A Geek History of Time - Episode 306 - A Brave New World, not that one, Interview with Matt Forbeck Part II

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

See, people when they click on this, they'll see the title, so they'll be like, poor Ed. What does that even fucking mean? However, because it's England, that's largely ignored and unstudied. I really wished for the sake of my sense of moral righteousness that I could get away with saying no. He had a god damned ancestral home and a noble title until Germany became a republic. You know, none of this highfalutin, you know, critical role stuff. So they chewed through my favorite shit.

No, I'm not helping them. I'm gonna say that you're getting into another kind of, you know, Mediterranean, or psyche archetype kind of thing. Makes sense. Also trade winds are a thing. Ha ha, just serious. Like, no, he really has a mad on him. Yeah, we'll go upon a tangent. As we keep doing.

Like, yeah, this is how we fill time. I'm going toery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California, and just in the last couple of days I had the opportunity to finish writing the first part of a term paper for the history course I'm taking for my masters because I need to get my masters in order to approach the level of education and area edition of my podcast partner and you know so many of the people we have on this show. I've got to catch up somehow. So I got to spend basically all day yesterday writing a bibliographic essay to prepare for the term paper I'm going to be writing that is a comparative history of the American and French revolutions. And I feel very accomplished. And I also feel very, very tired.

Cause it's not exactly hard, but it is very time consuming and really a real fucking slog. I hate writing bibliographic essays. I like, just let me write the goddamn paper. But it is what it is. So how about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I am a high school US history teacher

up here in Northern California. And okay, so last episode we interviewed Matt Forbeck. In this episode, we're interviewing Matt Forbeck. Yay. And what's really cool about this is that when we started this podcast, Ed and I sat down and came up with a list of about 20 topics. I still have the notes from it somewhere. We've pretty much covered all those topics, including the last, the Lost Alamo episode. The one episode we've recorded and been like, that's it.

Yeah, that, yeah. Sorry, we're done, yeah. And so, what's interesting is, about four plus years ago, I reached out to Matt Forbeck and said, hey, I've got this podcast. I would love to interview you about Brave New World. And he got back to me and he said, yeah, that sounds great. Just, you know, let's set it up.

And then like life got in the way and it just flittered out completely. And so by the time we had like dialed in what we were doing, how we had guests on stuff like that I was too chicken shit to like reach back out to him and be like Hey, I'm not exactly a flake, but you know I could be part of one on TV but yeah, um, I could be a leper but so And then he got the rights back to Brave New World,

my favorite role-playing game system, or setting. I've never played it to know if the system is one that I like, but it looks fun. It looks awesome, but anyway, it's right up there with the 616 system, really. But then when he said that, because I follow him on his fan page on Facebook, and I was like, wow, that's my favorite system ever.

And a little bit of back and forth. And then I said, I would love to interview you about this. And he said, absolutely. And I was like, oh, thank God he doesn't remember me. It was like last time. Yeah, except this time I followed through because I'm no longer the flaky young 42 year old I once was. Now I'm a seasoned 46 year old.

So that's right. Four years ago, man. Okay. Yeah. It's still a whole pandemic in there too, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's still a whole pandemic in there too, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yes. So, but anyway, I don't know if you actually remember that at all, man. I imagine there's hundreds of you.

I don't know what I'd do to be honest. Yeah, no, you've been doing things. I've just been teaching. Again, there was a whole pandemic going through that, right? Yeah. Yeah, right, yeah, right. It would have been sometime between, I wanna say December of 18 and

April of 19 because our first episode came online April of 19 though, but anyway, we have Matt Forbeck finally Eka on our show Matt how you doing? Good good. It's I'm doing all right, actually. First episode was fun, second episode promises to be even better, I'm sure. Exactly, exactly. You know what I always say is start slow, taper off. Or set the bar low and just do a summer salt over it.

Get those expectations as low as you can so you can just go right over it. I mean, that's the secret to a good marriage and a successfully completed marriage. And that's the secret to a good marriage and a successfully completed marriage. So when last we talked, we were talking about if there were any figures that you'd used. So just to reset it for people who are monsters and don't believe in the social contract and are listening to episode two of a two-part series. The game Brave New World is essentially a dystopic now time from about 25 years ago.

So pretty much all the things that it was pointing to, we've blown past since then, except for the superheroes part and the hover cars. So again, we did it the worst possible way. For our usual, quite honestly. But basically 1918, or World War I, the first soldier, the first Delta is created. He's a superhero. His name, I forget his actual name,

but he was the Silver Ghost. Peter Payne. Peter Payne. Name that for a kid I went to school with. Oh wow. I just thought it was like, hey, Stan Lee illiterated, I'm gonna illiterate. No, no, that was part of it. I was like, oh, who do I know? Yeah, Peter. Okay. I know Peter knows that. It actually happened. That was a long time ago. I haven't seen him forever. Wow. Well, you got a reunion silver ghost, he phased. So bullets wouldn't hit him.

A very useful thing to have in World War I. In no man's land, that's a pretty good power to have, yeah. Now the fact that he was a black American also played into how his life turned out afterwards. But that's basically the point at which history, as we know it, diverged from the reality that we're in. World War II comes around, you now have different countries have

an amount of Deltas fighting for them. There's a Delta Corps. There's a whole draft that happens. There's a voluntary sign up, including all kinds of villains who are like kind of lucky Lucchese-ing it, like, hey, you know, we might be criminals, but we're Americans. And so World War II happens. Another Delta, there's a huge massacre in Auschwitz. And because the Deltas get captured and Mangala is is carving them

up to see what makes Delta so we can make more, you know, because it absolutely feeds into the uber mention. So they're all the Americans stage a revolt. They all get wiped out by Captain Krieg, if I recall correctly. And what's that? Capitan, I think. Yes, if I recall correctly. And what's that? Capitan, I think. Yes, another alliterative name, sadly. But so the Americans are on like a conveyor belt going to the incinerator practically.

And one of them awakens and he becomes an alpha alpha which is like even more superhero the Thor to their Hawkeye And then he goes and he kills Hitler. He wipes out all the Nazis right there, which is awesome He goes and kills Hitler immediately then he flies over to Japan and makes hirahito surrender What happens after that is pretty much like Cold war stuff, but with superheroes and atomic bombs as well Jack Kennedy becomes president per the usual and Lee Harvey Oswald and if I recall correctly, he's led by Jack Ruby in the power suits Well, you're right. Yeah, they come to kill Kennedy. They accidentally well, they almost kill him, they do kill Jackie.

Superior, who was the one who alphaed up, he didn't get there in time, grabs Jack Kennedy, flies him to Walter Reed immediately from Dallas, gets him hooked up to life support. Kennedy comes back out of it after a little while, imposes martial law, creates a Delta Registration Act, and then the clock starts ticking toward like just the most totalitarian with superheroes that there is. There's Delta Prime, which is the government version, so if you have your awakening, you absolutely have to report yourself right away. And then you have to serve at their pleasure. And there's no more elections people are calling him King Jack He's getting older, but he's not losing control Delta Prime is actually run by Ronald Reagan Having by the way Robert Kennedy still gets killed but not by Sir Hans Sir Han. It's now a mystery

And if I recall correctly, um, oh god, I want I've forgotten his name the the guy who ran the FBI forever Yeah, Hoover J. Edgar Hoover. I was gonna say F Lee Bailey, but different But J. Edgar Hoover he he was trying to kind of control he sees sees J Edgar Hoover like that didn't really change but then Reagan took over Delta Prime and now it's 1999 and It's getting to be 2000 and there's more deltas than ever and the oh balls also in 1986

some deltas in America or American deltas were fighting with Russian deltas, or they were chasing a delta, and it was right near Chernobyl. And then Chernobyl blew. And what happened there was that the Russians blamed the Americans for fighting there and immediately launched nuclear missiles and took out all of Atlanta

and took out all of San and took out all of San Francisco. Yeah. I forget I did that. Yeah. He has a mind-blowing re-agreement or something about that. In those blasts, two things happened. One, you had vampires be born. And two, a whole bunch of, uh, priests and nuns became the Covenant Deltas. Meanwhile, we launched... There's definitely white wolves involved.

Yeah. Yeah. We launched weapons as well in 1986, and we hit, I think it was Minsk and... Yves? I think so. Yeah. And took out, you know, those cities,

and then everybody's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's calm down. Let's calm down Let's not do this some more and we stopped and and so it's been a Cold War ever since also in 1976 I'm sorry to backtrack. I don't normally go this on linear, but in 1976 there was a huge battle called the Bicentennial Battle where Superior flies in to fight against Devastator, who's like this alpha level, brainiac, terrible guy, and there's this huge battle with a whole bunch of deltas and a whole bunch of alphas,

and pretty much every delta and alpha who could fight, who was at the fight, could be at the fight, they were there. There were some that were in a special prison that were not allowed to come out and play and then Devastator hits the kill switch and literally all of Chicago plus a mile above and a mile below and a mile to each side a sphere of destruction vaporizes everything and then Lake Michigan yeah and then Lake Michigan floods into the the basin creating tidal waves and destroying even more and then a guy I think his name is mr. C no it was a different guy a developer he he starts

buying up all that property and he starts redeveloping Chicago and turns it into something called Crescent City. It's like Crescent cut right out of the Lake Michigan. And so it's a dystopic, the world has changed, there are things that have happened. The world's reacted to this by the way. Japan has pretty much created a very closed society, China as well. Different countries are doing different. Yeah. Doing things different ways. There's one country that has invited deltas to come there, and that is Costa Rica.

And there's like this little island off the coast of Costa Rica called Isla Delta. Yeah, I forgot about that. And I've been to Costa Rica twice since then, but I've never been there at that point. Really? That's so weird. So basically the idea is that deltas who want to get the hell out of the fascist police state, that is America, can get down to Costa Rica. If they can get down to Costa Rica, they can claim asylum. Okay.

And the thing is, once they get to a thousand deltas then The Isla Delta will apply to be its own country or something like that meanwhile Costa Rica is like happy to have these neighbors because they're they're pretty chill and So it's good for the economy and frankly it keeps them safe from American predation And that's kind of the the world that he's created by the way you can play any number of powers With these templates that he's developed within all of these these these books There's there's also a book a World War two version book so if you wanted to go back and play in more of

I liken it to the the what-if episode of what if Peggy Carter had taken the Super Soldier serum yeah and you have like the you know the Nazi smasher armor yeah you want to play in that world you could instead yeah it's golden age comics tribute road there you go there you go um so that's that's the lore that's the world um and it just absolutely gripped me. When I was 22 years old, it was a game store that I will not mention because of the owner being such a twit, but in that game store.

And I know exactly which one you're talking about. When it was owned by the two fellas, I found it in the back of the game store and said Brave New World, it had the American flag and it had embers burning around it, and said brave new world it had the American flag and it was had Embers burning around it and I thought well, that's interesting. I started reading through it and the pages look like websites Look like Netflix or not Netflix Netscape websites now in 1999 when I found it that was pretty current and monitors cutting edge man

Yeah, so I was I was hooked so I the player's handbook and then at cons, I found all the other books and stuff like that. And sadly, I've never gotten to play the game because I don't have that many friends who want to play a superhero game and even fewer who want it to be a superhero dystopia game. So, you know how hard it is just to schedule guys who wanna play, you know, the brand name game, you know?

It's a niche. Anybody over the age of 30, it's like. Yeah, I love that meme of what do we want? A regular game, when do we want it? Sunday, Friday, Tuesday, or noon. There you go. Yeah. So anyway, that's's what we're talking to the creator of that game he he developed the whole damn thing himself funk it up all

on his lonesome and and and put it out there into the world for all of us to get and now he has the rights to it that's true yeah. Yeah. Um, so definitely. Woo. Yeah. You know, so yeah, go ahead. Um, at the end of, at the end of the last episode, um, I, I had the question flashed across, across my mind, but I wasn't able to ask it the point of divergence in, in the brave new world universe that is the, cause there's a bunch of them, but the, the assassination of JFK being, being one of the major, you know, um,

to borrow a doctor who term fixed points in time in, in your, if you will, university, I can't, yeah. Another way of putting it. When you were writing it, because you mentioned that you had thought about having it be Reagan rather than Kennedy, was part of that, and you mentioned that you didn't want it to be obviously preachy or one sided and all of that kind of stuff was part of it. Maybe also, do you think that, uh, JFK's assassination is a bigger cultural inflection point than when, when Reagan got shot? Yeah. Well, for one Reagan didn't die. Right. I mean,

it really came out of Reagan being shot was the Brady built, right. Um, which, you know, it was the only real step again for gun control we've had in the last 40 years or so. But, um, and he was emboldened to keep attacking unions, but exactly. Exactly. Right. So it's, uh, so you don't see, yeah, well, we, JFK getting shot, it was before my time, but I mean, that's a, you see, you don't see, yeah. Well, we, JFK getting shot, it was before my time, but I mean, it's one, you know, my parents' generation, everybody knew where the hell they were

when that happened, right? Flash point. All the moms in school, I was at work, blah, blah, blah. It was one of those moments where when you found out about it, you knew where the hell you were, right? Kind of like 9-11 is for, you know, younger generation, essentially. And that hadn't happened at the start.

I was right at the game, fortunately. So yeah, I definitely think it was just me trying to play with iconic moments in American history. Right. That's always been kind of a fascinating point for me. I also think comic books do a great job of that. I remember there was a Jack Kirby Captain America Bicentennial Battles comic that was one of those treasury-sized editions. and you actually see Cap traveling through time and talking to Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and stuff like that. So be able to kind of lean into that comics are a patriotic kind of thing was part of the whole idea behind Brave New World, but definitely to play with those moments in history

that were, you know, one of the things about the Kennedy assassination too, is it's also one of the most, nowadays you have conspiracy theories about everything, but back in the day, before you could get people talking about them too much, that was one that was just everybody talked about. Like, who really killed him? Was it Hoover?

