A Geek History of Time - Episode 305 - A Brave New World, not that one, Interview with Matt Forbeck Part I

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Okay, so there are two possibilities going on here. One, you're bringing up a term that I have never heard before. The other possibility is that this is a term I've heard before but it involves a language that uses pronunciation That's different from Latin it and so you have no idea how to say it properly an intensely 80s post-apocalyptic Schlock film and schlong film, you know, it's been over 20 years, but spoilers Okay, so so the Resident Catholic thinking that, we're going for low Earth orbit. There is no rational theory. Blame it on me after. And you know I will. They mean it is two o'clock in the fucking morning. Where I am. I don't think you can get very much more homosexual

panic than that. No, which I don't know if that's better. I mean, you guys are Catholics, you tell me. I'm just kind of excited that like you and producer George will have something to talk about That basically just means that I can go ahead and get started. This is a Geek History of Target, where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock, I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California, and I just recently got notified that I will be losing my treasured first period prep. I'm going to be trading classes with another instructor. So I'm handing him my sixth period and I'm taking his first period. And I think I'm getting the better end of the deal. And when I broke the news to my sixth period class and I told them,

And when I broke the news to my sixth period class and I told them you're going to be Mr. S's class after Thanksgiving break I'm not proud to say this but there was a part of me that was pleased when a few of them went. Oh No, like yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You're gonna learn you're gonna learn So, how about you? Well, I'm Damian Harmony I am a US history teacher up here in Northern California at the high school level. And my daughter and I were hanging maps in her room today because I just got the new DMG. Nice. And I have it for both myself and for her. And so that way she can leave it at her mom's and I can still have I can still have access to mine and she can have access to mine if she's running again but

there's a map in the back of it and the map is on the one side it's a map of I forget where and then on the other one as who the continent of the flen a s on sure yeah yeah okay that you're complimenting my bum. And on the other side is Greyhawk. And so she had the first one, Pliny's Ass, and I assume it's the elder. And then I said- You know, I don't know, the younger apparently had a better tush. I'm just saying. He did, but I figured the continent has been around for a while.

Okay, true. Some parts of it that are incontinent. And the the, the other side has Greyhawk. And I told her, I'm like, go get my book and grab the Greyhawk. We'll put it up. And she's like, Are you serious? I'm like, it's not like I don't know where it is. And I don't run out of modules. So we're good. And she's like, Oh, yeah, yeah. And then I told her, I said, Oh, by the way, tonight, I'm recording. And she says, Oh, okay, I said, and I'm recording with, I'm interviewing Matt Forbeck and she looked at me and she's

like, how, how are you this adjacent to famous? And she loves and despises the ways that I work my way into things. And I told her, I said, I asked and she she's like, that's the guy that did dungeonology. I'm like, I know. And you have that still. So she was very, very pleased. Now, the cat is out of the bag. We have with us a, wow.

I gotta say, I'm fanboying out. We have with us a guest who, and I will just read to you his CV on the notes that I took, he's a University of Michigan alum with a degree in creative writing from there. So basically forever creative and forever making a living at it. Right out of the shoot he was doing, living most nerds dreams. He started focusing on western-based games in the early 1990s to the point where he and Shane Hensley Not to be confused with sugar shane helms the hurricane

Professional wrestler, but he and shane hensley developed pinnacle entertainment group in order to publish deadlands Which I was stunned to find out because i've played that game a lot For which he won his first origins award the second one he won for the Lord of the Rings role-playing game as far as I could tell in the research and if he wants to correct me he certainly can then he was for deathwing but there you go oh deathwing okay so this is for the lawyer James Taylor which was best board game developer on it so there you go okay there you go so Okay, there you go.

So yeah, as far as role playing games versus board games. Yes. Yeah. He then left Pinnacle to form Alderac Entertainment Group, a more benign version of AEG than the one that helped create the housing crisis. I think that made- I didn't inform that, but that was Jolly Blackburn and John Zinser, Dave C and Ryan Dancy who were all part of that.

But they were part of the partners of Pinnacle too. Oh, okay. So you guys poured it over. Yes. He's also written a slew of novels for a slew of companies and a slew of other IPs, including novels for, and I tried to find the ones that I knew something about because there were many, many more. Everton or is it Endless Quest, Blood Bowl,

Knights of the Silver Dragon, Halo, Minecraft, Magic the Gathering comic books, and a whole bunch that I didn't know anything about because I'm not that literate. And then of course the aforementioned book that I gave to my daughter when she was seven, Dungeonology. He also has helped design or designed on his own several collectible card games, including Fast Break, which is based on basketball, a card game where you can basically card game basketball and Wild Storms.

Recently, he's been the head writer and head designer for a role playing game that my son promised that he would run, but hasn't done so, which is the Marvel Multiverse role playing game. And update a redo of the one that I love so much, the TSR, with all the... So... Nobile patriot filet spiritus sancti.

So an actual playable Marvel role playing game. Yeah. So Patriot affiliate spirit is something so and actually bless you sir for trying playing game. Yeah. It uses something called the D six one six system which honestly echoes a little bit of some of the other mechanics that I found in other games that he developed. If you got a good idea keep keep permutating it. Oddly that's not what I'm actually here to talk about. Much as a Marvel stan as I am tonight, much like Shawn Michaels winning the world

title at WrestleMania 12, a boyhood dream is about to come true. All right, maybe not boyhood because I was like 20 when I first found this game. Thanks. The end. So I get to interview the creator of my favorite RPG world of all time, Brave New World. Thank you.

Thank you. Now, just the shortest version I can. Brave New World is a role-playing game that was quick, that was originally designed under the auspices of Pinnacle Entertainment in 99, but then quickly shifted to AEG midway through publication. I think like two books in. After the first two books had come out, yeah. Yeah, through multiple source books after that.

The shortest plot I can give you, Ed, is this. It's an alternate present in which superheroes exist starting in World War I. After that, things start shifting to incorporate superheroes into our world, then they're called deltas. And then in World War Two, we see the first alpha. So to understand the relationship between an delta and us think like shadow cat and me, right. But to think the difference between an alpha and a delta think like Superman and Deadpool Batman.

OK, well, all right. Well, yes. Yes. If that man's powers being rich, don't even start with that shit. OK, all right. OK, I'll give you Thor and who am I thinking of? Like the difference between like Thor and Hawkeye.

Yeah. OK, fair. OK. And then JFK's wife gets killed and shit gets bad really quickly. At the outset of the game, if you want to play a modern version, it's set in 99 2000. Okay. It's been 36 years since Jackie Oh was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald and a bunch of other superpowered villains. Okay. And and they're Deltas, some of them, some of them are using Delta tech. And the Delta Registration Act has come into play, combined with the Declaration of Martial Law,

and they've turned the 1990s into a really awful version of the turn of the millennium. There is a rich, deep lore, tied to alternative versions of what happened. And then there's your character that you would play pulled in all sorts of directions by the realities of living in such a brave new world that has such people in it. Nice. Nice, nice, nice reference. Thank you. Matt Forbeck, father of five, husband of one and designer of countless. Welcome to our show. Well, thanks for having me guys. I appreciate that was a hell of an introduction. That's thank you.

You have a hell of a career to to some ideas. We actually had some guys in here looking contractors like, what do you do for a living? I'm like, I write games like, how long have you been doing that? And I'm like, shit, it's been a long time. Right. Yeah. Thirty five years. Professionally, very cool. Plus freel Yeah. 35 years professionally. Very cool. Wow. Plus, that's freelancing in

college and high school and shit. So it's been a while. So do you think like part of your ability to get in on, quite frankly, the ground floor or the foundational floor on some of these games, like literally designing them has to do with the fact that you were living near the locus of where you grew up? Yeah, I mean, I grew up 40 minutes down the road from Lake Geneva, which is where Dungeons and Dragons was invented and first published.

And so when I was in high school, or even before I was in high school, I would go to conventions like the first one I went to was a winter fantasy in Lake Geneva. And it was held the American Legion Hall. And the guy ran the first game I ever played was Steve Winter who ran us through Boothill, me and my high school buddies or grade school buddies. And Steve went on to, he had done second edition Boothill,

was actually one of the designers on the Marvel Superheroes role playing game, the one from 1984 that you liked so much, right? That I loved so much. Yeah. And then Steve ended up being my editor at TSR many, many years later at Wizards of the Coast. So now a long time friend of mine.

But I grew up there, so I was able to go out there. I started going to conventions. This last Gen Con was my 42nd in a row, right? Cause I've been going since I was really young. And the funny part about then is I had my own booth at Gen Con when I was the summer I turned 17 I was bought it when I was 16 Gen Con happened I'd you know because I was born in August my birthday usually falls on Gen Con actually which is kind of fun But this summer I turned 17

I had my own booth at Gen Con and I ended up hanging out with a bunch of guys like Troy Denning and Steve Sullivan and Kelly Satches and Mark Akers. And so I ended up going up and play testing games with them in the evenings up in Delavan, Wisconsin when they ran a company called Pace Center, which did chill and star ace and time master and Sandman and all sorts of other great games. So that's how I met you and you ended up doing this. So yeah. And you had a question. games. So, yeah. I'm sorry. So, a couple of couple or three episodes ago, I did a very rapid history of the development of, of role playing to tabletop role playing games. And, and I'm listening to

you talking about this and so casually. Yeah. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm blown away. And, and you know, the fact that, you know, we're, we're talking to somebody who was, you know, there at, at those moments is, is kind of freaking me out as a, as a, as an amateur historian of the, the point of things that doesn't mean when you grow up with it, you're like, well, that's just what we did. Right. Right. Well, yeah.

I yeah. Yeah, I was hanging out with Tesla and I mean, yeah, exactly. I don't know. What do you do? But it's kind of it's it's free because now I'd be like you guys as historians. I mean, there's a bunch of histories

of Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplay. But I'm not. And it just blows me away. I'm like, are you kidding me? I mean, this is stuff that you're like,geons and Dragons and other role-players, but I don't know about it. And it just blows me away. I'm like, are you kidding me? I mean, this is the stuff that you're like, oh, you can't make a living at that. It's never gonna go anywhere, blah, blah, blah. Here we are 50 years later and there's, you know,

scads of books about how it was pulled off and it just stuns me. So, I don't really get books too. You know, I get art, they're good stuff. In fact, at Gen Con, I was in charge of the 50 years of GenCon, 50 years of D&D book panels this year, right? Because I've been a long time, obviously I've been to GenCon 42 years in a row, but I also know the guys there, Peter Atkinson owns the company now and a few of his friends who was

giving stock tour of the years who worked with him. But they said, Matt, can you help us out with this? I'm like, yeah, sure. So we ended up, we got Rose Estes to come up. Who was the woman who wrote the first Atlas Quest books and one of the early employees of TSR. Jeff Grubb, who was the other designer on the Marvel role-playing game,

amongst many, many other things. And it was also a long time friend of mine showed up. And we had a bunch of other people. We had Tracy Hickman. Then we had a full panel of historians. So we had, you know, John Peterson and Ben Riggs and, you know, Mike Whitmer and a couple other guys. It was just, you know, David Ullt, that's the other one.

Just kind of stunning to get this kind of stuff put together. And, you know, it's neat that you can just kind of go through your Rolodex, your Facebook account and say, hey guys, you want to come out to JetCat and we'll talk to people and they're like, yeah, that'd be fun. So that's so cool. But yeah, go ahead. I was going to say you mentioned Troy Denning. He actually, he wrote,

he's written a bunch of Star Wars books. So I famously, in as much as such as it exists, I famously don't read fiction. I just, I don't, I don't listen to much music. I read fiction. You're a historian, right? Yeah, I'm a historian. I basically stick to that.

But the one fiction that I do read and I've read religiously, and you can't see it because I got the logo behind me, but there's an entire shelf that is like double stacked right behind me. And it's all Star Wars books. Nice. And Troy Denning wrote my absolute favorite Star Wars books

including, well he wrote one that wasn't my favorite but it had one of the most beautiful lines in it and it was, where was it, it was, I'm looking up there now, but there was a couple that he wrote that one was called Traitor, and it's about Jason Solo and it's essentially existentialism in print form. And the other one that he did was he talked about turning toward the storm. And it's it's it's the the Tatooine Ghost and that that whole concept stuck with me so hard like it's it's become kind of a mantra toward me it's turned toward the storm. So it's just you're like yeah I had a booth I was 17 and then I ended up meeting Troy Denning. Troy is one of my great friends right we had a he actually kind of mentored me into doing all

this stuff. You know, when I was starting out doing, you know, tabletop role playing, and then when I got into doing fiction, he was a guy I turned to all the time. We had a group of writers out here called the A-Literates in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, for a long time. Apparently, the West Coast branch is still going on in Seattle, but it was like me and Lester Smith

and Rob King and Troy Denning and Steve Sullivan and Doug Niles and all sorts of other folks, a lot of novelists essentially from the TSR days. And just had a ball. I mean, just great guys. And I would see them every month. We would talk about books and what we were working on. We'd have a burger and some beers and then we'd go home and we'd do it again the next

month. But Troy actually faithfully introduced me to a guy who I'd met at my first Gen Con when I went off to college. And he was a great guy. And he was a great guy. And he was a great guy. And he was a great guy. And he was a great guy.

