these guys about? And then just set up a game with a load of old toys, which is kind of fun I think...

...but to finish, as I know you need to get on with your life, and your missions around Brighton, I wanted to expand upon what we've just talked about regarding the hours writing or painting or preparing or doing stuff and... then not having as much time to actually do the game.. but there's an element which is... that's part of it, isn't it? That the design and the painting, it's just another form of play. It's a kind of solo play...

...but yeah, to expand on that, I was going to ask your thoughts on, collaboration, because you're someone who—in both in your RPG work and in your art, and here the two cross over—collaboration seems to be a very strong element, a thread running thread through it. I wondered how much you saw that as a form of play. And I mean collaboration outside of the conventional play space, in the design space... although I guess there's crossover....

Is collaboration a kind of play?

Or definitely. Of course it is. Absolutely. I think any creative endeavour is a form of play because you're mucking around with ideas and trying to think of things that they're... I don't know, more fit for the purpose you want them to be than the thing that exists already. Maybe. How do I make an image that says this? And no one's really said that particular thing, or certainly not at this time. And in this way being creative is always playing. And I think most of my visual artwork comes through play with other people, just bouncing around ideas.

I think I just like having other voices to bounce off. I find my own brain too known. Even when I'm writing by myself, I'm always thinking of the reader in some sort of way, and that becomes a type of collaboration, because you're trying to communicate a certain thing to this space. It's not like a pure novelistic writing thing where it becomes about telling a particular story in a particular way. It becomes about creating a world together. You're trying to craft a tool for that space. I think that's immensely obvious when trying to write something for a solo play space; that you've got to set out enough for there to be a structure of play. Because you don't have the safety net of the GM or the person running the session. So it becomes much more prescriptive, in some ways, but then it's also still giving enough space so that it feels like the player has agency and is actually causing an effect in that space. Yeah, that's another form of collaboration. But I think yeah, in general...

Glad to hear it! My favourite collaborator is myself, too!

In general, I just find it so much more fulfilling and exciting to work with other people. Yeah. Because it gives a sense of a shared vision. I was in a band for years and years. In my teen years. We played gigs and stuff around London. I think that mode of music-making where you're not the songwriter, you make things collaboratively through jamming and then codifying that jam into a song, and that’s pretty much how I approach all my artistic stuff. It's like I make a bunch of things and then someone else comes in with different ideas, mix them together and see where it goes. I want to see things that I haven't seen before, really. That's often one of my impetuses. And to do that, you have to be open to the mistakes or the weirdnesses or trying something that's probably going to fail: having a compatriot in that journey can give you a different energy which I think can be really important.

I want to see things that I haven't seen before. Fantastic! But also... music, because I knew you played music—I saw you working on a score for some of your work once at the studio when I visited—but I didn't know you played in bands. I used to play some music as well... and definitely that experience of jamming and working through something organically and just free-form improvising is an experience that I am yet to kind of match in any other milieu... so that's interesting...

I haven't really thought about it in that context, but in many ways procedural adventure-making is quite like that. It's sort of like giving a set of riffs that then can combine in different ways. It gives you a kind of back line, a beat and a bass line or something that then lets you create this melody on top.

Or even to stretch the analogy, again, you can say, like the different elements of your procedural generator can be discordant or they can harmonise, as a counterpoint between those elements: and that's where the exciting stuff happens, in that space.

No, totally: it's often when they don't fit, the fun happens.

Some... discord! Wow... there you go. Well, that's fantastic. I'm going to have to go, and I think I need to let you go as well. So thank you so much for your time, David.

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