Was it the Cubans? Was it the Russians? Was it the mob? Blah, blah, blah. That was just something that was fun to play with. And I was never one of these conspiracy nuts, but I knew that it was a very rich in textured fabric to play with. I really enjoyed that.

Very cool. Yeah. You, you, you have them going to Costa Rica. And you said you never had gone there. Yeah. At the time I had been there. I wonder why I to Costa Rica. And you said you never had gone there. Yeah, at the time I had been there. I wonder why I picked Costa Rica. Costa Rica, I've always kind of been fascinated with. It's a country that disarmed itself, like in the 50s I think it was.

They actually got rid of the military. So it's one of the most stable regions in Central and South America where there hasn't been a whole lot of fighting because they literally don't have an army. They've got one of the highest literacy rates in the world, actually, because instead of putting money in the army, they put it into educating their citizens. It's still got its own problem.

It's not a very wealthy country, but it's a beautiful place with just amazing natural resources run and such. I've been lucky enough to visit there twice and really enjoyed it. So first time I just went, we had one like a raffle at my kids, Marty was in a play and they had a raffle saying, hey, you get to stay at any place on this network. We're like, oh, let's go to Costa Rica. So we went there and then the second time

I was with this thing called forward slash story, which was these guys from one of the colleges in New York, it's blanking out right now, but Lance Weiler and then a woman from Australia come together trying to get all these, Christy Deena, trying to get all these different types of storytellers together to see what would happen if you put them all in a room together and kind of sparked ideas off each other. So there are novelists and game designers and VR people and filmmakers and whatever. They gathered us in Costa Rica one year and we had a blast down there. And then back in 2018 also did the same thing with them but in Kenya. So we actually went over to the coast of Kenya, a little island called Lamu.

And they've stopped doing it since, but I got to go twice out of like the six or eight years they had done it. It was just fascinating fun. That's cool. Do you think they were trying to recreate Mary Shelley? You never know, right? It was like just kind of stunning. When we were in Costa Rica,

we were staying at the resort, which is basically just a bunch of cabins near the coast on the Nicoya Peninsula Resort then we went up to the this beautiful house in the side of a mountain every day to kind of meet together and That was owned by John Johnson who is the heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune And he had donated his home for us to be able to use it while we're down there I'm sorry. His name is John Johnson and he's the heir to the Johnson and Johnson. Yeah, but he had actually met his wife. If you go look him up on the New York Times,

there's this great article about how he met his wife while he was vacationing. Tell me it's Joan. And I think it's something else, but it should be, right? Juana. Yeah, exactly. And they built this beautiful place on the side of the mountain.

But then they really went through and revitalized the economy of this little town out in the middle of nowhere. Right? Costa Rica also is like some of the shittiest roads you've ever been on in the world, right? The people actually, because they don't want tourists in a lot of places, you have to want to get to the coast if you want to go to the coast. Like if you want to be in the central part of the country, you want to be in the Atlantic side, sure.

But if you want to go to the surf on the Pacific side or something, the roads are aggressively bad and intentionally so, right? So you have to actually want to get there, right? We had to buy this little four by four like Geo Tracker, whatever, just go, it would call it Donkey Hote because it was just this little thing like a donkey climb up everything. It was called a donkey jote because it was just this little thing, like a donkey climb up everything. It was amazing. Oh, that's great.

But just a really, really beautiful country and wonderful people. And I spoke enough Spanish to get by. So it was good fun. Nice. By the way, I absolutely love the dynamics of El Diablo being a thief, a man who is pretending to be an Hispanic revolutionary as his cover of being a thief, and all the while actually being the police chief. So, this is this great thing. There's an amazing level of social commentary there. There is. And so I'm wondering, who did you have in mind?

Like, that just Mayor Daley or? No, I mean, yeah, obviously that's Chicago really, right? Yeah, yeah. It was the discovery, okay, so just, Ed, and for the rest of the audience, it was the backstory for a woman who was a phaser, basically, she could phase. Her awakening was due partly to,

he was essentially blowing up different buildings and viva la revolution kind of thing. But as it turns out, what he was really doing, he was blowing up these buildings Because he he was a police chief so he knew where to put guys so that they wouldn't get there in time and what he was really doing was blowing up the buildings that had jewelry stores in them and So he would rob the jewelry store then blow up the building

But he'd have guys out of position so they would take them enough time to get there and he, you know, abscond with it. And so he's chasing himself. So it was really fun. Wow. So yeah, what, what, what? That's just really the abuse of power, right? That's somebody, somebody having fun with, I mean, nowadays, you know, the real abuse of power is having people bribe you or pay you to look the other way or whatever. With two days before ethics things come out. Yeah. Exactly. But to see somebody in a superhero setting,

superheroes are more about action, right? You have to take active action, aggressive action against something, direct action, as they say. So as opposed to like, hey, I'm just gonna wait here and then basically put my hand out until you get the hint, otherwise nothing happens for you. Like standard Chicago style corruption or whatever, or big city corruption anywhere.

Even small city corruption. I don't know if I'm being everybody. Corruption is everywhere, right? It's just the natural part of the world. John Rogers, again, is a guy who created leverage. He always says where there's value, there's everywhere, right? It's just the natural part of the world. John Rogers, again, is a guy who created leverage. He always says, where there's value, there's crime, right? And it just happens, because somebody is gonna wanna take it,

they're gonna make some use of, they're gonna wanna do it differently. And if you're the chief of police, you end up having a lot of power that you can then utilize, and hopefully, interesting ways, right? And again, if it's just like, yeah, we're going to use this power so I can beat up somebody like, OK, fine.

That's that's kind of pedestrian for Super Hero game. You want to have something that is a plot to it that the characters can discover and perhaps do something about as opposed to we're going to have you arrested like for right, as we got you on tape committing a bribery. Like, yeah, sure. You know, that's, I can do that at home. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Pilot Mountain was also a thing that you did. Was that a nod to Ruby Ridge and Waco? Yeah, definitely. Okay. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, that was one of those things where I absolutely understood what the government

was doing, what they're trying to do, but I also thought they did in such a poor, awful way. Yeah. That was just going to instigate more problems. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's hard to say that you can't, should we just ignore these guys? And the government has done plenty of that stuff with, uh, the Bundy's out in the West Coast.

Yeah. And that's when they said, you know what, maybe we shouldn't shoot at people. I think that's probably a good way to go. Um, I think I'm definitely in favor of not shooting people. Right. Yeah. Um then someone, they said, you know what, maybe we shouldn't shoot at people. I think there's probably a good way to go. I'm definitely in favor of not shooting people, right? Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to just running ramp shot over them. But then again, you have to find other ways to prosecute

or to stop them from doing terrible things that don't involve shooting them. Right. And they did do some of that where they got one of the sons as he was traveling back and forth, for instance, in a restaurant and things like that. But it's interesting when people want to barricade themselves in houses with guns and say, come get me.

And do you want to play that game? Do you want to let them set the rules of it and how it goes, right, or not? I think not is probably the best way to go. We had a rash of that for some reason here in my hometown where like every time some guy got really angry with he would Barricade himself in a house with his guns You know and the police here were just like okay. Well you got to come out something right right

You're gonna run out of canned beans eventually We're not going either, we can sit around your house until forever We have shifts Do you want to go in and like, do you want to like fire tear gas and start bombing the place? Like, no. I mean, come on. It's it's in a community with everybody else. We live here, too. They're very good about not doing that here, at least in my town.

But you can see where other people like, especially with the militarization of the police over the last 20 years. I was going to say, yeah. Yeah. It's become much more common where you're like, well, we got all this equipment. We might as well use it well And you know if I have a Tonka truck and I've got a sandbox I'm probably gonna want to play with it there. So yeah, you know when the war on terror Causes the Imperial boomerang to come back like it does and then you have all the surplus shit lying around, you know Militaries upgraded like well, what are we gonna do with all this stuff? Let's don't answer police departments like right

Yeah, and they'll put Punisher icons on it. It'll be fine. Yeah We did a we did a three episode Series on the Punisher and the concepts of masculinity with Gabriel Cruz on the Punisher and the concepts of masculinity with Gabriel Cruz. That sounds fascinating actually. It was, it was. Somewhere back in the 140s, you'll have to scroll a bit on your phone. Gotcha.

Yeah, but we, I'd say we went pretty deep on it. So. Neat. That's kind of wild. Yeah, they've actually started redoing the Punisher. There's a new Punisher now and the, Oh yeah? Frank Castle's now become the Cos ghost rider. Right. Oh wow. Really gone wildly different directions,

but I think they're trying to shake it loose a little bit and see what they can do with it as opposed to leaning into the, yeah. Well, uh, cause the Punisher was always an anti-hero. That's what people forget. I mean, he's a killer. He actually started out his first episode, first comic he was in was him snipe trying to be a sniper against Spiderman. Right. You see him? Yeah. Right. He's not meant to be a sniper against spider-man, right? You see yeah, right He's not meant to be a hero and when people start to lionize that then you have to start worrying about the people are doing it Yeah, I mean

Dr. Cruz said it's okay to like The Punisher as long as you recognize that the Punisher doesn't like the Punisher. Yeah So Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, by the way, you had Delta, the Delta War, they bombed the Supreme Court at one point. It read to me like the May 19th Communist Organization, M19Co. Were you drawing from that specifically or just kind of like extending the plot? I don't think so. I think it was more like me taking iconic buildings and institutions and saying, what are people likely to attack? Sure, no, that makes sense.

My mom lived in DC from like 92 to 2000 or 2002. So, and I lived in Virginia when I was working at Pinnacle. I was the president of Pinnacle. So we would go up there all the time. Right? Sure. And see all the different buildings and tour around and all that kind of stuff. In fact, we got to go to the 96 inauguration

for Bill Clinton because my mom had been a political appointee for Les Aspyn. So we got to do that. Funny part, I didn't realize that inaugural balls, there's like 18 of them every year, right? Although I guess Trump didn't have as many last time because he couldn't get me to donate to it or whatever. But yeah, yeah, we'll see what happens this time around. But she was usually like, you know, at least a dozen, if not two dozen inaugural balls and ours,

the Midwestern one was at the Air and Space Museum. And it was just, yeah, like, ah, I'm at home here. I love this. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Um, the, the first voice in the Delta Prime book that we read. All right. So, so there's, there's different source books the players handbook. You had the Defiance source book You have the Delta Prime source book. So the Defiance are the people who are like, this is a police state I don't want to be a part of it How do I get out of this and it's bleak and it's it's grim and it's terrible and there's this wonderful character named truth Whose name now escapes. I mostly just remember their their code names. Yeah, um, but she She has the ability to see if someone's lying. That's a superpower

So she's teaching you how to be on the Defiance website, which you know, hopefully now between episodes you you grabbed I've got him purchased again. Yep but between episodes you grabbed. I've gotten purchased again. Yep. But, so you're led through it basically with her and Patriot and people talking about Patriot and stuff like that. Then you get to the Delta Prime one and the very first voice we hear is a guy who's talking about his bygone college football career.

And he's a super chauvinist, which is a thread throughout. And it's just this wonderful conceit of, hey, I'm showing you the government side. By the way, here's who their spokesman is. He's the kind of guy that would pat a woman on the butt and go, thanks, honey. He got electrical powers in the end zone when he got hit by lightning, I think. And he obviously, when we get to the novellas, he's very much like the cutout for what Ragnarok became, it feels like. Exactly.

But I just love that the way that you got information across was through the point of view of a guy who's just so odious. And just such a shit. It's fun to rate guys like that though. Oh yeah. It really is, right? Yeah. And probably I didn't know folks like that growing up.

I mean, there was just obviously lots of that out there. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, to kind of occupy that voice and have that in your head for a while. You don't want to live with that for too long, right? No, no, you definitely want to put that down. And what's great is he spends a lot of time lionizing Reagan too. Yeah. Well, you know,

all I had to do was listen to some of my high school buddies were more conservative and like, Oh yeah, I can hear that. People still lionize you Reagan. I mean, I could go on a rant about Reagan, but yeah, well feel free. That's a mainstay on our show. Yeah. We've done that countless times. Yeah. Margaret, that's Ronald Reagan. Like we have a musical number. Yeah. There's an inflection point for a lot of shit, right?

That's, that's the, the you've, I'm sure you've seen this. There's a person who loves putting Ronald Reagan on graphs. Yeah. Every time I say there where's the ship? Where's yours at? Oh, there we go. Oh, there you go. Okay. Hard to believe.

By the way, I like also how Delta Prime basically presaged the Department of Homeland Security. Yep, that was frightening for me too. I'm like, oh God, don't do that. What the fuck did I have to be right? Exactly. Bye. Oh, no, don't do that. What the fuck did I have to be right? Exactly. Come on. Isn't it obvious what's going to happen here?

Guys, this wasn't the goal. Again. But you know, people, we're all human and people are scared they do stupid things. They give over that. When I was trying to describe Brave New World to people, what the main theme was is what kind of rights are you willing to give up in order to feel safe? Right. Yeah. And that turned out to be, you know, really wildly important over the last 20 some years. Yeah. Yeah. But at the time it was kind of like, you know,

people weren't thinking about it too much in 1999, but in 2001, holy shit. Yeah. I mean, and like all the people are scared. They do really dumb things. They're not thinking clear. Yeah. I mean, and I'm like, well, they do really dumb things. They're not thinking clear. Right. And they're thinking emotionally as opposed to thinking about what the ramifications are going to be. I tell you again, being the son of a lawyer, my mother being a politician, you learn about unintended consequences. Right. The things you set up here are going to be used against you or other people. And you need to be careful about how you do those things. Right. Otherwise it's going to come back and bite you in the ass every time.

Yeah. Not intentionally. You have the best of intentions. I'm not saying these people are not saying most of the people were evil. A lot of people believe that they were just scared and they weren't thinking clearly about how it was going to be turned against them. Well, you know, if, if most of my bowl of ice cream is in dog turds, that doesn't mean my ice cream is not shitty still.