And he was a great guy. And he was a great guy. And he was do it again the next month. But Troy actually faithfully introduced me to a guy who I'd met at my first June count when I went off to college. I said, hey, I'm going to Michigan. He goes, oh, you need to talk to Will Neeling then. Will was the first vice president of TSR, actually back in the day. And he loved Michigan.

He went to school there. He lived there for many years. And so he cut me a deal where if I bought his season tickets, if I found season tickets for him, he would buy a pair for me and my friends, if I found a pair for him, right? So I had to go out and buy four tickets. And then he would pay for all of them.

And then he started making me one of his sales associates. So I would go to different conventions with him on behalf of Iron Crown and Mayfair Games and Grenadier Models and all this stuff. And we would just want And you know, we would just want, you know, cowplow dice. And we would go these things and I would go, hey, guys, I'm kind of a writer. I could do that kind of stuff, you know, come on, come on. And I ended up, one of my friends I made through that was a guy named Don Turnbull. And Don was with TSR UK way

back in the day and actually won the first, he was the first inductee in the gaming hall of fame, game designers hall of fame back in the day. And Don has since passed many years ago, but he was the president of new infinities, which was Gary Gygax's second company after TSR. And I remember, I was just talking to William Dieling, Will's son this summer, but he's like,

I remember you and Don's kitchen when we were, he was giving you that editing test way back when. And this is how I actually got a gig working as an editor for New Infinities, editing novels and adventures, back when I was like 19 years old, right? And I remember Don saying, oh, you, well, Matthew, I'm not quite sure, you know, you're very young, but apparently, you know, the difference between lesser and

fewer. So we should probably hire you. Oh, man. But I listen to my grammar teachers, you know. Yeah. As an English teacher that warms the cockles of my heart to hear, that makes me very happy. So you know, I then try, you know, help me out when I was looking at moving into novels, too,

because he had already done that. Him and Mike Stackpole were actually my two guys who really helped me out a lot with that. Love Stackpole stuff, too. That was amazing stuff. Stackpole set a beautiful table for Aaron Alston to just laugh. What a great writer as well. No, I I was I went to Celebration 2015 and other people are like going and watching rebels the next episode and they're doing this and this and I went

to like the Aaron Alston Memorial where Christy golden and oh god, I think I don't know if Timothy's on was there I think he was um, but they they all showed up and just honored their friends. It was there, I think he was. But they all showed up and just honored their friends. So he was such a great guy. They talked about his notes. They're like, Yeah, no, most people that plot points and blah, blah, blah. He had jokes. I totally believe it. Yeah, I met Aaron when I was doing the first big game book ever did was a Western hero for champions,

right? And Aaron got to start doing champions role point game providers back in the day before all that so and the champions guys They're just fantastic. Once you write a champions thing. You're like part of the family for life. All right, yours. They're like, oh you're one of us now Come on, we're gonna do this Robert. Yeah. Well, we'll see about forever, but you know, we're still friends yeah, last time I was out in San Francisco for convention ended up hanging out Bruce Harlech and Was that Kubla? Oh my god. I want to drop a name name here what the hell is his name? It's killing me. I can see it Steve Peterson thank you there you go Steve Peterson was one of the original designers of champions and Bruce was one of his original proteges too. Bruce has

gone on to do all sorts of video games over the years and Steve is actually a consultant in video games nowadays as well as well as having done a ton of video games. A lot of us crossover between those things because, you know, to be blunt, the money in tabletop games is a great, but the audience in video games is an order of magnitude higher than it is. It's a billion dollar in a C. Well, yeah, but the, but the narrative, the, the kind of the narrative structure is still kind of similar the way you, the way you have to craft it.

I would think, is there, is there a notable, like what would you say is the biggest difference between the two when you're doing the writing? Well, I think you're absolutely right. That one of the reasons that especially in original older video games, they didn't know who to turn to other than tabletop game designers to help them out with this stuff, right? People were doing the coding and everything else were like, who else has the kind of chops to do this? If you went to a novelist, they would do like, I'm going to run you down this one corridor. And so all we're going to do is when you're doing games, you have to have several different quarters and lots of different possibilities and such,

essentially designing dungeons. I think the main difference between doing work in video games and doing tabletop games is that not only is it a bigger business, but it means you're often working with a team of, if not dozens, hundreds of people. Whereas tabletop games, you're probably working with a handful of people. Maybe a dozen. And with novels, it's just you and the page, right? So it really does telescope out differently. You end up giving up a lot of control over things,

but then you end up being in a much larger stage, essentially, right? A lot of times role-playing games outsell middle-grade or middles selling novels. Best-selling novels outsell tons of stuff, right? But very few of us actually get to be Stephen King. So sure. Yeah. And, and the, the amount of money that's, I mean, you know, there's cinema, there's film, but the entry point is so much harder.

And then video games are, I mean, I remember selling film now. Yeah. I was going to say, I remember like call of duty outsold like the highest grossing movie prior to the Avengers and the Marvel movies. You know, at the time, but it was like $64 million and stuff like that. And it's like, I mean, you know, I when I play video game, I actually don't like to think I like my thinking for my job. I like my thinking for my research. You do it all day long. Yeah. Yeah. And I like having played with you in, in college. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And I like my thinking when it comes to playing role playing games. But if I'm playing a video game, get in, get out 20 minutes. But the stories that they write for them are, you know, I'm like, okay, cool. I I'm another character with dissociative disorder, but a lot that was really big. And he's you know, right, you know, and, and, oh, this guy is just a made up character in your head. And now off you go. But like, it's it sells like hotcakes to people. Like it's it's the new thing, you know, to them. And so the video game industry last year was $185

billion. Wow. So it outsold film by quite a bit. And strangely enough, though, because of other economic circumstances, we've had something like 20,000 layoffs in that industry in the last two years too. Yeah. Mostly because of drying up investment money as interest rates went up because we're fighting inflation. The money that investors like like they looked and said,

well, I can make that kind of money in a CD. That's very safe. Or stock as a putting in a video game, which is a crapshoot. Yeah. Yeah. So you said one hundred and sixty two billion dollars, one hundred and eighty five billion, one hundred and eighty five billion dollars. Just billions and billions. Just for for perspective, because I like perspective.

California's budget was $297 billion. Right, I know. It's not. I think, and every other state is like less than three figures with the exception of like Texas, Washington state, interestingly enough, and New York. All the rest are double digits. So we're talking- There are many nations that have a smaller GDP.

Yeah. Like, that's, I mean, I'm just, I'm trying to, it's basically 10 times the size of New Mexico's annual budget. Right. All right. But that's just it then. I mean, the money becomes more important.

One of the things you get there is you get sharks in the water, right? So you go to tabletop games and it's just it then. I mean, the money becomes more important. Right. One of the things you get there is you get sharks in the water, right? So you go to tabletop games and it's generally collegial. We're all pretty friendly. You know, people that call, you know, they're like, I need to know how to do this. We're like, OK, here's my suppliers. Here's some artists you can talk to, here's whatever, because we're happy. We're hobbyists mostly, right? Right.

But we're not fighting each other tooth and nail for different things. You cheer each other's successes. Yeah, exactly. It's very collegial, but in the video game industry, especially at the top, they burn through people like crazy and it can be very knives out, right? So it's a very different environment. One of my sons just graduated with a video game design degree and I'm like, man,

this is literally, because these degrees have only existed for like 15 years, right? Yeah. This is literally the toughest time in these degrees have only existed for like 15 years, right? Yeah. This is literally the toughest time in history to graduate with that degree. Good luck. We're going to figure out that there's degrees to now that there's degrees. Good luck, kid. And the idea that there's a degree is kind of stunning.

So it just throws me. Man, this is I mean, talk about a treasure trove, first of all, like, you know, because I've been to Kubla Khan like a handful of times and you just like professionally go for your birthday. You know, you're like, I had my own booth when I was 17. I walked through booths and like, annoyed the vendors. That's how you start, right? Yeah, I suppose, you know. But I do want to get

down to the brass tacks, the wire here. So in Brave New World, which by the way, the name Brave New World does not come from the Aldous Huxley novel. I know. I've explained that to a lot of people. So many times I bet. It actually comes from a line from the Tempest, which you heard me quote at the top of this. And it's, oh, I forget her name. But Miranda. When she stumbled upon the man she's gonna fall in love with who has washed up upon the shore of the island

that she has lived on with her father since birth. Right. The wizard Prospero. And she has never seen another human being outside of her father until that moment. Oh, caliban too. Well, yeah, I suppose. Caliban is whether or not he's human. He's, he's kind of, yeah, she doesn't see him as one. Yeah.

There are lots of thesis papers that have been written over the humanity or lack there of caliban. So I actually just saw that play. I think not last summer, but the summer before up in Ashland, Oregon and They had a big like several pages of discussion of okay. We we know that this is bad And just like because it's the elephant in the room, you know, it's yeah No, it's the it's the orangutan for you know for both scholars. Yeah, you know, so Um, but uh, but yeah, so she she sees him and she says what brave new world that has such men in it um

in your lore Uh, the the united states is is actually chasing russia in the arms race um so uh world war two kicks off, um, everybody has Delta squads at this point. There's enough deltas and the United States does not get into atomic weapons because mid-war, the American Delta squad gets captured by the Nazis. They're taken to Joseph Mangla, who's carving up deltas to see what makes them tick. They're in Auschwitz. And they're all slaughtered after trying to rebel, if I recall correctly, and they're being loaded into the incinerator. And the and forgive me for this parallel,

but you've written in both worlds. So hopefully you don't get in trouble for this. The the the Brave New World version of By. Yeah, essentially awakens He's the sidekick to the patriot if I recall um, correct, yes, um, and he awakens and he The way that delta powers get unlocked at is that uh, you have a near-death experience So in war you're getting a lot of these guys, right? Uh, right, so He awakens and suddenly he has, again, Thor compared to Hawkeye powers. And he slaughters all, all the Nazis at the camp.

And then he immediately flies, because now he can fly, he immediately flies to Berlin and kills Hitler, which I loved. And then he goes to Japan and forces Hirohito to to resign or like to stop fighting. As a result, the alpha, the first alpha was an American, we didn't need atomic weapons. The Russians, okay, needed to kind of find some way to balance it. So they developed the atomic bomb first and we were chasing them Now now Did the Manhattan project exist? I believe I'm sure it existed right because it started before right happen, but

Did not get far enough and was kind of suspended at that point because they were spending more time trying to research and create more deltas as opposed to. And at that point nobody realized there was such a thing as an alpha. The guy who becomes supreme, which is the first one, is the first one to actually come out of that. Essentially it's the same thing. It's like, if a human being has a near-death experience,

there's a 0.01% chance that you might become a delta, something like that, right? And if you're a Delta that hasn't heard the experience, kind of the same thing happens. But there weren't that many of them, so it didn't happen until this one guy comes along. Okay, so my question- That was a dramatically appropriate moment.

My question is- That was really just me trying to reverse engineer how comic books work, right? And comic book stories and things like that. You always see these origin stories. Okay, if you have an origin story, how does that work? Why is that important? What does this make sense and? Trying to make some kind of logical sense out of stuff that was literally being made up on the fly Right back in the day when oh, yeah. Yeah, like Stanley

Herbie and Simon and whoever else yeah, we basically made mutants cuz he's like, I don't know they were born with it Yeah, we basically made mutants because he's like, I don't know. They were born with it. Yeah, actually, Stanley and Jack really, well, we're just tired of coming up with new origins, right? Yeah. We're going to make it's nice and easy. It covers everything. It's not atomic. That's all you need to know.

No more radiation. No more radioactive spiders. Puberty. So my question about all that is what other ideas didn't come to fruition in your lore that you thought about but didn't execute? Oh man, that's, you realize this is like 25, 26 years ago, right? Yeah, I know. I told you it's my favorite.

It's okay. It's okay if you're like, I don't remember. It's like, what did you leave in a cutting room floor? I, hell if I know. Okay. I was re, when I wrote this book, I had just, my son cutting room floor? I have a final. Okay. I was, when I wrote this book, I had just, my son Marty was born in November 98. So he's gonna be 26 at the end of the month, right?

And we moved back to Wisconsin after that because we wanted to be closer to family who was, free babysitting from people you trust implicitly was invaluable to us. Yes. So, yeah, it's an easy choice. And so I remember, and we had a problem with the housing that we were gonna get into the place was not clean and the landlord was an asshole.

So we ditched out and sent him back for the security deposit. So basically me and my wife are months old infant or homeless, but we're living at my dad's house. He's an attorney with a huge place. So it wasn't like exactly, you know, horrific, but I remember having my computer set up and Marty on my lap and me literally, you know, reaching over him to my keyboard to write this stuff as sleep deprived as all

new parents are at that time. So what was it? I don't think there's a whole lot that I didn't put in the book that I, there were probably things I thought of and said, oh, that's a dumb idea, or I don't have time for that, or I thought of it and didn't put it in, and maybe I'll do that later. Right? But I would have to go back and like dig through notes and such. The funny part is back in the day, and I don't know if too many people do it this way, I started out doing editing, like I mentioned before,

and I also was doing layout, right? So when I went to work for Games Workshop, I went to work for Games Workshop when I was fresh out of college, and I started out as a layout person there, or as an editor and doing layout. So when we started Pinnacle and started doing that, I actually wrote into Ork, right, the page layout program. I would just actually write the text into it.

I didn't write into Word and then import it in or anything like that. Like I wanted it to come out and look what it was gonna look like and know where the art was gonna be. So I'd literally write to the end of the page and say, okay, that's the end of that section. And then move on to the next section. Cause I could tell exactly how it was gonna look

as opposed to, oh, I've done with this chapter. It seems like a good moment. Like no, physically wherever I was in a page to, Oh, I've done with this chapter. It seems like a good moment. Like, no, physically wherever I was in a page, I would just hold them the next chapter. Well, that's very different than how your novels came out, your novellas, because there was always one line on the back page, back of the page. And that's many questions from now, but there were a series of novellas that he wrote in 2012. Okay.

And it was part of a 12 by 12 series if I recall correctly. Well for 12, yeah. Well for 12 and, uh, and what it, I didn't know that this existed until well after. So I didn't, I was it through Kickstarter? Yeah, I did. I did for Kickstarter. So I had this crazy idea in 2012 and I had been kind of joking about this for a while. Like, Hey, I can write really fast and I can't, I write about 5,000 words a day when I'm cooking, right? And-

Totally. Yeah, I'm like, well, you know, I could write a novel a month, right? But nobody would ever buy them all because who the hell's gonna buy a dozen novels from really anybody, right? Yeah. And some of my friends kind of dared me,

you know, I think Robin Laws and Ken Hyper, instrumental in this, like, come on, you gotta do it. And like, 12 for 12 just made a lot of sense. It was a great little marketing thing. I'm like, okay, let's do it, we're gonna do it. And I broke it up into four trilogies and then ran a Kickstarter for each trilogy. The first trilogy was Brave New World.

The second trilogy was, I think, Dangerous Games. All right? No, it was Shotkinsken's and Sorcery, which I've actually done 5e stuff in a Cypher system game for it too. And that's essentially a fantasy noir setting, right? So if you crossed Jarrett Tolkien with Raymond Chandler and ran from there.

And the third one was Dangerous Games, which was a trilogy of thrillers set at Gen Con. Which was great fun, because I love Gen Con. We actually talked about it at the time. I'm like, hey, if I do a thriller at Gen Con, like diehard at Gen Con, are you guys going to get mad? They're like, no, no, no, go ahead. And then the last one was called Monster Academy,

which is basically a juvenile hall for young monsters. So if you ever played D&D and you slaughter all the orcs and then you get to the end, there's this bunch of orc children huddling in the corner. Moral question is, what do you do with your children? Are they going to grow up and be evil? And I'm like, well, no, these are good people. They're going to take them and they're going to put them in a school and see if they can be good. And if they can't be good, then they'll kill them. Right. It was like a juvenile hall for monsters, right? Yeah, plenty of rest will likely kill you in the morning. Exactly.

And that's actually going to be a game coming out from Calliope sometime next year, I believe. We're going to be doing an adventure card game, which we've been working on for way too long. Oh, wow. So yeah, that was, but 12 for 12 was that. And then I didn't quite write all the novels there were 50,000 word novels Which is 40,000 is like the limit for most awards, which if you're a 50,000 kind of a short novel, right? Yes, not sure 80 to 100,000 words. But so I wrote

three of those for Brave New World. I didn't quite get all of them done. I wrote nine novels that year including a novel for a Leveraged TV show. I did a tie-in for that Because I knew the creator John Rogers one of the creators There was a TV shows on TBS and you know, we had some great actors in it And I also wrote nine issues the magic together comic book that year for IDW and a Starcraft 2 Novella for Blizzard that showed up on the website. So, uh, so I failed, but I failed well and actually got all the books out.

Not too long after that. Yeah. And in those no novellas, uh, I mean, they're about 180 pages a piece. Um, and, uh, what's, what's funny cause he was talking about writing up to the end of the page, Very often, the last sentence of each chapter ends up on you turn the page and it's just one more, you know. Yeah, when you're doing novels, especially if you're doing self-published novels like that, especially if you're doing ebooks, right?

You have no control over that stuff, right? Sure. If you're doing a novel that's being published, a hard copy, then you then you have some control over it. But it's still, it's mostly like I wrote this thing and you push the button and it goes, and it all flows into the file, right? Gotcha. But when you're doing a role playing game, which has got a lot of art in it,

it's much more of a different thing. Art diagrams, all the other good stuff. And it is much more of a lot of stylistic choices that you have to make from a design point of view, from a graphic design point of view, as opposed to just a game design point of view. So I really enjoy doing that. So I don't, you know, it's not a terrible burden for me to actually dust off those skills every now and then, but, but it's not something that I think most game designers do. It's kind of haiku-esque, like you have to fit the meter and the verse, you know,

and how do you get that? Now I'm like writing from the Marvel game and occasionally at the end of the Marvel game, I get into a chapter would be like a quarter page of white space. I'm like, no, you know, some artwork and something fine. Something I can write more. And you know, maybe, maybe this is untoward, but could, could, could I request that you put speed ball Robbie Baldwin into the next dump? You can request it.

Okay. Cool. It's actually not entirely up to me is the trick. I mean, that's totally fair. Uh, you know, the Marvel guys have a big saying and then we have to put whatever the book happens to be about. Sure. And then there's also the fact that we use character profiles, but there's usually a hundred in each book, 130 in the first book. My son Marty writes all those. The kid I was reaching across to write Brave New World,

he writes all the profiles of the game and actually has written chapters in the last couple of books too. Oh, wow. Nice. He's got a job in the family business, which has been great. Patrick, he's graduated with a game design degree, he's doing some stuff for us too. But the thing about the character profiles is they are steam release valve. So if one chapter goes over or under whatever,

we either put in more characters or take out characters because nobody notices if there's like 95 or 105 characters. Naturally. It's okay. All right. Okay. Well, I'll just send you over a list then. Cause I saw a squirrel girl was in one. So people are saying she's undefeatable. You know, really? We've done episodes on squirrel girl. We did an episode on squirrel girl. And we ended up talking at a convention in Virginia during the COVID times. And then I did about six episodes analyzing Speedballs arc

Which everybody's like why? Is well he bounces so But but oh speaking of Marvel actually you're the lore of your brave new world Pre-saged the Marvel Civil War by about seven And and the war on terror by about three years And the war on terror by about three years. And 9 11 by about two years. So you write this stuff before any of them get going. Yep. What was in the zeitgeist that you were like, I'm. No, there we go. Part of it just because I'm not nearly as well as you guys probably, a student of history but also a student of politics.

My mother was involved in politics here very early in Wisconsin as I was growing up. I mean, I remember her dragging us around in literally a little red wagon so we could stuff literature in people's doors and stuff like that when I was a kid. She ended up working for Les Aspen who became the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton. And she moved out to DC for 10 years and then came back here to help us out. I don't think we mentioned this before, but my eldest is going to be 26 here in a moment. Then I have a set of quadruplets who are turning 22 or turn 22 in June. Right. So, um, yeah. So that kind of got nuts too.

That's one of the things where my memory of those days, you broke Ed's brain. He's, he's an only child and they have one. And we're not worried that they're done. Yeah. That's it. We started, we started late. Yeah. And who wants to risk quad quadruplets? I mean, really like, oh my God, That's it. And they're done. Yeah. That's it. They're one and done. We started late. Yeah. And who wants to risk quadruplets? I mean, really.

Yeah. Like, oh my God. Honestly, one of the best things that's ever happened to me, also one of the hardest. I'd say it's one of the best things that's ever happened to me. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, yeah. Oh my Lord. Lordy.

I remember how tough it was just having one kid who wouldn't sleep through. Right. Right. And I've done with two and like I was married for some of that and the tagging in and out, like I remember going from having the one child to having the two children. And I even said, I'm like, Oh man, we used to have two on one and now we're doing man to man. And you've been playing zone this whole time. Yeah, zone the entire time.

They've got the ball. You can't stop that part. No, no, no. Wow. How can you just protect the basket at home? Yeah. So, all right. So, you student of politics.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I grew up in this kind of stuff, just thinking about it, thinking, I took dystopian literature classes in college and such. Like you do., like, as everybody should, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I was thinking, you know, again, I was reverse engineering comic books, and I'm getting up to the modern day, I'm like, okay, what is this a metaphor for? What is happening? What is going on here? What could happen? It's not too hard to see that, you know, people will use major disasters to then justify horrible abuses and breaches of power.

Right. I mean, it was already happening at lower levels before that. And then when we had, you know, 9 11 powers act, you had, you know, talking. Yeah. I mean, when 9 11 happened, I'm like, oh, just watch, you know, you know, it's going to happen. Right. It's not going to be a surprise because it's, you know, I'm not, you know, yeah, I'm like, oh, just watch, you know, you know what's gonna happen, right? It's not gonna be a surprise because it's I'm not you know

Yeah, I'm a pretty left-leaning kind of guy But it's not a political thing to say that people in power will overreach when they've been granted an excuse for it. Yes you know pretty easy thing to do so To watch that happen was I was like, yeah, it's just gonna suck and we're gonna be blaming the wrong people We're gonna use those excuse for whatever the fuck you want to do going to suck and we're going to be blaming the wrong people. We're going to use it as an excuse for whatever the fuck you want to do. Excuse me. No, no, don't, don't.

I swear. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then, you know, uh, looking at like the Marvel Civil War thing, I had people saying, are they ripping you off? I'm like, I don't know. I was probably ripping them off with everything I was doing too. You know, it's, you're, you're all doing the same thing with, uh, you're all

working on the same things, you're riffing off the same thing. So it's not a surprise when people come up with simply similar, whether or not Mark Miller and Brian Michael Bendis were actually at a copy of brave new world. I couldn't tell you. And if they did, who the hell cares? I've been flattered. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there had been the mutant registration act as well. So that, that predated your work, but there's just so much of what you had that I'm like, well, really, everything like we almost had martial law. We you know, then then Bush said, go to Disneyland instead.

But like, you know, and of course, you know, Watchmen did their thing with Nixon continue right now, or, you know, which was obviously an influence of yours. Oh, you can go back to, you know, Captain America, where they had Richard Nixon supposedly is the guy that shoots himself in the White House Because capital runs that the real Richard Nixon, you know, somebody posing. It's more sure You know actually was Hitler pose it as Richard Nixon. I mean Jesus Christ You just got to go pretty deep into this stuff to see what's going Time is a flat circle because now we have a president who's trying to pose as

Hitler. So yeah, yeah, there you go. That's great. That's and putting in some of the worst people just because you can't, you know, oh my God, like four years ago. So I'm not surprised by this. You should be surprised. You just haven't been paying attention.

Yeah. Well, that's to sort of this background of your question. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. To sort of this background of your question, again, it's not like that stuff was, I wasn't a genius for figuring that out. I was just paying attention. Right? Sure. So other people start paying attention at different times. They're like, oh, look.

And so the things that come after you, it looks like they were following what you predicted, but really you're just paying attention. It's not like this is, like when the 2008 financial crisis came along I mean I've been reading people talking about how the there was a real estate bubble for two years before that right exactly Yeah, not a shock to anybody except the people who got victimized, right? Yeah. Yeah So was there any any like singular event that kind of ticked it off or was it you were largely just paying attention to? Yeah, I think just just paying attention to? Yeah, I think just largely paid attention to. I think, uh, you know, uh, let me think, I don't know if it was any single thing. I think, uh,

one of the things I'm like learning about politics from the inside, like I've mentioned before, my mother had been working for Les Aspen and then you know, Black Hawk Down happened and he had let go as a security defense. Uh, and you're like, oh, it's not because he did anything wrong in particular, but because when something terrible happens, they want heads to roll, right? Right. And this head was online and it rolled. And again, it's not like that's surprising or shocking.

You get in a situation, bad things happen, often somebody's got to pay for it. And you start thinking about how that stuff works in Washington and how it works generally politically, and then it starts making more sense to you. Right? I mean, um, it, it just, if you're paying attention to the patterns and history that lead up to things, I could go on a political rant here a lot for a while about how Donald Trump is really just a mobbed up New Jersey real estate developer, it was been laundering money for the Russian mob for 30 years, 40 years.

And if you understand that, everything else makes sense. Yeah. Right. And again, now I sound like a conspiracy nut. No, you sound like somebody who's actually reading the newspaper. Yeah. Yeah. Paying attention and following things as they have been like, oh, well, that all makes sense. And then it doesn't take you really.

It doesn't take you long to figure out which direction is going to it could possibly go in from there. Right. Well, like when Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court, I was like, well, damn it. Because like I knew those connections and I'm like, well, obviously what's going to happen. Did anybody really think that they were not going to nominate another Supreme Court justice just because they had forced, they had said to Obama, you can't nominate one here.