No, exactly. So it just, I mean, it really only takes one little nugget. It doesn't take much. Parts of a billion are really what you should be doing. Yeah, like you ruined the ice cream and you did not improve the dog shit. Nope. No.

Was there a point that happened, okay, so you wrote, all of this got finished, I think, by 2000. I don't think there's any of them that were published in 2001. No, I think you're right. We started in 99 and we had a year's worth of books. I think by the end of 2000, everything would come out. Yeah. So number one, did you, did you, did you, God damn, that's, that's bleak.

But so, okay, yeah. So by the end of 2000, like we had the Brooks Brothers riots, we had like, wow, did you, did you, like first off, did you get everything in that you wanted? And, you know, yeah, I think so. I could probably have done more. I could always do more. You can always do more. Right. And I would have liked to have done crossroads and blown out the whole thing from there and done a bunch of other stuff. But I think you just, if you're a writer with things to say, you rarely run out of things to say. Sometimes you switch topics and tactics,

but you can always go back to that world. So, but you know, for instance, for the odd thing for us is that, you know, I finished that series and I was going back to freelancing and doing a bunch of other stuff. 9-11 happens and my wife and I are like, well, what are we gonna do? And you know, what we did is we had a bunch of kids, right?

You're like, uh, people like, what, you think you should bring them to this kind of crazy world and like, man, the world's always crazy. You're not going to, it's not going to like be better in 10 years. And, you know, so we were right. Try to have one kid and ended up having four, mind you. But yeah, but I do think even in the midst of, of horrible things happening, you need to do acts of hope. Right? You need to do...

I was going to say, that's honestly the most hope punk thing you could have done. Yeah, exactly. Right? Vibrantly and defiantly optimistic. Yeah. I want to raise people who will do good things with me in this world, as opposed to hunkering down and being afraid of all the horrible things are going to happen. So you can live in fear or you can live in hope.

And I generally try to live in hope because it's less depressing. Sure. And, you know, and if that fails, you can always fall back to fear. Exactly. There's plenty. Yeah, exactly. There's plenty of despair out there. Yeah, it's always available. They make more every day. Yeah. Yeah. So, OK, so you got them all in. Was there anything that happened afterwards that you were like, oh, for come on, come

on, you know, like that kind of, or had you already kind of put this to bed and you're on to other things? I was on other things. You had all these things. The thing is, especially when you're writing as a know, by the time a book has come out, I'm probably done two or three other projects in the meantime, right? Gotcha.

So I'm like, well, there are things I would have liked to have done or more things I would have preferred to have done with it. But I also knew that I had a six book contract with AEG. So I knew that was potentially the end of it when it happened. So I tried to cram it as much as I could before that happens, right?

Sure, sure. One of the things you learn early on is try not to save your good stuff for later, right? Because you don't know if later comes, right? Especially if you're trying to write a series of things. Again, I'm working on the Marvel game these days. I'm like, well, you don't save the stuff you want to do for later, like on the five-year plan,

because you just don't know. I mean, we've been fortunate enough to have good sales and continue with the game, but all it takes is one executive at the top saying, what the hell are you doing there? I don't think the numbers are good enough now, and then you're done, right? And it's really out of your hands.

Especially if you're working on licensed, well, it's not even licensed stuff, I'm working for a massive multinational corporation for that stuff, but you don't have control over that stuff. When you're self-publishing your own stuff, when you're making your own things, you do have control over it, but even then, if you're working with a publisher,

the publisher can always say no, right? And you might say, well, I didn't sell enough of that. I should try something new yourself. Publishers don't do that because they're trying to be mean. They're trying to do that so they can keep the lights on. Right, right. Having been a publisher myself and knowing how it is, it's hard.

I mean, we would prefer that we'd only be able to practice our arts without having to worry about commerce, but without commerce, my bills don't get paid. Yeah, yeah. The world unfortunately doesn't take art as currency directly. Well in some ways I mean I make money at it right so yeah, but there's that exchange. My creative nature for other people's labor or food or goods that I need so it works, but it's You know people would say how do you get how do you motivate yourself to write?

I'm like man I tack my mortgage up over my monitor motivate yourself to write. I'm like, man, I tacked my mortgage up over my monitor. It's, it's a, the bills come through every month, no matter what. But if I'm feeling blocked that month, you know, my, my bank doesn't care. Sure. You know, the grocery store doesn't care.

You have to do these things. Yeah. You produce at a speed that will help you get things done. You know, as I've gotten older and, you know, made, got a bigger name, whatever, developed a reputation, I've made better money at it. So I've had to push things as hard, which is really great.

But now I've got my son Marty working with me and my son Patrick maybe working with me. So I'm like, oh, I have more bandwidth. We can get more stuff in here. We'll do more things. It's all good fun. But at the end of the day, we're trying to entertain people.

Brave New World is probably the most, where I was trying to be the most provocative and thoughtful about what I was doing. Right? Because when you're doing stuff for other people, a lot of times you're slipping in things. And you know, your own preferences in politics, whatever, tend to exude from whatever you're doing. Right?

But that was one where I was explicitly leaning into it, as opposed to like if I'm writing a halo novel, I'm sure my opinions come out, but they're wrapped in halo now. Right. So yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. I I've often thought the same with my star Wars books. Uh, the, the Yuzhan Vong series, I've, I've talked about this plenty of times. It's a 19 book series. Half of it was written before 9-11. Half of it came out after 9-11. And there's a decided shift. There is. Some people panic. I mean, you look at Frank Miller's work as a comic book artist,

right? There's a point where he got mugged and suddenly he just goes really takes a hard beer to the right, right? Yeah. I was going to say hard right turn. Which is interesting because the... No, I was gonna say hard right turn and which is interesting because The no, I'm thinking of Mark Miller all these too many people named Miller I was like, yeah But yeah, yeah By the way, I love in in the Delta Prime book I don't know if you remember this but there's this great perversion of Peter Parker's mantra of with great responsibility or great power comes great responsibility I forget exactly how you coined it of Peter Parker's mantra of with great power comes great responsibility.

I forget exactly how you coined it. Do you remember? I don't remember, I'll tell my idea. Yeah, it's been 25 years. Yeah, fair. The funny thing for me is thinking about it's been 25 years. I didn't do anything for the 25th anniversary because I was too busy working on other stuff. But I was at GenCon, I'm going,

wow, 25 years ago we came out of this. And we're here for the 50th anniversary of D&D. So basically, Brave New World was like the halfway point. Halfway point, yeah. Yeah. That's mind blowing, right? How much is a Brave New World? Oh, it's two D&Ds.

Exactly. Right. Yeah. One of my greatest moments, I ended up playing Brave New World, which I had not played for many years, but at GenCon 50, I think it was, they had a bunch of us come in and play the games that we had designed at Gen Con with very important gamers that you call them, Vicks, VIGs, right?

And I got to play Brave New World on the 50 yard line at Lucas Oil Stadium, right? Oh, that's pretty cool. Freaking, I call it football stadium, playing this game I wrote. And that was just, that was the last time I played the game, actually. That was five years ago or whatever. I was just like, this is, I actually got the book in the museum that they set up for that too.

That was neat. That is really cool. That's... That was a highlight. So there's this quote that I did pull from it. I don't know why I didn't pull the other, but it says, the only people beneath you aren't part of Delta Prime.

You know they're the ones you've sworn to protect. There is a seriously messed up pathology there. Oh yeah. It reminds me of the, God I forget his name, but he wrote books on what he dubbed killology. He's a lieutenant colonel I think, and he said that he's the one that kind of started the idea of like there's sheep dogs and there's wolves

and there's sheep, and the sheep will just see you as a wolf even if you're a sheep dog and you and just like this real like Law enforcement starts to look down on the populations that they're that they're policing and protecting and This absolutely smacked of that like and again, this is before that guy's books So actually I'll tell you one of the formative Probably one of the formative parts is that One of my partners at Pinnacle was a guy named Dave C. He was a cop from southern part of Los Angeles, a little town called Bell, which was like, you would say this is where the guys from South Central

were afraid to go, right? It was really tough. And I went on a ride along with him one night. And while I'm there, I'm like, wow, the shit I saw. I mean, it wasn't even like. Like we didn't do anything pretty amazing, but I just saw like, you know, rampant, low key corruption and you know, us versus them thinking this is all before nine 11 too. Right. And these are, this is a friend of mine who I liked a lot. I stayed at his house. I met his wife and kids, you know, and we did a bunch of stuff together,

but just watching his attitude, because it very much was even for them an us versus them thing. Now here in my hometown, like we have cops, I grew up with, my dad was a judge, so we knew all the police in town, all that kind of stuff. And it was a very different experience for that.

But when I went to a bigger town where, you could see where they really did concern themselves with the thin blue line in those days, right? That's not a very healthy attitude, in my opinion, in a lot of ways. If you're with the community and you're protecting your friends, the people you care about, your loved ones,

that's where you really wanna be, right? Not somebody who's been militarized to the point where they're terrified and as soon as somebody reaches out of pocket, they want to shoot them. Right. Yeah. There is a condition to explain anybody who's possibly on drugs. It's like hysterical something or other. Right. I don't remember what it's called, but it's very poorly defined and it's very widely used by the police to explain why people get upset you know, upset when you've got your knee on their neck. And being poorly defined makes it useful that way. Right. The whole thing about

qualified immunity too. You're like, Oh, I actually, I'm of a very strong opinion that the people who are given power in this country should be watched over more closely than anybody else. Yes. They should not be getting the benefit of the doubt. I mean, I know we're inclined to do that because we don't want to hassle them too much, whatever, but I think they should actually be held to a higher standard than anybody because they have the power to harm everybody, right? Right. It's precisely because I'm a patriot that I hold my country to such a standard, that

mentality. So I don't remember what the term was called, but I had a friend who was studying to be a police officer. And I caught him, like he was back for a couple weeks or for a weekend from the academy. And he's our age. Well, okay, he's my age, Ed. But.

Fuck you. Just, come on, man. So, but he's my age. And so it's second career. He is an engineer. And I asked him, I'm like, well, how's everything going? And he's like, yes, I could get bounced out at any point. And I was like, oh my God, why? And he says, well, they just, you know, in these simulations, I'm, you know,

I'm not, I'm giving the suspect too much time to talk. And I was like, oh, Jesus, that's, that sounds awful. What are you going to do? And he's like, I mean, I guess I have to, you know, I got to play that part for that part of the simulation. I'm like, okay, long as you recognize that you're just playing that part. I ran into him last year. He's now a cop, has been for the last five years or so, talking about how he was going to take his daughter to the public library the other day, and that he realized, you know, there's a lot of unhoused people near the library, I better bring extra ammunition. And I was like, extra?

You're off duty, bro, what the, you know? And things I don't understand, but one of them, one of the things I have a hard time understanding is there's gonna be unhoused people people I better make sure that I have extra clips so I can shoot at them more with my daughter nearby. So being a being a sworn law officer there is there is a law on the books that you know he is supposed to be because he is a sworn peace officer sure he is supposed to be armed so as to be able to respond

should something happen at any point. But the mines, yeah, I'm with you 110% though on the extra ammo. Well, and then I talked to him, I'm like, really? Because it sounds like they're probably just hanging out there because there's shade there, and there's also public restrooms, and it's a public library,

so they might actually have access to resources to help stop them from being unhoused. Plus, there's a few restaurants over there that are known to be friendly. And he then went on to explain to me the concept of whatever, it's like hysterical, whatever the hell. He went on to explain that to me as the reasoning is like,

this is a thing you don't know that much about. And I'm like, it's, I didn't say anything because what am I going to convince him of? Yeah. I'm going to guess that the history of people costing homeless people outside of a library, you've never had to shoot more than one of them. Right? Yeah, that too. You know, I kind of think once, once've never had to shoot more than one of them. Right. Yeah, that too. You know, I kind of think once, once one of them goes down, the rest of them are probably going to back off. Yeah.

Like if we're absolutely intent on imagining a, a realistic worst case scenario, like industry of people who are actually trained to go out there and train police officers should be absolutely terrified. Yeah. I don't, you know, I don't believe people for being apprehensive. It's a dangerous occupation, but When you're trying to make these people whose lives who actually have a lot of other people's lives in their hands nervous and scared It doesn't seem me to be healthy. I know it's it's it's it's pathological Yeah, the word the word, the pathology got used earlier. Yeah.

Yeah, it is pathological. It is not. I would also point out, like when we talked about the Gabriel Bell riots for Deep Space Nine, we did a watch along episodes. Nice. And we replayed it just recently actually. But during the Gabriel Bell riots,

I talked about the amount of attacks involving unhoused persons. The vast majority of them are against unhoused persons. Not from unhoused persons. No, they are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators by orders of magnitude. And we won't even get into how many of those were police. And how many of the in-house persons are veterans.

I mean, like, it's just, it's rotten all the way down. But yeah, so he had mentioned that, you know, and it's just one of those things of like, you are performatively afraid to the point where your kayfabe has now become your reality and you're dangerous. That makes you dangerous. Yeah.

That's the trouble. Yeah. So yeah, it goes back to this quote, you know, that they're the ones that you're sworn to protect. They're the ones that are beneath you. And it's just like, whoa, boy. Which makes sense in a martial law kind of world. It does.

You know, especially when Reagan's your boss. So, you're, speaking of martial law, your whole section on martial law in the Delta Prime book, it's exactly fascism. And you use the Bill of Rights like a checklist, which Ed can vouch for this Pliny the younger was writing a letter back to the Trajan

And he's like hey, we found these really whacked out weirdos. They're Christians And so here's here's what we did to test them And you look at the test that he had for them, and it was the Ten Commandments. It was just like, okay, first we had them burn incense and say your name, and then we had them curse Jesus, whoever that guy was, and then we had them, and it turns out they take vows not to bang each other's wives.

That's weird. And then, and then, and then, and then, like, he just, like, he used the Ten Commandments as a list, so I just love that you use the Bill of Rights here as the checklist of how to set up a fascist state I especially love the part of quote. Do you know how many wife beaters the cops have put behind bars? Especially when we know that about 40% of cops are wife beaters, right? Yeah. Yeah when we know that about 40% of cops are wife beaters. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Yeah. Chef's kiss right there. Yeah. No, the chef's kiss is where he had Charlton Heston as the AD for LA. So there you go. The NRA spokesman. Yeah. Themselves.

Love it. Now, interestingly enough, in the New York Delta Prime section, so the Delta Prime book is divided at one point into different regions. Right. So, Denver is very different toward its deltas than than other places. Atlanta is just a hellscape because of the bomb.

Same with San Francisco, which bummed me out. But, you know, and then you got LA and you got all these other places. Crescent City is very featured. But the New York one, he mentions that one of the World Trade Center towers had had collapsed in an attack. Jesus Christ. Oh, shit. Well, remember in 93 there was a bombing there. There was. I actually, when I of the towers fell and I'm like, well this is not the first time this has been attempted. Right. Um, in fact, I think when I was writing that,

that's when they were prosecuting the guys who tried that plot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds about right. Timing's about right there. So yeah. So the idea that one of them would have collapsed is when it happened, you're like, well, yeah, of course, you know, this is what they've been aiming for. So. Right. And again, big iconic building. Yeah. It's a statement you're making, right? Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it was on an album cover for a punk band that same year in 2001. It was featured in the original Spider-Man trailer.

I mean, hell, escape from New York. Terrorists don't understand the idea behind symbolism, right? They're doing a good job with it. The two planes that flew in them were like American and United as well, right? It's like they didn't pick out Alaska Airlines or something.

Oh my God. I never even thought of that. Right. Yeah. That's they knew what they were doing. They picked them out the right the way to make a statement. It was a horrible, awful statement, but they really understood that they were trying to make it something that would be symbolic across the globe for them. Yeah. Wow. Wow. That's I have that same moment of I love moments like this But it's the same moment of when somebody pointed out to me that the two most successful

candidates for president Who are black in in our lifetime have been Barack Obama and Kamala Harris? Both of them are they have one non black parent Yeah, both of them are they have one non black parent and which to me is fascinating because if you go back to like 1915 when The birth of a nation came out the fact that the character was of mixed heritage was a mark against him Moral decay, but now it's it's a more acceptable thing and also Both of their black parents cannot trace their lineage to American slavery. Yeah, no, it's true. I think it does make a difference.

W. Kamau Bell actually pointed that out and I was like, oh my god, I never thought of that. Nope. I actually had a t-shirt when I was in high school for Jesse Jackson, right? Running for president. When he ran in 84. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So in Atlanta and in San Francisco, well, no, no, actually, I'm sorry. This is about the bargainers. Bargainers are essentially warlocks, Ed. So, okay. They deal with demons and what I love is that the very first bargainer ever was Harry Houdini. Oh, yeah. I'm a big

Houdini fan. Okay. That Wisconsin boy. He was raised in Appleton, Wisconsin Right and in fact his his moment of realization was in Appleton wasn't it? Yeah, he So good since there in fact many years later. I actually wrote one of my scurrier jobs I did I designed an interactive Give me an interactive game for the Milwaukee Public Museum, where they had this place called

the Streets of Old Milwaukee, which everybody under 60 has gone to when they were doing field trips. It was turning 50 years old, and they wanted to redevelop some of it, but they didn't want to destroy a lot of it because it was such a precious memory for somebody here. So what they did is they hired me on

to write an interactive adventure that basically you had to take one of the phones that we had loaned you because this is back in like 90, 2005 or whatever, 2007 when they weren't, you know, the penetration of phones wasn't as deep as it is now. So it was a choose your own adventure. There was an audio book that would play over your earphones, but it would detect which way you decided to go by Bluetooth beacons that would pick up which direction you were

walking in the streets of old Milwaukee. Wow. Your job was to go out and find Harry Houdini's lost paycheck that was secreted away somewhere inside this three quarters scale replica of 1912 Milwaukee. Wow. Yeah, it was crazy fun. replica of 1912 Milwaukee. Wow. Yeah, it was crazy fun.

I worked with these guys on this for months and we actually recorded, the guy who produced our recordings was the producer for the first two Violent Femmes albums. I was like, ah, this is great. Oh, wow. That's cool. So when they had people walking, were they strutting their stuff? They should have been. They were so stressed out.

Exactly. Some of them got high as a kite. Exactly. I walked in, there was gold albums on this recording studio, I'm like, what the, oh, it's the Vabz. Wow. Because the Violin Femmes are from that area too, weren't they?

They're from Milwaukee as well. Yeah, yeah. They used to play outside of baseball games, if I recall, outside of Brewer's games? Yeah, in fact, they used to play down in Beloit College here in town too. They come down there and play occasionally. I was too young at the time but sure I was a big fan of those when I was in high school and one of the guys they used to work on video games with was one of their opening acts at Beloit College. He went on to

become a video game designer at High Voltage which was a big studio in Hoffman Estates in the North Side of Chicago. And I wrote a few different video games with them, including the Harvey Birdman Attorney-at-Law video game for the Wii. Oh, nice. Wow. Very cool.

Wow, I love that it's for the Wii, the thing that you're really active with. I got to write dialogue for Lewis Black, right? Oh, wow. As the Deathly Duplicator. Oh, that's great. Was that before or after your work on Conduit? That was around the same time, actually. I don't credit it as doing work on Conduit,

but I came in and basically like, we wrote this game that's coming out, and now we need somebody to actually define everything so we can have a framework for a sequel. So they had me come in and write that up for them and create all that stuff. And then a friend of mine, Jason Blair, came in and actually did the dialogue and such for it, right?

But I just like, here's your basic outline, go. And they're like, okay, good. Cool. But then I could probably play two thirds, or three fifths of the Harvey Birdman game, which had just this murderer's row of comedians that were voice actors for it. Oh, that's great. That's great. So, okay. So bargainers, they make deals with demons, right? Yeah.

And was this inspired by the fact that nearly 80% of Americans believed in angels at the time? I just don't get that. But yeah, I mean, when I worked at games workshop, I just don't get that, but yeah. Yeah, okay. I mean, it's part of that. I mean, when I worked at Games Workshop, I was fresh out of college. I went and got a student work visa and worked at Games Workshop for six months in Nottingham. And while I was there, they were like,

do people actually believe this stuff? We just think it's funny because, you know, I went through this satanic panic when I was playing games at D&D. Right, yeah. And they're like, oh, we just laugh at them because they think it's a joke. I came back and a friend of mine,

it wasn't one of my roommates, he was a friend of one of my roommates in Ann Arbor. He's like, you don't really believe in that. And he's like, he was this guy getting his doctorate in mathematics and just converted over to hardcore Catholicism, right? Like the kind where they're actually still doing maths

in Latin. Right. Rejected Vatican too. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Setti Vacante. And he's like, yes, I actually do. I'm like, I actually literally fell off the couch laughing. I'm probably one of the rudest things I've ever done. But like. Well, um, like,

well when the spirit grabs you, Matt, exactly. There you go. Right. I spend my life coming up with all these different fantasy elements, whatever, doing all these different creative things. And I don't believe any of this. Right. Yeah. Because you come up with it. Yeah. I've seen behind the curtain. I mean, I am behind the it. Yeah. That's probably a lot of your kind of Houdini. I've seen behind the curtain. I mean, I am behind the curtain. Yeah. Yeah. You're Houdini. And to see people just buy into that hard. I'm always like, man, what, what is wrong?

Yeah. You know, it's great that the stories affect you that deeply. But if you actually think that as a scientific mindset, that there are actually demons and angels and whatever else wandering around here tempting us. It's all meant to be a metaphor, guys. It's not meant to be actual things happening, right? I've said that one of the greatest tragedies about literacy was that just as we got more literate, we started taking metaphor literally.

We learned how to read, not how to read. Whereas previous generations are like, no, no, there was obviously more than just Adam and Eve. It's a metaphor. Those were true believers. And now it's like, well, I've read the word. And it's like, bro, That's not even the first version Like like yeah as as as someone who who is a believer but knows the history I'm like, okay, no

Like can you can you do just a little bit of research? Yes to understand that that this this text we we we cannot we cannot take this text literally. Even the nuns when I was going to Catholic school would tell me this is a metaphor. This is not historically accurate. This part over here where it talks about Jesus having brothers, we don't believe he had brothers, it's okay. It's fine. It's all metaphor. It's all historically wrong. You can't take any of it too terribly literate literally. You know? Yeah. You, you have to, you have to, if you will believe in the court, but the details come up. Yeah. You,

yeah. You have to find, you have to find the truth as opposed to the fact. Right. You know, and, and one of And one of the most awful crimes that particularly American Christianity has committed is this single-minded dedication to literalism in interpretation of the Bible. And Damien has heard me rant about this any number of times is also the fact that of all the versions of the Bible, they have to choose. It's got to be the fucking King James. Like, like literally, literally the worst translation in the history of translation of the book.

But yeah, I mean, I have a friend who doesn't think Catholics are Christians, so. You know, I'm the most Christian. What? Is it one of your friends that I've met? You've never met her, no. Okay, thank God.

All right, okay. But again, a lot of that's rooted in bigotry because a lot of the Catholics were either, they were minorities in other countries or right whatever, you know the non white whites Yeah, like that we need an SAT test for yeah, so yeah so um And obviously there's there's there's love crafty and things in there and stuff like that How much did you love writing about the cons with the

bargainers? So just to just to give you some background, the bargainers all meet every year at a con. Exactly. And it's usually in Vegas, if I recall correctly. Well, that's fitting. Yeah. But also like you really heavily featured bowling. I was, I bowled when I was a kid. I had a bowling, I was like a substitute for bowling league here in town. Right. Okay.

The reason Vegas comes up though, I mean, for one is magicians, right? So if you're a stage musician, that's where you end up. But also, I mean, the gaming industry, the tabletop games industry, for a long time, their national business convention was in Las Vegas for like 20 years. Oh, okay. So the Game Manufacturers of America, Gamma, has the Gamma trade show. And for a while, I wandered around. Back in about 96, 97, it stopped. And they had it sitting in And then in 1996, 1997, it stopped and they had it sitting in Las Vegas for like 15 years. Then it ended up in Reno.

And I think it just recently moved to Louisville last year. Right? That's a switch. It really was. Right? Louisville is a pretty cool place though. So. Yeah.

Again, they're trying to make it accessible to more retailers. One of the reasons you do Vegas is because the hotels and everywhere, the casinos were subsidizing cheap flights to get to Vegas. Right. Yeah, okay. Getting people to fly out there and then they can make a vacation out of it. So I ended up spending a lot of years when I was young hanging around Las Vegas with all these different game designers and such.

That meant that it colored a lot of of ways I thought about this stuff. I also had an experience when I was working for Kaplow Games. At one point, I was in New York City working at a toy fair, helping out Jim Kaplow with running a booth. And one night, we ended up going out to a friend of his who created gambling novelties. So he took us to his gambling novelty store, which was like an upper level in a place in Brooklyn where everybody had to roll down steel doors. And we got there. He showed us these six deck shoes that you could like hide a card in that you needed, right?

If you wanted to slap down a black check and bust somebody, right? Or he had a craps table where he had put iron filings in the numbers, the pips on one of the faces, and it had an electromagnet set up that could be activated by a foot button. Oh wow. Just scrubbed it, nice roll.

I'm like, I'm never gambling ever again. No kidding. I play poker with friends, right? Right. People who I don't mind losing money to. Sure. But I just like, you know, there's so many ways for these things to be warped backwards and forwards. Plus, as a game designer, I know what the odds are when you go to any casino that they're

always stacked against you. And it doesn't take much for somebody to just twist a little bit harder. So, crazy, crazy shit. But yeah, so that was one of the reasons Vegas was in there pretty strongly. In fact, I wrote a novel called Vegas Nights many years later that came out like 2012, 2014. Maybe it was 2010. Anyway, it was for Angry Robot.

It was an original novel. But it featured a couple of kids who were from the University of Michigan and learned a little bit of magic, decided to go to Las Vegas and clean up at the blackjack tables. And it turned out that the magicians had been controlling the mob in Las Vegas since the 50s or whatever. And dead Harry Houdini was in charge of everything. Oh, nice. I like it.

So I'm going to pull the curtain back here a little bit. In the game, there's a man who's called the Iron Mask. And he never takes it off and he always wears really nice tux. And he's like one of the oldest bargainers ever known. It's Harry Houdini. He never died. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's, which shows up in the final novel as well and he essentially is part of the reason that Devastator is killed. Yeah, I've always been a fascination with the Houdini is just this amazing figure Also, one of the great skeptics of all time, right? I mean, yeah, he had this amazing relationship with Arthur Conan Doyle

Yes, Doyle's wife was this spiritualist, right? Yeah. Who was communicating with spirits, and Arthur was with her saying, yes, of course, you know, and Harry's like, you know what, best buddy, but. Yeah, and if I recall correctly, Doyle accused Houdini of having access to the spiritual capabilities, and then lying about it and saying that it was fake.