Of course not. Yeah. No. Like, you know, they, they got it. Yeah. I'm a huge pro wrestling fan. There you go. And, and so like the amount of K-Fabe that was the, yeah. And it's like, oh, oh, they, they basically, you know, they, they put

their head out of the ropes when the good guy was coming at them and the, the ref got in the way and said, stop. But now the good guy's putting his out of the ropes and they're kicking the hell out of them. Like, that's just how it goes. No, exactly. And again, you shouldn't be surprised. That's part of the drama.

You know, it's, you try not to think of this too much as entertaining because it affects real lives, right? It hurts people, but it's Jeff, it's a story that's being told. Yeah, the paradigm still applies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So as somebody who writes things, who thinks about things in terms of plot and character,

everything else, and how you would set up things, you start looking at that and recognizing the patterns. And you also realize that a lot of times when people recognize patterns, they are just picking out things that they know as opposed to actually predicting things, right? Yeah. Yeah. We're, human beings are pattern seekers. That's how we solve problems.

And if we- And avoid danger. If we have limited amounts of, yeah, that's how we avoid danger, right? That's how we figure things out. That's how we avoid being killed. So we're actually, you know, in that sense, we've evolved to be problem solvers, right?

Pattern seekers. And if we look at stuff and think, you know, this is gonna, if we don't have enough information about about something if we only see the bits that are revealed to us then we think that's where everything's going right because we don't look for more information you see that in stories because in a story somebody the writer the creators the directors whatever are telling you things and nothing is accidental in a story right it's all put there for a purpose yeah they contrived it right that's their exact literally contrived it. Right. That's their... Exactly. Literally contriving it. Right?

Yeah. So as somebody who enjoys stories, as most people do, I mean, geez, look at television, games and everything else. We're all doing this stuff full-time practically. When you're not at work, you're basically doing stories. Right. You start to learn how to recognize these things. And if you're just reading the newspaper and you've only read this part here or heard this part on the radio or whatever, you start making connections. But this is reality, which means

the connections don't always exist. Causality and correlation are not the same thing, right? There's a joke I just saw on... Go ahead, you got to do that. There's this great joke I just saw the other day. It was cartoon actually. I think it's one of these one panel ones. It says that 100 percent of the people who confuse correlation and causation will die. Yeah, I used to use a lot of that. Yeah, I used to use 100 percent of people who eat pickles will they die

with my students to kind of show them the same and the amount of kids who freak out because they had pickles that day It's just no no. It's like well. Yeah, eventually, you know I think it was one of the great economists to is that you know, but in the long run, sir How does this work? He says well in the long run, we're all dead, right? How long run do you want to get as Richard Feynman or something like that? Yeah So yeah, it's you know, it's a lot of times you're doing this stuff, you know, brave new world was a very political game in that sense.

Although I tried to be very even handed. A lot of my friends were very conservative, including the guy who made that trailer that you had seen are fairly conservative people because I would try to present both sides of it. Right. Sure. Yeah. It felt like you had the defiance as like, I'm a very left leaning person.

Ed, I joke is the conservative of the group because he has, he's kind of liberal now. Whereas I'm sitting there going like, we need to redistribute everything. And Ed's like, no, I want to keep my tools. So I identify as a distributist, which, you know, so, but interest is pretty much get it. I was a little bit like, Oh man, he's kind of making the defiance out to seem like they're not, they're, they're not entirely reasonable. And, and it, which is fair too. Cause like in any movement you're going to have the, the, the far fringes, uh, who get, you know, who,

who painted up, but yeah, they, black and white about it though. Right. I mean, like, I'll tell you, one of the things that influenced me was the troubles in Ireland, right? My mother's three quarters Irish. I'm half Irish. You know, we several generations back. I mean, I say Irish, I mean, Irish American, but still we paid attention a lot of this stuff And yeah, yeah the Irish Republican Army who thought they had a great fight going a great thing going You had the Ulster Unionists over the other side

And I remember sitting in a bar in Ann Arbor with a couple of friends of mine who were from Ireland You know exchange students were like they're terrorists. No, they're not they're freedom fighters. They're terrorists. They're freedom fighters Like right well, and these are two people whose opinions I respect who live in the middle of this who I'm like, well, you know, sometimes freedom fighters are terrorists, right? Yes. It's not a good thing. But it's so when I was writing a game like that, I want to present things from, do you want to be part of the people who are trying to protect the rest of the world? Right? Or you want to be fighting for freedom? When you say protecting the rest

of the world, are you actually just being used by your fascist dictator? Right. You're actually protecting people. And you know what? You probably are protecting people. Yeah. At some level. The question is, are you also being part

of a terrible system that maybe is hard for people to stomach? Does that protection grind people into paste? Like in your novella, the the guy Norseman um Ragnarok that guy I liked it because at the end he was like like he finally did turn on to doing the right thing and he's like yeah man I got snowed but at the same time like he did not let go of the fact that like he absolutely saw himself as the thin

blue line as it were. And you have true believers on both sides. You, cause you have to truly believe. And generally speaking these people, and this is one of the reasons when I, I state my politics, but I'm not hateful about it because I actually do think there are a lot of good people on both sides or a lot of there are some assholes on both sides. Right. And I, when I say good people often, I'm like, well,

obviously I think my way, what I'm leaning toward is the better way to go guys. That's cause I'm advocating for what I think is the right thing to do. You know, I've got family who's on the other side. Sometimes I'm like, you know, I know you're good people in your hearts. I know you're trying to do the right thing. You don't think you're doing the right thing. And here's why, but I know you're trying to do the right thing and wants to do the right thing. And I think

you can be able to have people play a game where they can take either side that way and say, from my point of view, this is what I think the right thing is. That was really kind of wild to see people take up the Delta Prime guys. Delta primers. Yeah. Jack, Buddha, and thugs. Yeah. It was obvious. Yeah, I know. But they're like, no, we're going to be the police. We're going to save the world. I'm like, yeah, well, sure. Okay. Yeah. That's how you want to play. Okay, then. And then you also had the corporate side, like, which I absolutely loved, because you had, you know, people who had finished through Delta Prime, and then they were hired themselves out in the in the private sectors, but they could be recalled at any time. Yeah, but I mean, you see that too. I mean, you see that military guys going out to Blackwater

and coming back and all this other stuff. It's not like these are new things that came up with it. I mean, it's based upon a human behavior that people engage in all the time. It's kind of stunning, right? So yeah, it's a very, it's a deeply personal game that way. I tell you though, we did a, when we were going after press the book, I think I was at Origins, which is a month before GenCon, and we were having a print in Canada. So we knew we'd be able to get it there in time.

But my partners at AEG called me up and said, why is there a burning American flag in this book? And I'm like, well, on the cover, right? I'm like, well, that's kind of the whole point of the thing. Right. And I explain it to them in detail. They're like, OK, OK, we get it. We're behind you on this, OK?

OK. But even for them, that was like a gut check, because you're like, well, you're potentially stepping into a real firefight here. Yeah, it's like kind of plastic. Yeah. Every copy of that book, the background texture is a burning American flag at a time when

people were really screaming about people burning American flags. And I'm like, well, you know, the whole point is, at what point do you say, I didn't start the fire, it's burning here, we're going, you know, Billy Joel, just keep singing. Yeah. What I find interesting about that particular choice though is when you look at that, when you look at that on the cover of the book, the context that the viewer brings to it is very powerful because that could be a flag being burned in protest, which a whole lot of people were screaming and hollering about at the time.

And my interpretation of it was a metaphor for threat, that the flag isn't burning because some hippie freak has set fire to it. The flag is burning because there's a battle going on. You know, and, and I think that's a, that's a remarkable, uh, remarkably deft thing, thing to do, uh, you know, symbolically I, I, I, you know, now, you know, as a, as a, an adult looking at it, you know, as opposed to, you know, who I was when I first saw the book on the shelves, like now I can, now I can look at it and really appreciate the sleight of hand is the word that comes to mind that's, that's involved in that. And it's just,

it's even better. So yeah. Now we, I, I push for that. Like this is what we want to do. We're going to get somebody make this up for us as an artist. And we just, yeah, but you know, it was a lot of it's like, well, it's a bit of a gutsy move. On the other hand, you know, how many chances, how many, how many swings at bat do you get? Right? Right. You know, take the ones that make some important, they're important. You're gonna have fun with, I actually got the rights back to the game a few years ago too. And I'm still like, are you going to do something with it? But that's, uh, as, as people often say, it's like, well, how are you going to satire? What's happening? We have a, we have a maxim on this show is that satire lasts precisely one half of the generation

because after that time it becomes the goal of the people you're satirizing. It honestly does. Sometimes I've seen my, especially some of my science fiction friends really, you know, we didn't mean this as an instruction manual, right? Like when I when I wrote cyberpunk 2013 this right what I was no Dystopia No guys, no No So I have a question. Did crossroads ever happen? No, it never did. And if I ever actually started up again, I'll do it.

The novellas were kind of a step toward crossroads, which crossroads was going to be the sequel game. The trick was that Shane and I had actually been having some problems with each other, essentially, as the company was going on. And we brought in AEG to help us out. Kind of mitigate things and make sure that everything was working smoothly and all that. And then after Brave New World debuted and I had moved to Wisconsin, Shane's like, you know what, I'm just,

can I go off and do my own thing? And I'm like, yeah, sure, why the hell are we gonna cling to each other till our deaths or whatever. And you know, cause I never wanted to be in a company with somebody who didn't want to be in a company with me. Right, I'm like, okay, fine. You'll go do your thing, I'll go do my thing, AG will go do their thing, and we'll split the company.

It'll be fine. And then AG stepped up and said, you know, we'd like to publish Brave New World if you're up for that. And we will take whatever debt that you might've had and, you know, pay you on top of that too. I'm like, well, that, cause I actually just thought I'd just go back to publishing myself because I've been doing it. They made me such a nice offer and they hired me to write six books and gave me a contract for a year and I

was writing them quickly enough I could write other stuff at the same time. So you know I'm like oh good yeah let's go with that. And again, this is in 2000. So I had a boy who was not even a year old at the time. Like, yeah, money for my child. That sounds like a good idea. Yeah. Now I need more money. You know how it goes.

To reset it for Ed, could you, Matt, could you explain what Crossroads is? Because I know. OK, so when we did Deadlandslands to go back a little bit farther. Deadlands was a zombie cowboy horror Western horror game set in 1860 1876 right? Yeah. And then we came out with Hell on Earth which was a post-apocalyptic game and then there was the spaceship one which I've been a last lost no that's not what is it lost colony right? Lost colony which I was nearly as involved with

because I moved on to doing Brave New World at that point. But they were like these same kind of setting but then advanced years later or whatever. So when we did Brave New World, I thought I would do another game that was attached to it was basically gonna be a multi-versal game, right? You can run around from multi, you know, universe to universe to universe.

And it would actually explain some of the secrets that I didn't quite get to behind why superhero powers worked and the way they do in Brave New World. And, uh, when that did, after a year of writing the books for AG, they said, you know what, uh, we kind of muffed this and the sales numbers aren't strong enough. So we're going to end the line. I'm like, right. I'll go off and do something else for a while. Sure. So crossroads was never going to come out at that point. But then in 2012,

I basically said, is it okay if I read novels for this? They said, yeah, sure. You know, well, they were paying me a royalty on Brave New World. So how about we just not pay each other royalties for a while? I'll not pay the royalties in the novels. You're not paying me the royalties in the games. And you know, whatever the numbers were going to be, it wasn't going to be worth fighting over. So they said, sure. So I went off and wrote these novels and that was essentially my step toward crossroads. And if you've read those, so you understand Damien, what's going on there. And if I ever get the chance to do it again, I would probably do crossroads as well, right? Ironically i'm working on the marvel multiverse game right now, which is like

Yeah, there you go. It would have been a great idea back in 2001, but you know, we're here now So and also now that britney spears is free from her conservatorship, you can now do crosswords. Everything's changed. Again. Yeah, exactly. There you go. Did you ever flesh out what the specific alpha powers were going to be? I never really had mechanics for it, right?

Yeah. Because we see Supreme, or is it Superior? I think his name is Superior. I'm sorry, Supreme. Yeah, it's Superior. We see Superior, and he basically is, I mean, he's a Superman espy. He flies really fast. He has laser eyes. He pretty much does whatever the plot calls for.

Right. I mean, he's basically God in disguise, right? Yeah. Yeah. Superior was, you know, when I was developing games, I was writing games a lot I Decided early on I really liked the low powered stuff right the super powered stuff like, you know Superman type stuff It gets a little bit repetitive because especially like well, what am I really? What is Superman gonna punch this week? Right? Right? How is he gonna not try to kill this person by accident this week? Oh, he blew out a star. Yeah, exactly. Where are you going to go? Especially if you're talking like

pre-crisis Superman where literally his brain was working at the speed of light and just, yeah, not only was the strongest, most invulnerable, whatever, also the smartest man alive, fastest man alive, whatever. And they de-powered him since then, you know, were powered down. I'm like, you know, Batman, Batman, Spider-Man, that's where I want to be. That's that kind of stuff. That's where it's a tree level. Yeah, exactly. I actually found it to be better for role-playing games too, because if you, if you, one of the reasons I really like Boothill and the reason I got into doing Western games is because every time somebody picked up a gun and pointed at you in Boothill, there's like about a

16 and a half percent chance you would die, right? Like just from one shot. And like 33% chance you'd be pretty badly wounded and it would take forever to heal. And like, well, this actually encouraged role playing cause you're like, well, maybe I don't want to just burst in and just blast the shit out of everything and I'll be fine, right?

Actually, I've come up with ideas and think about things. I really enjoyed that aspect of it So when I was doing brave new world, I'm like, you know, I'm gonna set this at low power level Uh, and in a sense, it's really a metaphor for for guns, too I mean, it's like uh, if every if you could have a power that's basically the equivalent to having a gun in your pocket That's undetectable Right. Yeah, maybe some people are going to want to feel safe by regulating that right? Yeah But then you can carry it too far,

then no, if you have that, then you have to work for the state and be part of that. Right. To see where there's an overreach of power. So, but for me, that felt like a good, comfortable place to be. It also made the game design relatively easy. I also did something where I think,

looking back, I probably wouldn't do it again, right? We thought we were gonna try to sell this game at comic book shops to comic book fans who had not played role playing games before. And back about 25 years ago, that might've been a possibility. But again, the company was breaking up shortly after this. We never really pulled it off. There was a template system.

So if you wanted to play a guy who was a bruiser, you got the bruiser template, you write up a character, and you're done. It took you like five minutes, right? Which is great, but it turns out that players, if you've been playing D&D and you got really deep in your spell book or whatever, you want more meat on the bones in most cases.

So the hardcore gamers didn't really enjoy it as much. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It got very difficult that way. So you learn from these things. I mean, the new Marvel games got a lot more of that kind of stuff in it. So it's simple enough in the basic ideas,

but then there's plenty of stuff for hardcore gamers to sink their teeth into if they really want to as well. Right, right. So I would probably do something closer to that next time around if and when I get to run to doing this. The real reason I haven't done it so far is because during the Marvel game, I didn't really feel comfortable.

And Marvel doesn't have me under exclusive because you know For instance a lot of their writers and artists both work for DC too at the same time, right? It's not that he'd say no, you can't do this. This is your livelihood you go off right? But I didn't feel comfortable doing basic core game design on two superhero games at once fair And I would rip off one for the other favor more It's kind of like why Robin Williams stopped going out to comedy shows. Yeah, exactly.

You might rip somebody off accidentally even. Yeah. And you don't even want to have that be a possibility for yourself. Sure. Sure. I do love the idea of somebody getting on Reddit or on Blue, well, I doubt they do it on Blue Sky.

It seems nice over there. But on X or something like that, where they're like, Oh, Matt, for back is just ripping off the creator of the Marvel role playing game. Yeah. That asshole. Yeah. It's like, I mean, people, they also don't understand this thing called parallel development. Hi. Yeah. Lateral. Yeah. Yeah met so back the creator of the Marvel game Yeah, hi, how you doing? Yeah, see where it says lead designer Yeah, well, you know Yeah, you know that that has actually happened to writers and oh god

Yeah content Gail Simone had a really famous one where you know, it was like hi I've actually been the writer of Wonder Woman for you know, it was like, hi, I've actually been the writer of Wonder Woman for, you know, 10 years. Hi, how are you? Maybe I understand the character. Maybe. Yeah. I keep paying her to write it. So it's a good thing. Right. But you also have this thing called parallel development. And we had, and we kind of touched

on this a little bit. We were all swimming in the same cultural soup. You're watching the same movies, playing the same games, writing the same books. So when we did Deadlands, we thought, who the hell is doing Western horror? Nobody's doing that. And like six months into development, White Wolf announces Werewolf of the Wild West.

And we're like, oh shit, we're in trouble, right? Fortunately, they released their game two months after ours. They looked like they were pinging on us rather than the other way around. But honestly, they weren't. There's no way they could have known what we were doing, right? Yeah. And we didn't know that they were doing that up until they announced it. Well, and the world building, like if you take a minute to look at the world building,

you know, between Deadlands and, you know, Werewolf Wild West, no. Yeah, no, the, the conceit, yeah. The conceit is, is similar on the surface, but if, if you, if you actually read any of it, you're like, Oh yeah, no, this is, this is very different. Yeah. Not everybody in the internet is really well informed. I have to tell you. No, shockingly. Well, and let's see, Deadlands came out in the mid nins. 96. 96.

So Tombstone was 94. I believe Unforgiven was 96 or 95. I think it was before it, but I don't remember who it was. But we have like neo-Westerns, right? You had the posse, you had the quick and the dead. Silverado, yeah, all these other things. So there was this resurgence of Western. I mean, you had Dances with with wolves like that was a Western as well

You know, so you had this resurgence of Westerns So again, it's kind of like when there were two apocalyptic movies coming out within weeks of each other, you know Yeah, the two asteroid movies the um, deep impact impact and again. Yeah, um Oddly enough Armageddon was the one that got turned into a adult film type. Whereas you would have thought Dean Pimpact would Yeah, yeah. But maybe it was just too on the nose. But, but yeah, yeah. But you know, so you had that, like you

said, swimming in the soup, like we've we've long I pointed out many times that the the screw job in Montreal happened. So for Bret Hart, you know, getting getting screwed out of his title on on pay-per-view in Montreal happened within six weeks of Ross cheating on Rachel while they were on a break. There's just something going on. Yeah. You just don't know. Yeah.

But you know, they say you're one in a million if you come up with this stuff, right? But there's a lot of millions out there right now. Yeah. Yeah. One in a million. 8 billion people or whatever. There's a lot of millions. Yeah. Yeah. That's 8,000. Okay. Tell me about the Gen Con execution of the Patriot. I obviously didn't get to see it. Oh yeah, that's a funny story. I didn't have a shadow box of it.

Yeah, if you look up behind me, I got the mask that our friend David Ross wore at Gen Con there. It was 1999, and we had started doing these little, I guess you call them sketches or plays or performances or whatever, in the booth to try to get people excited about it before we launched the game. We did one with Hell on Earth a year before, where we actually had radiation priests wandering the halls and chanting and Gregorian chant as they were carrying this gigantic palanquin full of books on their shoulders and people were following them to the halls

and they got to our place. We'd open it up and start handing out books to sell them. So we tried to do something similar with Brave New World where we're going to execute Patriot who was the main hero of the Defiance who had been part of Delta Prime and now has moved over to the other side. And we actually had it all set up. We had him get him, we had blood squibs and blanks in the rifles and we were going to, we were going to kill him on the floor of GenCon because I want to do something dark. I'm like, yeah, they always think they're grossing and survive.

So let's kill him, right? It'll be fun. Sick fun, but there we go. Gamers it's okay. Yeah. Yeah. This was back, you know, 99, we didn't have a ton of shootings going on like we do nowadays with mass shootings. So, uh, when did when is Jencon? Jencon's in August, right? Yeah. August or very late July. We had so I'm buying in April. Uh, no, that would have been a couple of years later. I think this is 99. Okay. I'm not sure. I forget what Columbine was exactly. I believe

Columbine was 99. Okay, I was tempting but anyway But the main thing was that we actually had a date There was a day trader went nuts and started shooting up a shitload of people in the streets of Atlanta like two weeks before Jack Oh damn, right And so we had actually asked Jencon gotten permission from me because we didn't want to scare people We want to have this dramatic thing but not people people panicking, right? Right, right, right. And they're like, no, no, you cannot do this. Like, okay, fine. Yeah. So since we can't kill him and we can't make it look convincing to kill him,

we're going to let him live. So we actually changed the plot, right? So is that why everything changed and why everything's different in the book and in the novel, which I know the two don't line up and you explained it in, I think the end of one of the novels. I actually, I explained in one of the other books that came out, I think it was okay. When it came out, right. It said, Hey, actually he's not dead. What do you know? Right. Well that part I'm saying that when you, you, cause there's a,

a divergence from, from how he gets rescued in the Defiance Book. It involves the underwater people and all kinds of stuff. And then you literally have that as I think the first novel revolution. Um, and it's a very different jailbreak. Yeah. And you explained, I think at the end, like I went where the story took me like, so I wasn't stuck to this. And you explained, I think, at the end, like, I went where the story took me. Like, so I wasn't stuck to this. And I thought that was actually a really brave choice, because you would probably get some, like, true diehards who are like, this is not how it was supposed to be. Yeah, I agree.

Honestly, I didn't want it to go that way originally. I'm like, well, you know, circumstances dictate sometimes and you try to follow them the best way you can. And, you know, everybody, one of the funny things, if you're a creator, you understand this instinctively, but as a consumer, you don't always understand it. A lot of times the consumer thinks this stuff is all just in your head

or written down someplace. And I'm just peeling the pages back one at a time and I'm teasing you as I go, right? But the real answer is I'm making this shit up as I go along, right But the real answer is I'm making this shit up as I go along. It's Indiana Jones. He's like, what are we going to do next? He's like, I don't know. I'm making it up as I go. It's exactly what you're doing. And it's, you know, sometimes you forget what you made up. Sometimes you contradict yourself. There was actually one bit where I had forgotten I had an earlier patriot, right? And I'd already be like, oh,

well, patriot looks like he must be 80 years old at this point. Oh, that was the original patriot. Right. So you started doing this Stanley no prize retconning stuff where you're like, oh, yeah, actually I can explain it. Just give me a chance. Yeah. And it's kind of fun, right? And part of the thing again is that you're not a staff of hundreds of people that have a guy who's just single job is this person's single job is to do the lore and keep track of everything and build a wiki for you.

Especially back in 99 when that didn't exist, right? You're basically just you and your notes and hoping you don't screw it up too hard. Yeah, because your notes are likely on paper or on a screen. You might not scroll back far enough to find the thing, or you might not flip the legal pack back enough to- I mean, this is like practically free Google, right? I mean, it's just- Yeah, you're using AltaVista at this point.

Actually, if you look at the original Brave New World books too, they're built up as if they're on a web page, right? Yeah. Which I love. Is that the hot new thing at the time? Yeah, I loved that. I thought that was, I mean, number one,

it's at the time I'm sure it felt like, okay, this is very current and this is going to be an ongoing thing. And now looking at it, I'm like, oh, he used Netscape. Okay. It's not even 3.0. It was pre-Chrome, man. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty micro internet explorer. Whatever happened to the miniatures? I don't think it ever happened. We were hoping to do them and it never actually came out.

Yeah, it was one of those things like we had been talking to some people about it. I think Rich Jennings was going to cast them for us. He had done the the great world wars figures for us. I've been hoping to do them too. I'll tell you though, one of the problems with doing miniatures for something like superheroes is everybody's got a different idea about what's in their head about what their superhero is. So you could put them in different poses, but do they have claws?

They have like spikes coming off their head, different types of costumes, do they have a cape? Hero Forge is freaking amazing for that kind of stuff, by the way, if you've seen that. Basically, art up your whatever kind of character it is and have them do a 3D printed model and even print it in color for you. Yeah.

I've got, I mean, I have a few. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And yeah, when the hero clicks came out a few years after all that too, I was like, ah, so sweet. Jordan Weissman is one of my good buddies too. And I'm just, that guy has just done so many amazing things over the years.

Jordan's a guy who founded FASTA so he came over the battle tech and shadow run and whatever else then he came up with mage night and he recreated whiz kids they did hairbrained schemes and he did you know a bunch of video games he's got a sure just ended for uh with thousands pirate game that's name is not coming to me at the moment um he also is that the the one where you're on the boats you have to measure the distance. Yeah. Well, he did one of those with the cards that you actually like it came flat yet to assemble them too.

Yeah. And crimson. Oh, man. I spent so much money on that game. I was in the Spanish main was what that was. That's okay. Yeah. And he also knows the guy who met the first ARG, the first alternate reality

game, which actually worked out with him. It was we did it for Steven Spielberg's AI movie. There's crazy web based thing that we actually had tens of thousands of players playing it once online with us. It was nuts. And we were just make it up as we went along. Right. Crazy, crazy stuff. That's that oh, that's wild. That's, that's neat. Um, hey, so here's a silly question, and you as a game designer would probably be best, uh, equipped and to answer this. Um, ambidexterity in the eighties and nineties, it was all the rage. Like, what happened? Like, why were people just so gaga over it? Like,

it was a feat in when you got to like 3-0. It was like, it was absolutely a thing that was in the TSR Marvel game. It shows up in your game. Like, it is, it was in Mekton Zeta. Like, it was in all kinds of things. Yeah, it's good. We're all, we it's because we're all hostage Dungeons and Dragons essentially. Okay. So if you look at D&D, D&D assumes that you're fighting with one weapon. If you're going to fight with two weapons, then you have penalties, right? Sure. For each one.

And then suddenly it's like, no, I don't have a penalty, I'm ambidextrous. I can do whatever the hell I want, right? But it's because Dungeons and Dragons, because role-playing games start in miniatures games, in miniature simulations, in war games before that, that we still have a lot of that mentality around it. And honestly, I still fight that when I'm doing the Marvel game.