He thought he was withholding on him. Yes. It just, oh, it's crazy. So there's a character that you come up with in the bargainer's book called, it's German. So forgive me, Diener Neiblung, which is German for dwarf, basically. Yeah. You have two of the at board members as his protege's. Is this a way to just kind of set it up so like if characters, if players want to play

bargainers that there's this internal intrigue and you're like kind of, there's adventure hooks for an internal coup of the bargainers? Sure, I mean part of that's also Died Nibelung, I think it's from the ring cycle or whatever, right? From way back in the day, but, um, with Wagner, I think I'm getting into a little mixed up. One of the guys who mentioned me in the gaming industry,

who took me to Las Vegas for these shows was a guy named Will Nibling, who was the first vice president at TSR. That was my nod to him in a lot of ways, right? And I used to room with the guy named Bruce Neidliger, who was the CEO of Iron Crown, when I was working with them. And he was on the board, he was the treasurer for the gamma board. Right. Okay. Stuff I learned from that back in the day, like it turned out that one of the one of the executive directors was taking

kickbacks from the hotel that they're at. Stuff like that. I'm like, Oh, my God, what's going on? Yeah. So again, it's where you just, you see corruption around you and yeah, it's in some ways a corruption is how things get done. Right. And yeah, it's the green, it's the dirty grease. The wheels a little bit here. Yeah. You're going to get a taste. We're going to make this happen quicker. And then it's like any other kind of power eventually gets abused and gets the

point where people are. Yeah. The grease that, that, uh, greases the wheels also stains your clothes. Exactly. I mean, if you look at Chicago, I mean, it's wild, you know, for a long time, the daily political machine. Yeah. Crazy. But on the other hand, the city ran relatively well under it compared to a lot of other places, right? Yeah. It's just, it was a lock that the family had on it and they just ate at the root of the whole city for a long time. Nowadays it's less corruption,

but it's still there. Yeah. I believe Illinois has finally crossed the threshold of less than 50% of their governors serving time for corruption. Like at one point, if you flipped a coin, you had a better odds than Illinois governors serving time for corruption. Yeah, it's kind of wild. It's wild. Wow. Yeah.

What made you decide to use which real murders and which real events that had happened? Like Mark Kilroy murder, for instance. I mean, talk about a deep, like you have to, you have to know your stuff for that kind of stuff. I forgot about that. Yeah. I don't even remember anything about the Kilroy murders. Probably whatever the hell I was reading at the time, right? But again, you know, you're just influenced by everything you just soak into. Sure. A lot of times I would just come up with stuff,

a lot of the things that are made up are things that I was trying to make a statement about, or it was an end joke for me in my head. Like the Alan Smithy reference, I love that. Yeah, exactly. Stuff like that, right? I'm like, okay, I'll do this, probably six people are gonna get the joke,

but I'm enjoying it, right? One of the things okay, you know, I'll do this. Probably six people are going to get the joke. Right. One of the things you do as a writer is you try to entertain yourself as a reader. Right. Yeah. I do that with my puns. So exactly. You're at least one person in the audience is happy. Exactly. Exactly. And then people get mad at me on their way home. It's nice. Exactly. On their way home. Really? Does it take that long? Sometimes. Yes. I don't explain all of them. Could you real quick for, for Ed's benefit,

could you explain the Alan Smithy thing or Alan Smithy is the name that was used by all the Hollywood writers who didn't want their name on something. Right. So there was another, Oh, there's a guy named Jeff Leeson who did this. Maybe I use this in partners too. Jeff Leeson was one of the original guys at TSR way back in the day. And then he was a young guy. He ended up in Mayfair, uh, working on role playing game stuff.

And every time he didn't want his name on something, he would put his name as Drake Mallard, right? So dark wing duck, because his nickname was duck. You know, it was always Hey duck, how you doing? So every time there was, you know, when I was named on something was Drake Mallard actually edited and or wrote that. But Alan Smith, he is traditionally the Hollywood version of that. Or was that just one person? It was like everybody wanted it.

If you didn't watch your name on that thing, you said, please credit it to Alan Smithy. Yeah. Nice. But in the bargainers book he was, oh god I forget his other name. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I noticed with bargainers there's a lot of like, there's a lot of costuming, there's a lot of, and some of that's obviously stage stuff, But are they kind of a cutout for the queer community? Because it has some drag aspects.

I mean, honestly, uh, there's a part of me that thinks of superheroes in general as a cutout for the community, right? Yeah. Yeah. And drag. Yeah. I mean, you're just, if, uh, you're a superhero with a secret identity, it means that you have a standard life you're trying to keep, for closeted gay people.

Right, right. But you have the standard of life you don't tell anybody about, or you just do it by yourself. And then you have this fabulous, amazing life where you wear these incredible costumes, you're empowered, and you don't tell anybody how the two are connected, right?

Right. I've known about that for a long time. I explain that to some people, they're like, no, no, that can't be it. Obviously that's what it is. No, my guy who wears his underwear on the outside of his pants is, no way. Yeah, Wonder Woman being created by a guy

who was a known BDSM fan, right? Yeah. And she was depowered by being tied up. Right. And he created the polygraph machine. Yeah. And he was the, well he was in a polyamorous relationship with both,

and it's questionable as to how consensual it was on his wife's part, but he and their third, his wife I believe was the daughter of Margaret Sanger. Okay. Yeah. Or something like that. So like, it's just, it's so wild. Yeah, exactly.

So which, okay, of all the books that you wrote, which narrator do you identify with the most and which one was the most fun to write? I'm, Patriots kind of got my natural voice, right? Okay. I mean, I can tell with the hair, so yeah. Yeah, there you go. and which one was the most fun to write? I don't know. Patriots kind of got my natural voice, right? Okay. I mean, I can tell with the hair, so yeah. Yeah, there you go. I didn't have that at the time, right?

The Reed Richards look. He's got this kind of sarcastic banter going on, right? Yeah. I do, there's a, I write these Halo novels. There were a couple of them from the point of view of a guy named Sergeant Buck, right? He was from Halo 3 ODST. And he was voiced by Nathan Fillion, right? So I basically had Nathan Fillion's voice running around the back of my head for like

six months at a time every time I'd write one of these books. And people were like, oh, you really nailed that voice. I'm like, actually, that's just my voice. I'm sorry to tell you. It just allies really close with that. I didn't have to really stretch too hard for that. That little sardonic laugh and kind of a con-cad look at life. I think Patriot has that.

It kind of fit me pretty well. What's my favorite to write? I think Patriot is a lot of fun. Truth was fun too because she just was such a believer. Truth is just like, this is the real thing. I'm here to help you out. She's the AOC of the day. She's the organizer of the South Carolina.

She really was. Yeah. Yeah. To get everybody moving. And it really believes in the movement as opposed to the individual. That's an interesting way to tackle that kind of stuff, especially for comics, which are generally about individual action. Yeah, that's an interesting way to tackle that kind of stuff especially in for

Comics which are generally about individual action, right? Right, right teamwork and thinking long-term and all that kind of stuff But she's the organizer that's bringing all that together I guess there's a different place where I forget who I did for evil incorporated But that remember that being kind of fun that was a what's her name, but she is basically the lieutenant of Of Al Capone, he's also name? But she was basically the lieutenant of Al Capone. He's also still alive, by the way. Yeah, exactly. But she's like, she's this ball busting, like you expect her to be wearing shoulder pads out to here, pencil skirt.

No, I think when I was writing that, I thought of her, you ever heard that, there's a song by a gay band called Cake. It's a long jacket and a short skirt. Short skirt, long jacket. Yeah. I just had that in mind the entire time. It's up early. I want a girl who stays up late. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and and now I I OK. I know exactly how I'm picturing this character and I have the voice

like figured out. Stratus in a in a business suit, you know? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to try to come up. That's the trick. I think a lot of times try to come up with a good voice. That's fun to write that you're willing to live with for that period of time. Right. Right. I write like trilogies for novels and stuff. By the time you get to the end of the books, you're like, man, I'm going to miss this. I'm going to miss this person, this voice work.

That's a good sign. There's people I've been with, I've been hanging out with for a while. And maybe I'll get to go back to them at some point, but you do miss them. They become friendly to you, right? And that's one of the best ways to entertain yourself, again, as a writer is by having that voice in your head that you enjoy being with as opposed to having to force it and hate it. So like even the asshole from Delta Prime, I'm like that's a guy I know, he's in my head. That may have been somebody like the older generation I'm thinking about, right? These are people, generation ahead of me, who talk like that or act like that.

I like them for who they were even though I don't think they were great human beings all the time. Sure, sure. There's this great quote that you have in there with the Bargainers book. It's, Bargainers cut deals with demons. Shaking Reagan's hand isn't hard at all. There you go. And there he is on the chart. I would have loved it if he inverted that though. Yeah, well, either way.

Cut deals with Reagan. I can shake hands with a demon. Shake hands with a demon, yeah. Was there thought given in your work on the covenant toward how those powers express themselves in other faiths? I mean, you do kind of a blanket statement at the end. Yeah, I think I was leaning very heavily on my Catholic education at that point.

Yeah, oh, very clearly. Obviously Catholic, right? There are some thoughts there. So that's the most iconic, aside from the Eastern. There are some thoughts there, but I, you know. Yeah, I was gonna say. Part of it is that I'm not familiar enough with every other religion.

I mean, I've studied a little bit about everything from, you know, Islam to Judaism to Shinto to Rastafarianism to whatever, but especially back in the days when research wasn't as easy, it was I didn't want to step on toes as hard. And that was one where I knew Catholicism backwards and forwards. And also, one of the other things is if you lived inside the house, you're much more in-house thing. Yeah. Right.

Whereas I wouldn't feel comfortable going off and, and uh, taking shots at a religion I'd never really experienced. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's really my place to do that. Right. Whereas with Catholicism, like band, you know, you guys, I was an altar boy. I know how this works. I can do this. Oh, and you say that at the end, like that's on that last page there in the Covenant. Now, I had asked this, I asked about the voice, but do you, like, of all the characters that you've made in all of these, would you say that you are a

patriot? Like, is that? I think that's probably closest to who I've... Although, you know, I don't think I would have been, you know, the fascist patriot to start with. I think where he ends up is where I was always, right? I was not really... I wouldn't have been the guy who says, sure, let's go with Delta Prime to start with, right?

But I think where he ends up is probably the closest to where I would want to be. And I think the think the neat thing about patriot and one of the reasons he speaks Better for the entire game is because he's a guy who's been on the other side, right? Right gives him instant cred to say that I've been there I was actually the people they'd looked up to on that side and I switched right so that And his very existence His very existence is also an opprobrium against like it's very obvious if your main character has converted

from I did both sides, if he's converted from one to the other and he's not a shithead for it, it's very clear where you want him to be. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, when you did evil and limited, uh, obviously this, obviously this book is your nod to cyberpunk or maybe fascist corporatism or both. Cyberpunk kind of is fascist corporatism. I was going to say you're making a distinction without a difference there. Well, just the difference is the amount of years, I guess. Fair. Was this also kind of looking at the mergers,

again, the soup that you were swimming in at the time? Oh, for sure. I mean, I was a big fan of cyberpunk from when Neuromancer on, right? So that was not a big stretch for me to think about that kind of stuff. I was a big fan of the game too. Mike Pondsmith's a friend of mine,

Mike and Lisa, who created Cyberpunk. He just popped Ed's mind. Again, mind again. Yeah, it's the kind of thing when you grow up in an industry, you get to know. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I used to work for I was a freelancer, too. So I worked for lots and lots of different companies. And I also run this thing called the Diana Jones Award.

I don't know if you guys know about this, but. No. We've been doing it for 24 years now, but it started out as a mailing list of basically game designers who, James Wallace started it. It was this great game designer who did the extraordinary adventures of Baron Munchausen and Once Upon a Time and a whole bunch of other really story games. But basically set up a mailing list of his friends

that wanted to vote on what we thought the coolest thing in gaming was every year. And we would just give it to whatever we thought it was. Could have been like one year was Peter Atkinson, another year was Gen Con, one year it was Irish Charity, Irish Gaming Convention Charity Auctions. You know, sometimes it's a game, sometimes it's a person, sometimes it's just a concept. This last year, for instance, it went to the United Piso Workers Union, right? The people who actually unionized first. And we've been doing that. But it started out of my birthday party at Gen Con. God, I was turning 33 and it was my 20th Gen Con. And I bought like six barrels of beer. And we had a big party. And James said, can I give out this award at your party? And it went over so well that we've been doing it now

for 24 years in a row and I just pass around a hat, get donations for it. And it's an industry party. Anybody who's in the industry is welcome to come join us. We do it on a Wednesday night before ChedCon every year. And in the last four or five years, it's kind of gotten even more serious where we actually

have this thing called the Emerging Designer Program, where we now go out and find people in the first four years of their career as a game designer. And we often try to point ourselves to marginalized people. And we basically take them wherever they are. We have a little competition. It's basically people nominate them when we vote on them. And we actually fly them out from wherever they are in the world, bring them to GenCon, put them up in a hotel room,

pay for their badge, their meals, their flight, everything else, and then give them an honorarium to go with it, and then give them a booth to play their games in, and we introduce them at the party to the entire crowd. And the bundle of holding has been our main source of funding for that, although we have other people donating for that this over the years. And yeah, we've got we have bringing now four people a year to do this. And it's just been amazing fun. So

that's amazing. So when you do stuff like that, end up being one of these guys who just basically networks with everybody. Right. Now, because of that, now actually the president of a five Oh one C three nonprofit, which we had to transform into so that people could write this stuff off from their taxes when they donated to us, right? Nice. We're actually trying to do good with it. It's something that started out as a joke, essentially 24 years ago is now more of this thing that's become this legendary party that we do every year.

And then that we are now trying to do some, some long-term good for the gaming industry for that's cool this legendary party that we do every year and then that we are now trying to do some Long-term good for the gaming industry for that's cool. Very cool. Ed was talking to me before you popped on for the first episode he was talking to me he's like I did you know I did just some background research to and and and I What was the term you use you said he was oh, oh he's he's the It's that guy. Yeah. The trope from TV tropes is, oh hey, it's that guy. Yeah.