I'm like, I could do this, I could figure out all the angles for this, I could figure out whether or not you're in cover or not in cover or what angle or whatever. And at a certain point I'm like, you know, this is just dumb, nobody cares. Like I was trying to figure out like if we do ranges, do we want to care about whether we,

if we're doing on a grid, let's say we're doing on a grid because you can play a theater on the mic or whatever you want, but if you're doing on a grid, do you care if you go one, two, three, four over, then one, two, three, four up, that's eight, right? And slightly shorter if you take the straight angle across. Right.

But is it really all that? Does it matter anything? And are you really going to make your players, you know, hypotenuse it? Yeah, exactly. You know, bring out the characters. Name is Pythagoras.

And you have a Pythagoras to figure this stuff out. Right. Yeah. The answer is no. I mean, it's boring. You don't want people to do the boring stuff. Right. Oh, there's crowd, nerd friends that I have who like, Pythagoras to figure this stuff out, right? Yeah. The answer is no. I mean, it's boring. You don't want people to do the boring stuff, right? There's Gronard friends that I have who like, oh, I don't know.

I know. I mean, I have friends. I played Starfleet Battles, right? Where you have to have a laptop with you to be able to calculate which vector you're going at, what age you're at, and three different dimensions at the same time. So, and I actually, I got a degree in creative writing, but I actually started out as electrical engineer and computer science major. And so I was going to get a degree in both fields.

And so I did two years of electrical engineering. So my brain still works that way sometimes like, oh yeah, I can do that. And I'm like, well, yeah, why, why would I want to, why would I want to force it on anybody else? Right. Just cause I can, doesn't mean everyone should. Right. And yeah, things just't mean everyone should. Right. And one of the things you strive for in game design

is elegance, where you don't even have to explain the rules to people or how they work. You just say, this is what you do. And you have to say, and the reason you're doing it this way is because blah, blah, blah, blah. They don't need to know that. Yeah. They just need to know it works.

And they need to know it's exciting and how it feels when they play it. It's your job to do the math and hide it from them. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That makes that makes a lot of sense. Like my daughter. So I run a game. I've been running games for my kids for just over seven years as of this recording. Like we just hit seven year anniversary and I waited until they were both literate and could do basic arithmetic. And she asked me once, like, and I've played the Star Wars West End games with them as well. And she asked me once, she's like, and it was so funny,

I've talked about it on prior episodes and she's like, and she and William are just blown away. My daughter's name is Julia. They were just blown away at how I was able to have them in suspended animation from the time of like the early Republic, you know, the old Republic times. And then they show up and they're on Starkiller base. And she's like, oh my God, how did you do all of that?

And I'm like, I literally just made it up. Like I didn't tell her that I'm like, I'm so glad you liked it. But I'm like, I just told lies the whole time. Like, and so it was just, but like, if you can do that in such a way that people are just like, again, gobsmacked that you and yeah, I did all the math. Yes, I figured out, okay, I'm going to have them and you know, I'm going to railroad them. I'm 100% railroading them and so that no matter what door they open,

they go into the thing. You know, it's, it's, that's one of the great dungeon master tricks or GM trace. Like, you got left or right. It doesn't matter. Cause the plot's going to meet you, you know, and it comes to you. Right. Yeah. I did a, I did a book called Star Trek versus Star Trek once for Adams publishing We're just put different things against each other. Right? Oh, it's our drug versus Star Wars. Yeah Sorry, that was what 2014 something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the funny part is like, you know You can calculate out how fast the enterprise goes, right? Sure

Like goes but certain percentage of the speed of light, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And you know, the Millennium Falcon, how fast does that go? It goes at the speed of plot, right? Just wherever it needs to be, when it needs to be. Point five pass speed.

Yeah. It's time for more conversation. Right. That's how fast it goes. Well, yeah, like who would win the Star Destroyer or no, like the, the enterprise or a Star Destroyer. It's like, well, the enterprise, cause it's named. There you go. You know, people like,

you could get into that. I'm like, it has a name. This does. It's much more important clearly. It has the bold outline and the other drawer doesn't, you know, like, um, yeah. In, in the books in the early book, in the players handbook. Um, yeah, in, in the books, in the early book, in the players handbook, um, and I think a little bit in the defiance book, you develop tricks, right? And then it kind of fell off. It tapered off.

Yeah. Why? Why was that? Did you have a nice, I don't remember off the top of my head. I think, uh, at a certain point I'm like, well, I think people are able to do this on their own. Right. At a certain point, I'm like, well, I think people are able to do this on their own, right? Let's see, this is coming out in March, you said?

Which? This episode is coming out in March or so. Yeah, thereabouts. Well, I can tell you if you keep it under your head until March is that we're doing something similar with the Spider-Man book. Oh, great. So we're going to introduce something called stunts, right? So different ways to use your powers in new and fun ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, I think part of the problem with what we did, what I was trying to do with Brave New World is that, at a certain point, it starts to... The binary system gets too large for you to actually get into, right? There's too many different possibilities that you're branching off each other. Right. And also, think at that point, I was probably just

writing the books at speed. So I was more concerned with getting background out than I was about getting new rules out. You know, a lot of the other books don't have a ton of new rules in them, right? Yeah, they're very lower. With Marvel Game now, we're doing, originally with the Marvel Game, we're

going to do it the same way. We're just going to go, here's more source material for you. Want more X-Men? We got more X-Men. Right. But then the guys at Marvel, like, what about new rules? I think we need more rules. I'm like, well, OK.

So now every expansion we put out has like about 50 pages and plus of new rules in it. So wow. And you're like, oh, yeah, we could have covered that. One of the things when you do a role-playing game, too, especially a game like Marvel, is you realize that what you put in the core rule book becomes what the game is about. Right? So if you...

Yeah. If I put in... For instance, there's almost nothing in the way of weaponry in the book. Right? Right. Because if I put in all the different weapons and did gun porn essentially for the Punisher, then it becomes a book about shooting people. It becomes a game about shooting people.

As opposed to a game about having to do with battles. So I'm not saying that we won't do that in some fights. If we did it in the core rule book, it would alter things, right? If I stopped and said, oh, by the way, now you've got all this exciting stuff, let's talk about headquarters or power stunts or how are you going to build your power, your Iron Man armor in 16 different ways. Right. For one, the book would have ended up being a thousand pages long.

But for two, you know, you start taking it away from what you want the game to be about. And again, when you have grognaars who want to play these games like me, like you guys, right? You want to have that depth to it. But that's what expansions are for. You can put those things in expansions as opposed to trying to put them in a core role book. And so the guys at Marvel are like, yeah, you remember you telling us that it's time for the stuff in the expansions. Like, okay. Yeah, you're right.

Okay. Okay. Was there ever actually a website for the Delta times? There was, I had the website for a long time. Damn. I wish I had a long time. A few years. I, cause I went looking for it. Yeah. No, I mean, it labs.

I'm sure some porn sites got it now or some Nigerian email scam or whatever the hell it was. And I got a book. Now you're getting, I have to go actually look this up. Yeah. The com or I think it was. So, so if I ever run this game and here's the problem I've run into is that its name is for sale.

I could buy it back when you know there you go. Hey, you heard it here. Here. Here first, folks. There you go. I just I just want 2%. But I've never successfully been able to get anybody to play this game with me. And that's a huge frustration to me.

And a lot of it is because most of my friends now are straight up only fantasy games. Basically, D&D is the band aid, right? It is the brand name. It is everything. It's what WWE is to wrestling. And I'm like, but guys guys there's so much other cool shit Like we could do like weird war stuff we could do and like no no, I like this this weirdly specific Learning the stuff they like it. They're not interested in trying something there, which is sad, but you know Most gamers are that way most people are that way. Most people are that way. Right.

Yeah. That's one of the reasons you have 16 versions of CSI on television. Right. Yeah. It's just, yeah, that makes sense. Or whatever. You know, once you get a formula down, people like it, they keep going back to it. Yeah.

As a producer and a designer, you're like, well, let's give them what they want. It works for them. Right. Right. Because that pays the mortgage. It does. Yeah. I think it's sad. But you know, on the other hand, it's sad but you know on the other hand it's because you know

like you guys were what we call the alpha gamers right the folks who go out there and Try everything right? You play any kind of game you'll play whatever else because you're excited about you pick it apart see how it works Let's see what's going on here But not everybody is that way the same way that some people only read like James Patterson novels or whatever Right or Star Wars novels or Star Wars novels or whatever They'll just stick with what they like and they'll pretty much not go off it and when they stop then they'll find something else Hopefully but as long as they keep producing for that thing, right?

You know Janet Ivanovich is for everyone how many different novels in her series? You know, it's just the way that people go. They're like, I like this, it's familiar, it's comforting, I enjoy it. I don't have to worry about being disappointed by it, so they go with it. Now that said, I mean, D&D is a great game and I love it. I've played a lot of every edition over the years, but getting people to play new games is hard. One of the other interesting things in the development of Brave New World is that it was at the very tail end of RPGs that had overarching plots. Yes, which is actually what the question I was coming to. But yeah, I mean, White Wolf had that very much in Vampire. We did it in Deadlands, you know, you would move things forward, Shadowrun

had it. All these, you're like, okay, here's the setting and you know, this is what you need to know. And then we're going to advance it every now and then because you're playing through adventures and things happen. Even Torg used to do that back from West End games. They have this game called Torg, and which has got a funny name story behind the name. But Torg was a game that was this multiversal thing that you would then turn in your results

and then they would tabulate those and that would tell them how the meta plot was going. Oh wow. Torg is one of the examples of why you never name your role playing game a code name that you don't absolutely hate, right? Because Torg is actually the, it's an acronym for the other role playing game for a company that was doing Star Wars at the time. Right. So it's called Torg and then.

Oh wow. The problem is if you get exposed to the same name often enough, you start to like it. Right. Oh, actually, I like that. Sounds good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Star Wars is a perfect example of a plot. Like you decide, like my kids, I literally took them from one era to another, you know, that kind of thing. one era to another, you know, that kind of thing. And and so that makes sense. So I guess my question is, when I finally get people to say, yes, I want to play a superhero game that isn't Marvel

and and yes, I want to play a dystopic 25 years later, a role playing game with superheroes. When do I tell them that? John F Kennedy is actually facade That's an interesting page. You don't have to right? Okay, you don't ever have to You can reveal things as they're needed one of the things about role-playing games is you get much more information You're ever gonna need to use. Yeah. Yeah, and part of the reason that designers do that for you is because Let's say it's a novel, right? If it's a novel you're only told the things you need to know ideally sometimes people input dump on you and get tons of more

Information like you know what everybody had for dinner on the third day of their trip or whatever, right? Really need that information and enjoy the story, but it's in there texture and versatility so in there, right? Supposedly texture and versatility. So, but a lot of novels or movies or whatever, especially movies, because they tend to be pretty short compared to every other type of entertainment, television shows, now that you have series that go on forever. Most of the things in there are really vital, right? You're only told the things you need to

know, you're not told a lot of stuff that's not going to come up in a role playing game, because you don't know which told the things you need to know. You're not told a lot of stuff that's not gonna come up. In a role playing game, because you don't know which direction the players are gonna go, and you don't know which way the narrator or the game master is gonna take it, you need to overload them with information and say,

look, if they do this thing, here's some ideas about which direction you might need to take that in, right? Or for instance, if you're looking at a television show, everything you see in the screen looks like a million dollars right everything outside of it bailing wire and duct tape right right and if you try to do that with a role-playing game i'm only showing you this part that means you can't go outside of that part right there's nothing out there and if the game master starts looking out

there and they go, uh, and then the players are like, you don't know, do you? You don't know what's going on. Nobody knows. It kind of kills, it kills the k-fades. It just kills the momentum. So that's the reason you get gazetteers and sourcebooks and maps and all sorts of wonderful things like that.

They give you a lot of world building information that you as a narrator or as a game master need to absorb, but don't necessarily need to relate to the characters until they need that information. Okay. So again, if you enjoy reading it, enjoy having it in your head, that's great. But again, once it hits your table,

it's gonna be different than anything I wrote. Sure. You're gonna make it your own. And that's one of the great things about D&D is because it's this fantasy thing that everybody kind of thinks they understand, but it's all just kind of, you know, wormed over Tolkien in a lot of ways. But it's, you know, it's every way it thinks they understand it.

You don't have to explain to them how it works, right? They know what a dwarf does, they know what an elf does, they know what a hobbit does, whatever. So they have this generic understanding in their minds that they can use and apply to these things. Whereas if you're doing a science fiction game or a modern game or whatever else, you have to explain everything to them. How is this different?

What's going on? What's happening? Especially if it's a science fiction game, that's one of the reasons like, all right, you're doing Star Trek. How's the Federation work? Where do they, how do they barter for anything? Do they do it for free?

Is it all just free? You know, we got- Right. They run into people who do barter. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so because of that, you end up over-designing these things essentially, so that the game master has the opportunity to be able to, so they can feel

confident about what they're doing. Cause a lot of the real problem is if you walk in a game and you don't feel like you have mastered the material, often you'll get nervous about it. And that anxiety can often lead to you choking and nobody likes that experience. Right. Right. You know what? So they're going, I don't know, I you choking. And nobody likes that experience, right? Right. You know, it's a, they're going, I don't know, I'm sorry. And some people are just not good at improving, right?

If you're a good improv, uh, game master, you could just felt this is what happens. I'm making it up as they go, but not everybody has that skill or is, or cares to use it. So you need to over prepare for them. And then they'll take the bits of the daylight that respond to them and then they'll move on with this. One of the great things about the Marvel game, I know I keep bringing it up,

it's taking a lot of my brain space these days, is that every game that somebody sits down and plays it is its own universe in the Marvel Multiverse. So you get to play whatever you're doing, that's you. If you're a character who wants to travel from one game to say a convention game, to the game down the street, to wherever you happen the street to wherever Happen to move to another city you can do that You're just popping through a portal to the other universe and now you're in that other universe playing a game, right? Okay

Yeah, and essentially that's what everybody the funny part is it's like well, that's that's an interesting idea I'm like, well, yeah That's what everybody does every time they sit down to play a game anywhere, right? Your game is never the same as the guys at the next table. That's true. It's, it's your own thing. There's your own common area that you and the people you play with all remember the end jokes and whatever you came up with and the call backs you're going to make and all the fun things are going to happen, but it's always different. Right.

Even if you're playing convention, you have to play one hour convention games for people, you know, suddenly developing in jokes for that, what we've been doing. That's right. And nobody outside that table will game. Like that's right. And nobody outside that table will understand any of that. Right. But then you meet them up in the next year. You're like, Hey, you remember what? You know? Yeah. And then they'll develop that further and that, that'd be good. Yeah. So, I mean, the other thing is that when you're,

when you're writing games like that, especially in that meta arc era, games are generally designed to be used in three different ways. You have to have, one is to teach somebody the rules and the setting, right? The other is to be a reference book for it. So when you're playing the game, you have to look something up or you just can't remember what you read because it's 300 pages thick. And the third is to be an enjoyable read, right? Yeah.

So if you can make it all three of those things, you're winning on a lot of fronts. But if you, it's easy to stumble on one or lean too hard on the other. Sure. Okay. This next question is as a multi-part patriot question. Sure. Number one, I just gotta say, I love that his awakening was

interrupting Batman's origin story. Exactly. Like that was, I like that. I love little inversions like that. That was, that was cool. Was he inspired by anybody? And why was it Smedley Butler? And the other question is, you also have him getting up three times from his execution

in the source book. Biblical reference? Are you using his Catholicism? So yeah. Yeah. Okay. And are you using his Catholicism to play off of Kennedy's Catholicism? Of course. Yeah. Okay. I mean, there's actually the whole covenant book in there too. That's me getting through

my Catholicism. I've been a lapsed Catholic since I was in high school. Sure. Uh, uh, my friends who are still Catholic, say you're recovering Catholic, right? Cause it only takes one slip in your back end. Sure. Or, uh, I've also heard culturally Catholic. That's my friends. What it is to like a lot of the Jewish.

It's like we celebrate Easter and Christmas, but we're not going to church or anything like that. Right. Mostly because those are the fun parts. And yeah, I like the fun parts. Yeah, it's okay. But I'm agnostic at best. Right. But I grew up going to Catholic school, grade school and high school, which means that I read a lot of the Bible. Cause I was also a pretty smart kid was reading ahead. So I was often had nothing else to read except the Bible

that have to be in my desk. So I went through it over and over and over and all the different things. Everybody is on Station two of the cross. You're on stage. Well, you know, the days I wasn't hiding a comic book or an Isaac Asimov novel in the middle of it. Right. So, you know, God's sisterrini would catch me all the time. So.

You're like, no, it's I, Jesus. I don't know. Exactly. No. So, definitely working out some of my Catholic issues and those things, right? But things come in threes as a very Catholic Western world kind of thing. So. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, being resurrected or standing up three times like yeah, that's definitely a Christian thing going on. Yeah Yeah, I mean patriot I think as far as who who inspired him You know for me it was more like a cross between batman and captain america, right?

Just uh, this guy who was selling and actually the mask if you you know He's got this massive ties on like a bandana, goes around his eyes. That was more like Grifter, which was from Wildstorm Comics, right? Which was Jim Lee's Division of Image Comics. Okay. One of my big gigs in the mid-90s before I joined, before I started Pinnacle, I was the co-designer of the Wildstorms collectible card game for Jim Lee. Jim's now the chief creative officer at DC Comics. And his vice president was a guy named John Knee

who went on to found Cryptozoic Games as well. And also was the publisher of Marvel Comics who actually asked me to write the Marvel Worldwide Game. Right, so a lot of that just comes full circle, the people you know and the people you work with who you trust and like you will come back to you over the years. But Grifter had that kind of a mask like Patriot did, right?

And that was a great look, I thought. Like you tied that banana tattered at the bottom because you've been through so much shit. Right. But he also kind of was like a homeless person sometimes because he's just been through the mud and the gunk and everything else. Yeah. Um, you know, and you know, uh, these were days when, um, the nineties, when you're,

if you're an American citizen who cares about the country, you're often struggling with your sense of patriotism, you know, how much you actually love the country, right? Cause you see the bad, the good with it. And I wanted to show that through Patriot. I think, you know, there's a person who believes in the ideals of it, but not always the execution of it. Yeah. I think, you know, there's a person who believes in the ideals of it, but not always the execution of it. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's Captain America. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And many years later,

I wrote a Captain America book for DK publishing, Captain America, the first Avenger, but I think they came out the new edition a few years ago that they added onto what I had written. But, but I had a great time working on that. It was like, I really did a deep dive into Captain America. Now I know his history backwards and forwards. Like all the way, was this like the kind of large coffee table book where?

Yeah, yeah. I probably got a copy or something. It even showed him like from the serials where he had a gun. Yeah, that was it. Oh God, I bought that for my stepdad one year. It's around here somewhere, I can't find it. It's on my shelves. Yeah. But, um, yeah, it's a terrible, terrible thing, right? Um, but, uh, like I remember the one of the funniest stories from that is where,

uh, Stan Lee writes his first ever fiction for, uh, first ever story ever wrote was for Captain America. I think it was number five back in like 1941. And he wrote a prose story for it when he was like 17 years old. And his uncle, Martin Goodman owned the comic company, which was Timely Comics back in the day. Right, Timely. And he was just this kid working in the mailroom and irritating everybody by playing the ocarina, which is this like panpipe he was playing and pissing everybody off. And one of these guys looks over and says, hey, hey, kid, we need a story for this comic, you want to write? Give me a Captain America

Pro story. Just need like three pages, you know, and he sits down and writes it. And the reason they have them do that, and the reason they have, you know, pro was in comic books in those days. And the reason they have fiction in a lot of magazines but from then is that you had a better postage rate if you had fiction in your magazine, right? Really? Actually shipped at a cheaper rate because they were basically subsidizing literary works.

Wow. The government said, we will charge you a lesser rate because this is obviously something with some kind of artistic merit. So Stan writes this story just solely so that his uncle's company can get a cheaper shipping rate on Captain America number five. And he decides that he's not going to use his real name because he wants to save that for when he gets older and writes the great American novel.

So instead of being Stanley Lieber, which is a given name, he's Stan Lee. And he's forever after known as that never got around to writing the great American novel, although obviously he's written more stuff than he's written stuff that more people in this world have read than most about anybody. Oh, yeah. Yeah. His his thumbprint is on so much of my childhood. I just study. You center a lot of your world in Chicago Crescent city.

Yeah. Yeah. It's called, uh, I'm from Chicago pissed off me because I just tried to, we noticed actually a similar thing happened a few episodes back, uh, when we were looking at rifts. Yeah. Yeah. Is this because y'all are kind of in, in the midwest?

You boys. Yeah. And that's like the biggest city Nearby to me Chicago is the big city, right? I mean guys and doing Marvel comics It was New York, you know If you're in in film you're often destroying LA right because LA is right there. You might as well film it, right? But for me the big city was Chicago. I mean, I still love you I live about an hour north hour and a half north of Chicago, about an hour from O'Hare, about an hour and a half from downtown in Wisconsin.

And that's where we go for big city fun. That's where we do all sorts of stuff. So when I had to destroy a big city, and again, for me, that was me reverse engineering comic books, right? Cause you've looked at like DC comics, it's like all these cities that don't exist right and Where the hell do you put them and wires? Why is that a city there as opposed to Boston or New York or whatever?

I'm like, well, right I have present city so I can just muck with it and not worry about whether or not Being accurate to people or offending people in Chicago or wherever else you just destroy all of Chicago and then you know It's carte blanche. Yeah, exactly And then then actually becomes part of the plot that ends up in the novels later on right, right, right? Now like yeah, we're just gonna have the whole city of Chicago disappeared in blighting blast and destroy everything with a few miles But the title way that comes into Lake Michigan and a sphere that Yeah Question for you on, uh,

you, you actually, um, what, why is there an assassination attempt on Madonna written into your lore? I think that was just me having fun. Okay. Madonna actually went to college at Michigan a few years before I did. We never ran into each other. She was like, I think she was out of town before I got in the city. It was always like this legendary figure around Detroit.

Yeah. Cause she's from Detroit. Okay. That's funny. Um, the superiors, uh, statue, the head, was that inspired by Jedidiah Simpson, uh, getting his head cut off? No, I think it was before that. No, no, you're right. Maybe it was actually. I don't know. Sometimes you don't know all your own inspirations, right? Sure. sure. I also noticed there was a character named Joanne Weber, which I was like, oh, Fab Five. That's me on the Fab Five. Yeah. Yeah. If you know about Michigan basketball from the 90s. My mom, my mom was taken care of in her teen years. It was a very bad time in her life. But she was taken care of by a woman

who ended up being like the team mom for the Fab Five, this woman named Dottie. That's cool. Yeah, it's kind of fun. Now I had seized the tickets for Michigan for nine years for football and basketball. And I actually drove out from Ann Arbor to Seattle for the 1989 playoffs where

Michigan won the national championship in basketball double overtime. Right. Amazing, amazing stuff. That's cool. That's really cool. Um, you don't get too many sports fans, uh, gaming fans a lot of the time. They don't cross over very tightly. Different kinds of fast break hard game to not sell very well. Makes sense. Yeah. Different kinds of nerds. Oh yeah, they really are. They're nerds, but they're just on their own way. Yeah. Yeah.

Different wavelength. Yeah. My parents actually, my, my actually no, two of my parents, I have five parents, took a village to make this idiot. But two of my parents are actually from Dearborn, Michigan. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So kind of a and now my brother lives out in Minnesota. So yeah, so I can't seem to get away from the Midwest. I've lived other places, but I always come back here. Yeah, I actually I live out here in northern California. And I don't like the town that I've lived in for over 25 years now

It just the weather it's mostly the weather the people are great. Obviously I've got Ed right there I've raised my children here. I work here. I I love the communities that I've created but the weather can just kick rocks Eventually someday I'm gonna make my way to somewhere that rains and really nice. Um, but okay. So you discussed the gun ownership, uh, issues. Uh, did you foresee that satire of an easily surmounted background check as being quickly outstripped by reality? Like, I didn't foresee it, but I got, you know, it was the background checks.

They've always had like, you know had semi-sized holes in them. One of the other things I studied just for fun is cons, crime. Oh, okay. Things like that. So that's one of the reasons I got involved in leverage when John was working on that TV show, just because I love watching that kind of stuff. Love thinking about how people pull this off. My father was an attorney.

Still a law. He's retired now. He was a judge for about eight years as well. So, you know, again, that's me seeing that other side of the law and seeing how things work and that kind of stuff. And hearing stories that you don't get told on television or anywhere else because, you know, they just never get out. They're never reported in the news. You don't know what's going to happen. But, you know, mom and dad, mom's working on the politics and dad's working in, in the, in the law and they were divorced and separated or whatever. So yeah, I got from both sides of both houses. Sure. But it was a lot of that colored the way I think about the world and why the

things I was interested in, I think. Yeah, I bet. Um, so did South Africa win its revolution against apartheid? I was hoping they would yeah About goddamn time Wouldn't we all hope that like I mean, you know, you would hope but then there's you know, you got Yeah, I also like that you use the Basques in Your in your lore, but not the Kurds or the Palestinians.

I thought that was an interesting... I had spent some time in Spain visiting a friend of mine, so I talked to him about the Basque stuff and it's another good friend of mine who lived in Spain. A lot of that stuff you just draw off whenever you know in life. You've got to remember also, this is like baby internet stuff, right? So if I wanted to know about something, I had to go out and research this shit out of it or personally experience experience it right? I mean the Basques there was a Basque There was an episode where MacGyver thwarted a Basque attack

Like in in the early 90s. I was exactly, you know, so like yeah It just and how many people were paying attention to that at the time, right? Yeah. Yeah, like they they're like, oh he's in some country That doesn't exist. I'm like, Oh, you have no idea how right you are. Um, I used to teach, uh, an entire section, like for, uh, when I taught geography, I would teach it by region. And every time I was in a region, I would spend at least a week on a stateless nation. Oh, cool. And so, you know, I, you know, got in, which really made a lot of sense because I teach, I have a lot of my students have been Hmong. So, that's wild.