You know, who you see in the background of everything. You know, or as a secondary player in literally everything that you see in Shamanic fiction. That working actor you see in everything. Yeah, the banker in the Joker, the Nolan Joker movie the banker exactly. Yeah But yeah, it's just like it's not important tons and tons and tons of stuff. Yeah Yeah, it's good. It's good time right? I have two bookshelves full of stuff that I've worked on over here, right? This is Which you over 35 years I always say it like if you were a doctor

And you actually back in the days we had paper files you would have the same thing after 35 years, I always say it like if you were a doctor and you actually back in the days when you had paper files, you would have the same thing after 35 years. That's true. Yeah, that's true. Your designer getting published, you get a souvenir every time you finish a project. Right. You guys are school teachers. If you got, I guess if you lined up all your yearbooks and you got one for each class that

you taught, you'd end up with a shelf like crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A shelf like crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that actually brings me to a question since you've, since you've done so much with like everybody, um, like if you were to look back right now, what, what would you say was your favorite project that you, that you got to work on or that you were part of? I'll tell you, the most personal one I worked on was Breaking the World. I really enjoyed it. It was something where I'm like, I'm the president of this company, we launched Deadlines,

it's doing real well. Shane goes to me and he says, it's your turn now. I'm like, okay, good, we're going to do this. And I want to do a superhero game and I want to make some political statements and I wanna make some political statements and I wanna have some fun with it. So most deeply personal game I've worked on. Some of the fun stuff, I mean, writing Halo novels has been a dream. I just, I was always a Halo fan from way back.

Right, designing the Wildstorms collectible car game really got me in the comic book industry in a lot of ways that I probably couldn't have done any other way. And I played out to San Diego several times and worked for some amazing people. There's been lots of, you know, one of those crazy things is I've actually ended up being like I've been to Sweden like eight times now working on different video and different gaming things. Well, where is it?

Mm hmm. Well, where is it? So I started out working. This is so cool. Chronicles, which was a game from Target Games in Sweden way back in the 90s. You just popped out again. Yeah, I was going to ask you about new Chronicles as a matter of fact. So, yeah. And then I so I start working with them on that. They also ended up editing Doom Trooper and Warzone, which are their collectible card game and miniatures games. And then a lot of these guys ended up wandering off

to do video games too. And the guy who was the president of the company was a guy named Fred Malmberg, who then went on to purchase Conan and found Paradox Interactive. So he actually produced the Mutant Chronicles movie that came out in the B movie that came out with Ron Perlman and Devin Aki and Tom Jane and whatever. I actually got to write the novelization then and go to the Hollywood premiere, the red carpet premiere on the after-party. That was a lot of fun. But then Avalanche Studios would bring me out to work on video games with them and there's been a couple other ones like Studio Experiment 101 brought me out and I worked on, what's the name of the game? Biomute, right?

Which is, I got a big statue over there from that. But then just this, like last week or whatever, I got this book in a couple of weeks ago, Outside the Box, which is actually a history of Swedish role-playing games, written by one of the guys who was the original writer for The Meeting Chronicles. And he asked Ford for the book.

And I was like, that's just cool. So I haven't had a chance to read the book yet. That is so cool. Nice. But when he asked me, I'm like, of course, Magnus. I'd be delighted to do that. But you know, some of my great friends are in Sweden, so I've been invited to conventions there.

And a couple of years ago, my wife and I both got flown out of business class to work on another video game. And we went and tripped up to the Hoga Coast on the high coast and wandered around there with a good friend of mine, Michael Stenmark, who I remember from the year in Chronicle days. But I've gone to Singapore, worked on video games, and worked on Shanghai, all around the world,

just doing this crazy stuff. It's just been wild fun. That's a hell of a ride, man. Lots and lots of different things. Very cool. I feel very lucky. I'm not trying to brag or anything. I just, I've just, I feel very fortunate to be, to have had a career where I've not only managed

to sustain it, but do such, go to such wild places, make such good friends. Yeah. And again, like you said, you're setting up to do good stuff to help it along too. That's the idea too. I'm trying to do good things and try to... My kids I brought up in this industry too in a lot of ways too.

They've just grown up playing games. I've been going to gen cons since they were 10 years old now and just having a ball with them. That's cool. It's a big part of my life. I enjoy sharing with everybody. That's very cool. Wonderful.

I wish this was at the end of the episode because that'd be a great way to stop. So you, was there any pop culture stuff that you wish you'd included? I mean you quoted a Yu-Gi-Oh card and Bill Clinton within pages of each other. I actually worked on a Yu-Gi-Oh game for Mattel. That's why I did that one. Oh wow. Nice. Mattel called me up and said, are you interested in doing, we need somebody to write the rules for this game that's already designed. It was the Yu-Gi-Oh Capsule Monsters game. So I ended up writing the rules for that. Basically, they just explained to me how the game works. And then writing rules is a separate skill from

actually designing a game, right? If you're a game designer, you probably know how to write some rules, but You may not know how to write them excruciatingly clearly so that nobody can misunderstand Yes, that makes sense. Yes strategy versus tactics almost Right. So, I mean you may be able to do all the game design and but you can't write the rules He may be a great rules book writer, but don't know anything about game design. So I've been fortunate enough to be able to do both, but Mattel's brought me in a couple times to work on games like that with him.

So one of the things I had trouble with following along in Evil, Incorporated was it seems like, and tell me if I got this thread wrong, the president sought to help Al Capone get rid of a ton of deltas and alphas by way of the Great Deception during the Bicentennial Battle? Yes. Because in the novellas, it made,

that seemed to kind of clarify it. Yeah, that's definitely what happened. Okay, cool. God, I really was cross-dressing. He actually was trying to lead them in there to get rid of them so he wouldn't have to deal with them anymore. Right, right.

And of course that being facade, so. Right, yeah. And he's trying to, and what I loved about it in the novel, especially, was that like, there's kind of a thread of him like, I really am trying to stabilize things here. Like, he believes it. Yeah.

Yeah. In your reference to Gordon Gekko, were you aware of how much that was supposed to be a satire and nobody took it in? Oh yes. Yeah, okay. Okay. Greed for lack of a better word.

Right. And because I'm a huge professional wrestling fan, as you've probably heard through multiple times this episode and the previous, you had this focus on moral gray areas, like throughout all of them, but especially in Evil Unlimited. Was that, did you watch pro wrestling? Did you

watch Steve Austin versus the rock? I knew some of that stuff. I was not a huge pro wrestling fan. I was honestly can't be in gaming and not be aware of it. There's a lot of fans in it, right? Right. Yeah, there is that. I certainly knew who those guys were. I actually designed a wrestling party game that never got published at one point. It was actually for a company that had the license, and then at the last moment, they're like, actually, our licensure doesn't like this, or our licensure doesn't like this kind of idea,

so we're going to go with something different. Like, okay, let's have that in my pocket. I'm going to have to reskin it for something else. Yeah, yeah. It's funny because we talked about overlap, right? And sports fans and gamers don't overlap, but wrestling fans. And I think it's because there's a contrivance and a gamesmanship to it.

Yes. Oh yeah. This is, basically when you watch wrestling, you're not watching a sport, you're watching a show. Right, yeah. And you're watching the characters you care about, you're watching the drama of it, you're engaging in that. So it's a different kind of a thing.

So you do get a lot of gamers who are actually involved in wrestling. And it's a different kind of a thing. So you do get a lot of gamers who are actually involved in wrestling. And it's a collaborative endeavor made to look like conflict whereas like role playing games are a collaborative endeavor. Yup, that's true. Good point. Yeah, so. By the way, I loved your inclusion of Dan Quayle

in your Crescent City stuff. He doesn't get beat up on enough we've all forgotten about him there are better people beat up on the Dan quail these days he was relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things true and he interestingly enough he was the person that Mike Pence went to for advice about about about the certifying the election of when of wait yes I had heard that it's kind of ironic that Dan Quayle would be a hero right and that he was the person

who was the sage advisor like potato quail yes yeah who brought you know wish she brought a Latin translator to Latin America Yeah, so Dan quail Ed when I say that politics has always been this way I mean So there's a through line that I did. So there's an, there's a, I think a three parter that I did where I talked about the original screw job in wrestling, which was in 1911. Yeah. And, and this through line that started developing through my telling the tale was when

I say professional wrestling has always been this way, I mean that professional wrestling has always been this way and It just it like became like nine ten times per episode Yeah, and so it's become our through line Did you model Crescent City After Hong Kong in any way? Not that I think of. No, I think I had not been to Hong Kong, but I knew I actually one of my best friends in college was from Hong Kong. Okay. They come out that way. Okay. Joe Lu, who ended up getting into medicine and stuff like that. But one of my best buddies in college was that way. And he was terrified of when the Chinese were taking over.

Right. His entire time. Yeah. His entire family was moving out of the area and he was just worried about the elephant of moving to Singapore. And then he ended up moving back actually as years went on. He's like, well, apparently it's not so bad here and you know, it's not autonomy and blah, blah, blah.

You know, it's sometimes you're trying to figure out how scared you should be of the impending Fascism coming. Yeah. Yeah um So do you think peter teal would have loved this model of Because it's a libertarian paradise. Yeah, exactly. It's right. Yeah, the bars never close Um, what else do you want in the world? Yeah, business runs it all. I mean, there's literally a part of it floating. So you've got the island thing, which is, by the way,

new Alcatraz, which I absolutely love. And your underground world that you designed, was that specifically referencing the unhoused population that lives in Chicago or was it the Morlocks and the Morlocks that was in the X-Men? Some of the Morlocks, I mean, not only from H.G. Wells, but from the X-Men, right? Right, right.

And certainly modeling it on, what was it you were just saying? Now I'm slipping here. Oh, the unhoused population. Yeah, I think some of that, but that also ties in with the Morlocks and everything else, right? I mean, they're often thought of, you know, the Morlocks from H.U. Wells are the underclass people that we don't talk about, blah, blah, blah,

as opposed to the El-Away or whatever, they're the people in charge, but they're harmless children in lots of ways. It's actually the other people controlling everything. It was also just, I thought it was gonna be fun, just to have this underground world that you could wander around in and do crazy shit in. It gives you dungeons.

Yeah, exactly, right? I'm a big fan of the Yakuza video game series, right? And they always have these underground areas you can go into there. Like dungeons like that. And also, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Exactly. Yeah.

There's also, you know, the ideas like I think Neil Gaiman had done a novel called, what was his first novel? I think it was called Underworld or something like that. Oh, wow. It was about a Korean one. What's it? Yeah. Elswyn. Elswyn. There you go. Bingo. And also there was a Ray Winningier who had done a game called underground which was a superheroes game based on DC heroes

Engine that came out back in the late 80s early 90s raises Was that the the the box the like kind of light blue colored box and they care That's the DC heroes one. Yeah, but the underground one we came like a And they care to know that's the DC heroes one. Yeah. Oh, but the underground one became like a There's two versions you get one was in like a binder that was like a black binder with red printing on it. And the other one was a softcover book. They had like a Pat Mills, I think had done the cover for from the guy had done the actual martial law comic book with Kevin O'Neill and Ray ended up going on to become a high muckety muck at palm computing. And then where did he end up?

He ended up actually running D&D for several years. He just retired a couple of years ago, I think last year. And is now going back and working on more role-playing game stuff. But he was just one of the wildest guys. He actually was a roadie for the Beastie Boys when he was in college. Like you do. Yeah, you know Wow Had had the Unabomber been caught by the time

That this came out. Yeah, when was he caught? Oh Good question. I thought he was caught in 2000 Ed's probably looking like right now. Yeah. Yeah So Northside stuff that you're talking about in Crescent City feels okay so I have like I told you I had family in Dearborn right some state and it feels it reads very much like that country club life. Well that's Northside Chicago too really right? Okay. Northside Chicago is the fancy wealthy part of Chicago. Okay. Southside is the downtrodden working class side of Chicago too, really, right? North side of Chicago is the fancy wealthy part of Chicago. South side is the downtrodden working class side of Chicago. So that's part of what I was just getting into there. That's where you get the Cubs versus the White Sox,

right? The Cubs are the wealthy side, Wrigleyville and all that. And the White Sox are in a much tougher part. That's Um, which is nearby. So Ted Kaczynski was arrested in 96. There you go. So obviously, yeah, he had been, uh, yeah, he was kind of a fascinating figure cause I, you know, he's an American terrorist, right? But at the time weren't a lot of people doing that kind of stuff. Still, but, um, you scared the hell out of a lot of people. They turn out of going to university of Michigan where I went to college. I was like, oh shit.

Well, and he was kind of manufactured by the psychology department at UC Berkeley. Yep, he was an interesting individual. Obviously some skills they probably shouldn't put to use the way he did. But yeah, just thinking about that, I knew who he was and what he was doing even before he got arrested.

I have to say he was Ted Kaczynski and he was the unabomber. Sure. that, yeah, I knew who he was and what he was doing even before he got arrested. So I just I didn't know He was ted gazin's kid. He was the unabomber. But sure Yeah, yeah, so in your world war two book, it would have said something. Okay, so yeah Yeah, well, yeah, I mean obviously yeah um in your world war two book, um You had sparky being invulnerable Was that kind of just a a knock Robin and Bucky? Like, hey, yeah a little bit, right? How about a vest? Yeah, like you have these young kids coming in, they're like,

you know, in firefights and they're indestructible, right? Right. Until Robin gets killed by the Joker, of course. Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, generally that was a bit of that. It was a way to say again, why the hell would you bring somebody underage into this war zone, right? Right? Well, okay Okay, well fun. Sure. Let's do that. Okay. Yeah now it makes some sense Yeah, yeah, and a lot of that was just be reverse engineering the things I would see in comic books and say how the hell did You think okay, maybe we can come up with a reason that this work this way. Sure Um in in the World War two one glory Days, that's what it's called. You have, I mean, we have the birth of, we go from Sparky to Superior, and he's this idealistic,

so Ed, Sparky is the Bucky cut out. He is this idealistic young man. He joins up. He's gonna crack Hitler one in the jaw and all this kind of stuff. And by the end of, or frankly, by chronologically, by the end of it, he's installed a goddamn dictator in America. Allegory for idealists much? Like. Oh yeah, I mean, obviously, right? It's like, it's the old thing is like, I don't want anybody to be a dictator except for me, right?

Right. I would be the best benevolent dictator, right? Um, because obviously I would not make mistakes and I would do everything in the best interest of people. Right. So I'd be the right person to put install on this person in this position. Right. Sure.

It never works. No, no way. So, um, but I think that's what a lot of people tell themselves when they're on that road. Yeah. Yeah. I'm doing this for the greater good. I'm doing it. Not everybody clearly. I think the current guy is not so much that way. It's no, no, no, but you know, I think a lot of people when they're trying to gather power for political

reasons, they think you're doing it for the good of people, right? Or they're trying to be corrupt assholes, which is the other way they generally go. Right, right. I did, I really liked your It's a Wonderful Life reference. He talks about, there's this one part in the Glory Days ad where he talks about a friend of his who was deaf in one ear. Nice. Yeah. Nice. It's my wife's favorite movie who was deaf in one year. Nice. Yeah. Nice.

My wife's favorite movie. We watch it every year. Oh, neat. I think I'm going to show it to my kids this year. Normally I show them joy and Noel the, uh, yeah, just, which is one of my absolute all time favorite movies. Were you aware of the layers of that? You'd kind of cooked in there of having an Irishman who's a desert raider in German occupied northern Africa who fights on behalf of the British Empire? Yep. Like, okay Well done

Well done. Yeah Like I say, I'm half Irish myself, so I'm well aware of The various ironies that go along with that kind of stuff. Okay. Okay. Did the... Okay, so the existence of Delta is... I mean, it compresses the timeline of World War II by a good chunk. Because it cuts it short, right? Yeah. Like, kamikazes didn't actually come into being until they take off in 44. And you've got... And Ed, he does this great thing where there's flyers that are carrying another

superpower that some of them have is to blow themselves up. Right. So now he's got flyers who carry him, the blow up guy and drop him. And so, you know, just, yeah. Oh, obvious at the time, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, did you? You blow yourself up, you don't die. That's right. It's like, okay, you know. Okay. Okay. All right. Did you consider bringing Hedy Lamar in?

I probably could have, but I didn't. Yeah, just Hedy Lamar to be. And there's something comic about it, right? So doesn't I was trying to be more serious about it for that stuff, I think. Oh yeah, that makes sense. I was just thinking like wanting Gadgeteers. And you took great pains to have a lot

of really good representation, so. I do try to do that, right? You did. Like, I mean, one of the main characters in the final two, well, in the second and third books, I think the final two, well, in the second and third books, I think. No, yeah, it's the second and third books. They're a black family.

Yeah, exactly. So. I mean, part of that, I think you try to represent things as you see the world around you. I do live in Wisconsin, but I live in a town that's about 18, 20% black. And when I was growing up, did not have a lot lot of Hispanics but now it's about 25% Hispanic and I think you know it's a great way to one of the reasons I want to raise my kids here is because they didn't just see only white people only people like right yeah I want to be able to see other stuff out there I do think representation matters and I also just don't think it's

about trying to represent for for people but also say this is what the world is like. You're trying to put up a mirror to this. And not just create this fiction that's more of a fairy tale that you're like, oh, but only white people are involved. Like, come on. Right, yeah. Only men were involved or whatever. It's ridiculous.

A lot of World War II stuff completely ignores Northern Africa, and you didn't. I mean, you very much featured it. Yeah, no, it definitely was interesting that my grandmother was actually a Rosie the Riveter during World War II. That's where she met my grandfather who tried to, my dad's parents, he tried to enlist in the army and they wouldn't let him in because he had a heart murmur. He actually moved from Pittsburgh to Detroit so he could try to get to a different draft

board. They didn't get in and he ended up working on the line next to her. That's how they met. That's cool By the time you did glory days had you handed off most of the stat work entirely to other people or I don't recall really Some help that was going on We had I think Marcello was helping out some and there was an editor Was it Patrick Capara was editing me then? I forget I

Don't remember to be honest with you. Okay, totally fair As far as the novella's going on. I wasn't doing all I wasn't doing a hundred percent like I was in the early stuff though Right, right. Yeah, um Because it suddenly became just this huge list of weapons So I didn't know if that was like. Yeah. Part of that was because it was World War II. And I knew that we were going to have. I was mentioning in the previous episode about how, you know,

what you turn a game into, what you put in a book becomes what the game's about. Sure. World War II felt like a good time to do gun form. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. I can see. Honestly, having started out doing Western games and working on war hammers, 40k and stuff like that, I learned a lot more about weapons than I probably ever needed to have in my head. So when I get to those positions, like, oh yeah, let me tell you about stopping

power and range and distance and all this kind of shit. And yeah, this thing's going to jam and blah, blah, blah. Then when I started writing a lot of other games, like that seems like keeping track of ammo is a pain in the ass. Why would you do that? Right, yeah, yeah. Like I have to ban a gas in a charge and if I roll a one on the wild die, it ran out. There you go.

Oh, there you go, yeah. Yeah, okay. So in the novellas, oh, I'm sorry, Edward, what were you gonna say? No, no, go ahead. Okay. In the novellas, oh, I'm sorry, Edward, what were you gonna say? No, no, go ahead. Okay. Go ahead. In the novellas, I know you published it in 2012. When did you write it?

Because you included- I wrote it in 2012. Okay, because you included waterboarding. They were doing waterboarding by then, weren't we? Oh yeah, well, I mean, it actually is featured in GI Jane, so yeah. Yeah, but we started doing waterboarding in, well, after 9-11, I mean, it actually is featured in GI Jane. So yeah. Yeah. But we started doing waterboarding in, uh, well, after nine 11th session, we were torturing people. Yeah, you're right. Chris Hitchens even wrote it. Yeah.

It wasn't that innovative for me to introducing that. Yeah. By that time. Cause part of a whole 12 or 12 thing was that I was not allowed to start writing the books till the kickstart and finished. Oh wow. Cause it was like a challenge start writing the books till the kickstart and finished. Oh, wow. Because it was like a challenge to see if I could actually put it out. In Revelation... I had some ideas. I had an outline, that kind of thing, but I didn't actually start writing until then.

Gotcha. In Revelation, I was going to ask if Denver's your favorite city because it's... I love Denver a lot. It's a bottle episode in Denver. Like, and all the other ones, they're traveling here, there, and everywhere. In this one, it is up on a mountain, down to a church in Denver, and that's the only settings.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I, actually, my wife and I lived outside of Denver for about a year, right before we started Pinnacle. And I was like skiing, went skiing like a dozen times that winter and just had a ball. I was doing like,

I actually got to be a decent skier in those days. And then after we started having kids, I didn't go skiing for like 25 years. I just went back on skis for the first time in February of this year. For something like 25 years, I freaking loved it again. I was just having a great time.

Oh, that's good. That's cool. Did you run into any IP issues with this, with these books considering you didn't have the rights? Nobody's ever given me a hard time about anything. Okay, cool. Who did have the rights that you got? Oh, that was Alderac Entertainment Group. Okay, so it was 18. They hired me to write everything. It was a good deal for me. I mean, I'm not objecting to it. And then something like five years ago, six years ago, somebody came to AEG and made them an offer for the game. And John Zinser, who's a great friend of mine, who's helped me out a lot of times, turned around and said, Matt, these guys have offered this much money.

Can you match that? And I said, well, happens to be I can match that, so here's your money, and I'll buy that back from you. And thank you very much. So I've owned it ever since. I've just, again, I was planning to do some more things with it, and I ended up doing the Marvel gig instead. Right.

Yeah, nice. That's cool. That's a good problem to have, really. Yeah, yeah. Oh no. Yeah. That's a good problem to have. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no.

You hit on three major landmarks in your game lore, in your novellas, Chicago, New Alcatraz and Costa Rica and Denver as like a to be. Are there any other places you wish you'd included? Yeah, I wish I could have gone and bought a lot more, but I mean, part of it was there was 150,000 words. And that sounds like a lot. There's only so much you can fit in. And once you start, these novels were not a road story, right? Sometimes you write a book, you'd like, this is a road show. I'm here to show you the world. Right. Right. I wrote a book for Guild Wars 2 from the video game and they wanted me to show off

all the different parts of the world. So you're like, okay, we have to come up with a plot that brings us all the way through all this stuff. Right. Right. For me, I was most concerned about Chicago more than anything else, about Crescent City and dealing with that than I was about anywhere else. I think I probably just picked Denver because I like Denver for, you know, where the family was coming from and all that. Well, it's not always one of these great places to hide out. There's mountains around. There's also. Yeah.

And it's not normally featured either. Yeah, exactly. Now, unless it's a beautiful city, it really is. I had a wonderful time in over the years. Oh, yeah. And, you know, probably could have included a lot of other places, especially because I've been to a lot of other places at that point. But some of those things I say for other things,

like I've got a novel that's been kicking around my head that's gonna be in California and China and Nevada and a bunch of other places. Sometimes you say, well, let's save that for whatever book, the other thing I have in my head had rather than hit it too many times. Would have loved to have read like, you know, at least part of it, you know, in one of the places that have been bombed. Yeah, that would have been interesting. Right.

Like I could have probably done something in Vegas, but again, I just I've written that Vegas nights novel not too many years before. And I didn't really want to go back to that well too hard. Sure. Sure. Um, when, when Isla Delta gets invaded, uh, were you thinking Bush doctrine? Cause it seems very, okay. It's very Bush doctrine. Um, and obviously, lots of hits. Yeah. Um, did you, uh,

uh, there's no mention of Reagan in the novels. Oh, interesting. I guess I just, I don't know why, uh, again, you said you only had certain amount of words. So you're like, you know, there's, and I also had like, you know, if you add up all the books, there's like 10 or 11 books in the series of game books, right? That's a lot of territory to cover. So I guess I probably figure I can cover it. Also, honestly, because I'm doing that 12 for 12 thing,

I was ready at speed. I was ready. I'm just blasting. You had Delta Prime represented by Ragnarok. So, but did you, okay, so it's 2012. Did you find inspiration from V for Vendetta on Patriot's speech at the end? I don't think I cribbed it from that or anything.

I did like V for Vendetta. I mean, I read the comics and saw the movies and all that kind of stuff. So I don't think I consciously cribbed it. Okay, yeah. And also that was kind of going around, like that kind of defiance, no pun intended. Hi, got one in. Um, but that kind of defiance was in the soup that we all swam in at that. Oh, yeah, definitely.

The little dream of like, let's all get together and stop it. Henry the fifth born, I was channeling Be For Bendetta. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, yeah that makes sense. I'm a big fan of that film. The play and also the film, the Kenneth Branagh version came out when I was living in England. Jesus Christ, I remember watching the theater and walking out and saying, I'm ready to sign up for the British Army right now. As an Irishman that's funny. Not seriously, but you just felt inspired. Yeah. Sure. Ed, I've been taking all the questions. Did you want to throw throw one in there? Well? Yeah a little bit Appropriately since since you just mentioned

the time that you were in England What What what all did you work on while you were working for games workshop over there because you've mentioned space Hulk Which which made me squee internally because oh my God, but what, what all else were you involved in? I came over, I started working on white dwarf magazine right away and doing some other stuff for like a organized play, right? Oh, okay.

And then they immediately put me on deathwing, which was the first sequel to our first expansion for space Hulk and then they also put me on Gene stealer, which was the second one I Got to work with Richard Hallowell hell as we called him Which was how was the guy who was one of the main designers for both Warhammer and Warhammer? 40,000 and then was Basically contrary on that but I got to work in the offices with Nigel Stillman and Rick Priestley and Lindsay Priestley and all these other fantastic people,

Phil Gallagher and whatever, Brian Ansel, Brian and Diane, who treated me very well when I was there. And then my roommate was a guy named Bill King, William King, who ended up being a pretty famous novelist out of all that, right? He wrote the Ragnar Blackman trilogy, didn't he? He wrote the Space Wolves, I think. He wrote Gottrich Felix he came up with, right?

Okay, yeah, yeah. And Bill ended up being one of my best friends of life. And when I got married, he came over for a wedding. When the quads were born, he came over to see them. When he got married, I flew over to Prague for his wedding and saw him there and I had a great time. And so we, you know, we, we were roommates. We actually, the funny part is he was from Scotland. He was about 10 years older than me and I was this American kid who'd come in and our, our landlord, he had found a place to live in, but he had been burgled and he was like, I need to find a different place.

And so we, two of us finding a place is a lot easier than one of us. So finding this place and our landlords called us the two foreigners, right? Which as an American, I'm sure you had to be looking at the guy like, like me, okay, me, I get it. But it's like saying you're from Illinois. What the hell? Yeah. Just me. Okay. Me. I get it. But it's like saying you're from Illinois. What the hell? Yeah. Just up the road. So yeah, it was, but I worked in that. I worked on Blood Bowl too when I was there. I'm the star players companion or the star players. And then when I got back,

my first freelance gig was working in the Blood Bowl companion, which had added a lot of American football rules. Cause ironically the guys in England didn't really understand American football that well. Yeah. And you can kind of tell by looking at some of the oddities in the rules work. Yeah. I mean, all they would be able to do is watch it on Sky Television at like two in the morning every Sunday or whatever the hell it was. Yeah.

They would have a special on and watch it. And so they didn't really understand a lot of the rules. They enjoyed it and they obviously, they captured it pretty well from what they were doing. But blood bulls are like rugby than American football, right? Yeah. Rugby with a lot of killing. And then after I worked there for six months, my visa expired and they offered me

a full-time permanent position. And my girlfriend who was living back in Ann Arbor at the time said, you know, well, if it's permanent, you know, we might want to think about what we're doing here because I got another couple of years of college left. I got another year and a half of college and I'm thinking about going to grad school. And I'm like, well, okay, screw you guys, I quit.