We have a lot of that in Wisconsin, actually. You do. You do. It's a massive refugee population here that came back like 30 years ago. Right? Yeah. They actually, I think Wisconsin has the highest percentage concentration of I believe it. We have a lot fewer people than California. Yeah. Yeah. That's part of it. But

Minnesota as well. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And Alaska is now there's okay. So there's this quote that I absolutely love that you take. There's certain, I like collecting quotes, especially when they're from things that people will look down their nose on. Cause I'm like, that's a meaningful quote. It's from a game book. You've never heard of it. Right. The things that really shake me are the ways we hurt each other and not just in personal ways. It's the slaughters. Yeah. There you go. Were you reading Desmond Tutu a lot? No, no, sure sounds like it was, right? Yeah.

Did you? My wife and I marched against the original Gulf War, right? Okay. We were protesters and stuff like that. We were involved. Yeah. Again, being paying attention to politics from an early age and looking at the law and seeing how

people abuse things. Yeah. Having actually read the Bible. Yes. Right. Yeah. Actually knowing what the red text says. Exactly.

Did your did your critique of things sharpen after the Patriot Act came through? Like, did you get more sharp with your tongue about it? I got angry. Yeah. Um, I mean, part of it, I was raising young kids at the time, really. I mean, Artie was a baby and that was, but I also knew that if you stood up and started shouting about how stupid idea

that was, and I did sometimes, but I also knew that it was a very unpopular position at the time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the trouble is when something like that happens, everybody's like, and we're all one country now. Like, no, especially when you're doing this stupid ass overreach, it's going to plague us for generation. And it's aimed directly at these segments that you're claiming are part of the country. These are your scapegoat groups. Like,

exactly. I mean, when you got somebody who comes in and you know, the, well the first acts of the previous Trump administration was to ban Muslim travel. I'm like, yeah, you know, you know, just blatant bigotry, right? It's offensive. Should be offensive to all Americans who are built in a country that doesn't want to do this kind of stuff, right? Yeah. If you actually live up to the ideals of the country, but you know, the picture down to the history of your use, you know, use this to just abuse the hell out of people. Yeah. Because you've been given a gift.

Yeah. You're a power monger. You've been given a gift to be able to use it. Nobody's going to object. Right. Right. Well, and you'll build your base of power because you're hurting the people that they think they want hurt. Now, the trouble is, I also know that being angry about stuff all the time eats at you. Right. So I that being angry about stuff all the time eats at you, right? So I try not to be angry all the time.

I try to find gratitude for things. I try to appreciate the things around me. I try to enjoy my life, my children, the community that I'm in. And part of the fact that I know that neighbors whose opinions differ from mine means that I can still talk to them reasonably. It means that there's hope for humanity, I think, right? And I kind of concentrate on that as opposed to these assholes over here

that are doing terrible things, right? I also know that, you know, as they say, the arc of history bends towards justice, but it's always a battle. It's always a battle, right? It never stops. It's not a classic. People relax sometimes, but it's never stopped. Yeah. And it's a long, long, you're like, oh, okay, it's starting to speed up. No. You can only see the arc because it's never stopped. Yeah and it's a long long... you're like oh okay it's starting to speed up. No you can only see the arc because it's history right? Yeah yeah. You don't see like how it slipped back here and it went back there. It's not an arc it's more like a squiggly line and you know if you just step back far enough the squiggles tend to move their way out of it. Yeah

yeah. It's still a long... because the resolution is is hard to leave that point. It's about hours I'm gonna ask this one more question and then we should probably bring this episode to a close But we'll have you on for the next episode as well And I appreciate your indulgence on all of this I'm noticing in the Defiant book that there's a good deal of similarity to the Americans in in Man in the High Castle. Had you read that? I don't think I had read that, but I don't think I've read that book yet. Although sometimes I forget, right? I did read some Philip K. Dick back when I was in high

school and such. I read, you know, I was a huge Blade Runner fan for instance, right? And threw a scanner darkly and things like that. But I don't. Yeah. All I read the man in the high cast or not. Yeah. Because I remember I started watching it again. It's fiction, so I'm not going to. But but I started watching it on Amazon back in like 2015, 2016. Right. And then something happened around 20, the late end of 2016.

I'm not sure what I like. It suddenly seemed it seemed to like try to wrap itself up quickly When something happened around 20, the late end of 2016, I'm not sure what, but like it suddenly seemed, it seemed to like try to wrap itself up quickly because who's going to watch a dystopic Nazi allegory when you can just read the paper. You just look out the window, right? Yeah. You know, it sounded less of a fun little drama and more frightening Yeah, yeah, because it's real it's you know

Okay, final question for for this particular episode so I can start with some that's fun next time Were there any figures whom you specifically avoided using in the lore of brave new world? Oh Thanks. So I thought like princess I my my initial inclination probably was going to make Ronald Reagan, the president for life, right? Cause it's just seemed a better fit in a lot of ways, but I also wanted to be a bit more even handed and not be so obvious about what I was trying to do. Right.

That was really like that too. Yeah. Things that preach to you tend to be, tend to fall on deaf ears and I don't ever want to be preaching to people. I want to tell a story that's complex or help people tell a story that's complex and let them glean out of that what they can, hopefully in the right direction. Right. But I don't want to say, and this is how it is. It's, uh, it's,

it's just ham fisted heavy handed stuff that again, people, if you have brains and you run into this stuff before, you immediately recoil from that, no matter what your preferences tend to be. Even if it's something you agree with, often I would recoil with that. I'm like, well, that's just clumsy. So for me, going back to JFK, who's been a democratic hero for generations, but also was not a very clean person in a lot of ways. No, no. Yeah.

A liberal icon along with that with him, a liberal icon in all the good and bad ways to a leftist like me, letting, letting CM get killed, uh, you know, just, um, so, and yeah, I like what you said about, you know, want to preach to people cause Alan Moore already kind of had that market corner But I think in comics it's a little bit easier to Smack people on the head with stuff mostly because you're also the artwork carrying along right? You have the prior in my everything else

You're doing text. It's a little bit trickier, right? I think. Yeah, and almost you have to be that extra 15% in comics because you don't have that much space for the words. Yep. So you kind of have to be- And it's the glorious four color stuff, you know. Right, right.

So, well, cool. Ed, did you have any questions you want to finish with for this episode? No, not at this point I'm just I've just been consistently, you know gobsmacked by that by the names that have been dropped throughout this whole episode She's like, oh my god So, yeah, just people we're're all just people having fun. Yeah. Yeah, but you guys got paid to do the stuff that we paid for. So that's that. Well, thank you. Honestly, I always say thank you to all the readers and all the players and everything else, because honestly, it wasn't for folks like you. And you know, one of the great things about the

gaming industry is everybody in it is always a fan too. You don't get into this because you're just chasing cash or whatever, right? Right. You know, because you love this stuff. You don't get into this because you're just chasing cash or whatever, right? You get into it because you love this stuff. You don't get into it because you have an economics degree. Right, yeah, no. I mean, they're easier ways to make money, right? Yeah. But you do it because you're a fan,

which means that when you go to conventions, like the line between fan and pro in the gaming industry is so blurry, it might as well not exist, right? That's true. Lots of people are just consider themselves fans or players. They're really making up stuff themselves and you know, at their tables and doing great stuff.

It's just not being published. Right. True. True. It's okay. All right. We all start out just making house rules. That's true.

Um, so normally what we do at the end is we ask each other what we've gleaned from this. Obviously, I don't think we need to do that for this. But then we also give recommendations on things that we want people to go out and pick up, read, consume, that kind of thing. So, Ed, why don't we start with you? Is there anything you'd like folks to read or watch? I'm going to very strongly recommend anybody who hasn't gotten familiar with it, go out and check out Deadlands. It came out of the Zitgeist, like we mentioned earlier, but what it brought into the tabletop role-playing game, not genre, but form,

you know, the introduction of that particular kind of blending of genres was really, really cool and groundbreaking. And yeah, I think it deserves some love. So that's my recommendation. How about you? I'm going to actually recommend the Brave New World role playing game. Book. Let's let's get him. Let's get him some now that he's got the rights to it again.

Let's get him some scratch so that he can redesign it and re-release it. And maybe I'll find somebody to play with me. I still got kids in college to come out. Yeah, there you go. There you go. So I'm going to I'm going to college to come on guys. Yeah, there you go. There you go So I'm gonna I'm gonna recommend the brave new world So Matt, what are you gonna recommend for us? Let's see. What would I recommend? What's the category? We're just talking about games, right? Yeah, no anything you want people to consume. So normally we let guests plug the things that they've done I usually plug their other things. So like I think I So like the Marvel game plenty. You guys should buy that. But yeah, I have to make got every one of them.

This game is actually the first game since the first edition. There's been five editions of Marvel game. This is the first one that's gone more than a couple of books. Right. Wow. The saga edition came out from T.S.R. Company. Right. So you have that. But I mean, Marvel Universe Edition came out in 2001 that didn't go but a book or two.

The Margaret Weiss edition, which I actually worked on as a, Camp Banks was the lead designer, but I was one of the design crew on that. That only went a book or two. And so we've actually got, I think, three books out already and some extra stuff. A comic adventure came out. And Spider-Man book has now been finishing off to print. And we're starting to work on the next one right now, which hasn't been announced

so It's been a thrill to work on this and just to be able to keep going Not not have somebody say oh, no, that's fine. Tap me on the shoulder. You're out of the pool. Wow, it's great So do that but there's stuff that's not mine. Yeah, what am I doing these days? I'm I'll tell you one of my favorite games, I'll tell you two of my favorite games of all time. One of them is Space Hulk, right? Which is this great game that Games Workshop came out with

that I worked on, expansions for back in like 99, it was, what was it, 99, 2000? No, it was 1989, 1990, right? But it's got one of the best mechanics. Basically, aliens, but in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, right? So the space brains are running through and trying to shoot things.

And there's gene sealers, which are the aliens who are trying to slaughter them in this burnt out old space hulk of a ship. And the gene sealers, the aliens, can basically have all the time they want to make their move. They can do whatever they want. The space brains have a timer, an egg timer, and you flip it over and you got to go.

And you're just a being going, slowly, gently, now wake up. It's just such an elegant solution because you actually feel the panic that you would think these slow lumbering, you know, armored monstrosities would feel. It's such a great game. One of my other favorite games is a game called Fiasco, which I don't play often enough, but it's a game by Jason Morningstar. It's published by Bully Public Games,

and it's essentially, it's a four player, three to five player, game masterless role playing game that you basically set up relationships with you and the person on your left and your right, and then you tell a story, and they have these little story kits you can do with them. And it's basically a game for violent people with poor impulse control, right?

That's who you play. And it's basically a Coen Brothers movie waiting to happen. And it's so much fun. I played it with Jason and Keith Baker, the guy who designed Evron, who's a friend of mine, and then an actress, and we just had a ball. Just so much fun. Jason actually taught it to me. I was like,

I don't want to do more of this. In fact, we did a, uh, I did a dangerous games play set for that. One of those trilogies and I was a dangerous games play set for Fiasco back in the day. So neat. But if you get a chance to play that, check it out. It's pretty, very cool. Okay. Cool. Well, um, Ed, you remain a shadow in the warp, uh, but where can they find that? I do. Uh, we collectively can be found, uh, on the Apple podcast app, on the Amazon podcast

app and on Spotify. You can also find us at our website at wubba whistorytime.com, where we have an archive at this point, going back more than 300 episodes. And wherever it is that you have found us, since you're listening to me right now, please take a moment to subscribe, give us the five star review that you know we deserve. And where can you be found, sir? Well, let's see. Oh, David. We're going to give you the last plug, but you could find me.

Let's see, this is going to come out in March. So you'll miss that show. April 4th and May 2nd and June 6th, first Friday of every month at the comedy spot in Sacramento. If you do not live in Sacramento locally, then you should absolutely go to comedy spot dot coms, uh, calendar and get yourself an electronic ticket so you can watch it on streaming. But the capital punishment crew will be on stage slinging

puns, spinning the wheel, and we will just be doing all kinds of good fun pun stuff. So you should definitely come and check that out. Bring $12 if you're coming. Actually buy your ticket online because we sell out all the time. So if you are local, come be a part of that. If you're not local, come watch that online.

And Matt, if you want to be found, where would you like people to find you? For me, well actually, you know, you're talking about doing this kind of stuff like you were talking about. One thing I also should plug is my friend Dan Taylor does this thing called comedians and catacombs and comedians where he actually does plays D&D at comedy clubs all across the South.

Right. So if you get a chance to spot him, if you can find him and go to the catacombs and comedians, a lot of fun. I usually play that live with him at different conventions too with me and like John Kovalec and Keith Baker and Tommy Goff and a bunch of other guys. So always good fun. For me, go to forbeck.com, F-O-R-B-E-C-K.com.

And I'm on about just every social media platform you've ever heard on in your life. Because as a professional, I'm like, oh, can I get there before somebody gets my name? Just get in there and keep going. Let me know, Google is your friend and hope to see you out there. Great. All right.

Well, thank you so much, Matt, for being a part of this episode. My honor all the way. This is, I'll tell the story at the beginning of the next episode as to how this came about, but this has been just a sheer joy. For A Geek History of Time, Matt Forbeck, thank you for joining us.

I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s.