And I got anything for it. Thanks guys, I really appreciate you offer, I'm getting the hell out of here. So I ended up flying back to Ann Arbor on, well Detroit, on Valentine's Day 1990. That's my wife of 32 years, the mother of my five kids. So worked out pretty well. Sounds like you made the right choice there. That's pretty clear.

By far, right. We actually got to visit, I went to Dragon Meat last year in London and I went back to Nottingham for the first time since I left. I had never been there. Oh wow. However many years, like forever. 34 years, Jesus Christ. And now GW has turned into like a juggernaut.

There are massive, yeah, they're huge, right? I got to visit the offices and I called up a bunch, or base booked a bunch of friends who came out, went to the Yale trip to Jerusalem with me, which was one of the bars we used to hang out with, which is literally a hole in the wall under Nottingham Castle. And it's supposedly the oldest bar in England, but there's like seven of them.

So, supposedly where the night stopped out for one last pint of ale on our way to the Crusades. So, but a beautiful place. Very cool. It's been a great time. Wow. Nice. Yeah, I worked on that and then I also wrote, when I got back,

guy named Mark Escon eventually asked me to write novels, right? So I pitched like 10 different things to him and he picked, he looks at me and he goes, how about that one? Would you do Blood Bowl novels? And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? Sure. Okay, I'll do it. I wrote four Blood Bowl novels. There he goes. How about that one? Would you do blood bowl novels? And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? I wrote four blood bowl novels and five comic books over the years. And just had, I had a ball with him. A lot of fun to write. Yeah. Some of my earliest novels actually. So good times. That makes sense though. I mean, if you're going to have a bowl, you should have four bowls. That way.

If you're going to have a bowl, you should have four bowls. That way. Yeah, exactly. There you go. It's like a term, right? I had a great time working for a workshop. But the funny part is when I went there and people were like, the guys had been working with Will Neemling and the Grenadier guys and all of it, they're like, Oh, you're going to be just blackballed as soon as you come back.

And as soon as I came back, Charlie, what did you learn? Tell us everything. Wow. No, that's the blackballing, but it was good. It was a great time. It was one of those things. I literally flew over when I had $600 in my pocket. My dad bought me a one-way ticket to England for my graduation present. I didn't know anybody in the entire hemisphere except for one kid I had gone to high school

with that lived in Spain. I wanted to get over and visit at some point. I figured if I didn't get a job, I would get a job bartending. I just kind of called up Cames Worship and a work. And I remember coming in the second interview where they're gonna hire me or not. So you guys either need to get me a job today

or my dad's best friend's boss's daughter who lives in Oxford, who I've never met before will give me a couch to surf on for two weeks while I find a bartending job. And they hired me. What the hell? Nice. They like the honesty, I guess. I guess. I was being blunt. I'm like, I'm running out of cash already. You guys did hire me. I ended up living in my, Simon Forrest was the managing editor, and I ended up living in his place for a week or two. And then Bill joined us there after he got burgled until we found a place to live in. And the meadows, which apparently is like the roughest part of Nottingham, which I thought

was just hilarious because it was not very good. Oh no. Oh, whatever will we do? Yeah. And Ann Arbrite, we even go hang out in Triton parties. So you know, like I'm not, we're okay here, guys. You're not terrified, you know? Right.

Come out with the knife? Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, no, I'll live. Exactly. Nobody's gonna catch us stray from a knifing. Like, yeah. Yeah.

I never felt threatened there at all, to be honest with you. But people were like, You guys are cute with your bonfire night. We have devil's guide box coming out. It was a great time. I really did. It was fantastic. Crazy stories about my time there was good fun. We actually I think our third episode and then one more in the last hundred. Ed is our resident games workshop expert. Oh, yeah.

40k nut. Yeah. So yeah, he's... Yeah, recently, I didn't have a whole lot to do with him recently, but I did write the player versus environment campaign for Warhammer 40,000 Tacticus, which is a- Oh, yeah, I have it on my phone. I haven't played it in over a month,

but yeah, first whatever several missions and all the dialogue and all that kind of stuff. So very cool. That's cool. So I'm, I'm, I'm brave, new worlded out in terms of all the questions. That was more brave new world than I've gotten in years, so thank you. You didn't make up for your drought. Like again, I found it and fell in love with it and have just hoarded it ever since and

stuff like that. So question for you about the Marvel stuff. Obviously, the Spider-Man is coming out by this recording, I think. By March 18th. Okay, yeah, right around the release of this episode. So obviously people should go buy that. Is the next one going to be all new warriors?

Because it should be. That must be what I, I think that's what the email I'm waiting on. Good. Okay. Warriors in power pack. Yeah. Yes. Finally. And maybe a little thing with the new mutants, just for people who like mutants, but with stupid outfits. But good. That means- Tell us what you really think, David. Don't sugarcoat it.

Sorry, but maroon and pink is just, it was never a good look. Although they look, honestly, their outfits look the most delta-primey of all the outfits. Sure, they do. So, but okay, so that's where I can- The other five outfits were actually kind of Warhammer 40,000 inspired,

where you could say those- Yeah. Populates. Huge. Fog holes in there, whatever, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, agents of a fascist over government. Yeah. Well, you know, uh, uh, agents of a fascist, you know, over government, you know, yeah, blocked together 40 40 K is going to kind of be, yeah, that's one of the sources.

Okay. There's a lot of people have lost the center. Oh, that's his point about that. I have ran into about that so many times. Yeah. Guys, guys, it's a joke. Yeah. There's space dwarves has been there. There's space dwarves on on Hawks. Like, how do you not? How do you not see this? Yeah. Again, satire only exists

until it becomes the goal of the people you tried to satirize. So Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine saying don't you get it? Yeah, yeah what machine did you think we were raging again You or the other one I like is like it's it's not called politely debate the machine So of all the things in in brave new world like What is your favorite power package? Oh Like The place was kind of fun because basically just walking around the gun in your hip pocket, right? But two part favorite to play and favorite in concept because those can be different

I like the bouncer a lot because it's just this kind of like Spider-Man idea. Where you're a speedball. Yeah. Yeah. I always like that one a lot, too. High concept. I think, you know, the bargainers are always kind of fun for me, right? I just like doing the cutting deals with demons kind of idea that you had. And again, that's not just the Catholicism, whatever they're coming in, but also the fact my dad was an attorney. I'm like, OK, it's not just the Catholicism, whatever they're coming in, but also the fact

my dad was an attorney. I'm like, okay, it's all about contract law. Nice, nice contract law for the win. I never connected that until you said that. I love that. Oh, very much so, right? Yeah. He taught me how to read contracts.

And the funny part is I've written like 35 novels or more now at this point. I've never had an agent for any of this stuff, right? Because I had him train me on contract law. I was doing toy design back in the mid 2000s where I was making a lot more money than I ever got off a novel, negotiating deals for that. So I felt comfortable doing that. And also like the guys at Wizards of the Coast

and whatever, I would say, hey, I got a novel offer for an original one here. And I was like, hey, congratulations. Let me look over your contract and tell you how they're gonna screw you. Okay, great. You know? But I managed to do all that stuff just on my own.

But it's one of those things where you just have to develop lots and lots of crazy skills and see how you can apply them. If you don't have them, the trick then is to knowing knowing what you don't know. So you should pay somebody for this. I don't think it's that bad. the trick is finding a good agent you can trust and then yeah letting them do their job right yeah like I wouldn't go to a law without an attorney

right sure sure negotiating a contract I can handle but I'm if it's your life on the line don't screw up right yeah you know not that anybody asked but my favorite of all the power packages obviously the bouncer because speedball but also the freezer Yeah, that's a fun one too. That's like so far-reaching. So it's basically cryo

powers, yeah And that that came from the world war two one specifically Russian front soldiers. Because shit got cold. I like that. They're very specific to region and stuff like that. Ed, you're going to love this. There's were sharks. Fuck yeah.

And at the end of each book, there's a module module kind of to get used to that that genre, right? And there's a were shark attacking people inland in LA And it's it's kind of like it reminded me of black Dahlia to be honest But but basically to be honest. So there you go. That's probably like. But basically you're trying to. Yeah, you're trying to hunt it down. You're trying to figure out what's going on. There's also were bears. Well, I mean, obvi. Yeah.

Like, like. Seems like it's right there. Yeah. So, you know, if you're in California, I mean, they're on the flag. Like, come on. Yeah. Yeah. I know.

But there's also, Ed, you're going to love this. There's there's a snub. There's a snub. There's a snub. There's a snub. There's a snub. There's a snub. There's a snub. There's a snub. There's on. Yeah. Yeah, you know, but there's also ed

You're gonna love this. There's there's Snuffers they called snuffers, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah snuffers and then there's boosters and very often They'll work together as a tandem Stuffers top powers boosters boost powers, right? Right. Yeah, okay So, you know, so you could really you could boost the snuffer and he could just blanket everyone Snuffers have powers, boosters boost powers, right? Right. Yeah, okay. So just, you know, so you could really, you could boost the snuffer and he could just blanket everyone.

Or, you know. Nice. And what's cool is like the powers are so, I'm gonna say underpowered. They really are underpowered, right? They really are. Potentially so, but yeah. Yeah, like you've got phasers, but like if you try to phase through something that has electricity

It fucks you up. So you pretty much only phase through doors, right? Or windows, you don't know we're gonna run into one right right now. It's actually and honestly work on the Marvel game I'll tell you phasers are one of the worst characters cuz you're like, oh they can just break anything Right. Yeah, do we go to wherever they want water through anything? Okay, how do you design adventures around characters who can do that kind of stuff? just break anything, right? They just do it. You go to wherever they want, wander through anything. You're like, okay, how do you design adventures around characters who can do that kind of stuff? Like it gets tough. Yeah. Yeah. It's a point of pride, if you will. Exactly.

Thank you. See this, this is the kind of stuff I've got to deal with most episodes. Constantly. Constantly. It's fun. It's good. Yeah, for you. Yeah. So, well, geez, this has been a treat and a half for me. Me too.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad because sometimes people fanboy out and it's just obnoxious. So I'm glad that I was more than just obnoxious. We all fanboy. and it's just obnoxious. So I'm glad that I was more than just obnoxious. We're all fanboy. I was at Origins this year and a kid came up to me and he's bothering and he was like, this is Matt Forbit. He wrote that Minecraft novel. And the kid just looked at me so starstruck. I was like, well shit. I'm like, you're starstruck? It's okay. Let me talk you down. We'll be here. It's okay. Well, I was, so I went downstairs between episodes.

I went downstairs between episodes to talk to my kids. And I, my daughter, she's just like, she finished watching whatever show she was watching with her friend online. And she said, so how was it? I'm like, it's awesome. And in about 10 minutes, I'm going to do it again. And she'm like, it's awesome. And in about 10 minutes, I'm gonna do it again. And she's like, it is so weird to me that you're gonna be upstairs across from my room interviewing Matt F-ing Forbeck. Golly.

Yeah. And she's just like, and she's like, you're famous. I'm like, I'm not. No, he is. And he's only famous adjacent, cause it's gaming. No, exactly. Yeah. In gaming, we he's only famous adjacent because exactly. Yeah. Yeah. In gaming, we say you're famous for four days. Right. Yeah.

You're going to Jen kind of whatever. Now, if you go to a convention, you're famous at the convention, which actually means the best goddamn kind of thing. You have to worry about Jason around taking whatever you have. You know, buggy at the grocery store. You're opting in. Nice. Yeah. Very cool. Now, I know like Will Wheaton, I've known Will for many years and people chase him around.

It's ridiculous, right? And again, met him through games. In fact, I met Will at Comic-Con back before he got re-famous again. He was just blogging back in those days and started acting. And we swapped, I gave him Blood Bolt books for a copy of his autobiography. Oh, nice. Very cool. He did, God, what was the role-playing game that he did? It was like, it was a proto. You remember, it was like something with the word Titan in it, maybe?

Yes, I actually wrote a few pages of that. Oh shit. It's like Ashes of Titan, something like that. Yeah, something like that. Producer George absolutely loved that and put me onto it. Nice. And it was before Dimension 20, it was before Critical Role. I wanna say some of the voice actresses in it

were also in Critical Role. I could be wrong. May have been. Yeah, Tabletop was the YouTube show that you had. Yeah, yeah. That's what it was. It was actually one that Diana Jones won here. I got handed to him on stage,

but that was kind of fun. But that's cool. But yeah, it's that thing, every time he featured a game on that thing, the sales of that game go shh, like that's cool. But yeah, it's that thing every time he featured a game on that thing The sales that game goes like that. Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah talk about niche but like effective niche to really effective Yeah, and my kids are gonna love the fact that you know him too because we're watching Next generation for the actual. Yeah. Yeah, so

So they they know Wesley But yeah, I mean this is is like, it's so interesting how, you know, with this podcast, I reach out a lot to people. Oh, sure. And I would say I have like a better than 75% hit rate. That's great. With it, yeah, it's, well, it's because people are nice, like you, you know? If you got time and you want, it's because people are nice like you. Yeah.

You know? If you got time and you want, you're like, oh no, you're going to ask me about the stuff I have a passion about that I've been working on for years. Right. And that's the dirty little secret. How torturous could that be? Yeah. Yeah.

And that's the dirty little secret of doing this podcast. Because people are like, how do you interview these people? I'm like, I shoot my shot and then I let them know they have full edit. And I also like, I asked them, I mean, I'm just a fan. I'm not hitting, I'm not doing some sort of investigative reporting. So we've had communications professors from both coasts

on to talk about like different things. We've had, we had an author of a book called American Fascism. Oh, cool. So that was depressing. And I did a lot of drinking. Yeah. And by the way, they had really good

impressions of various D&D characters. And so that was kind of fun. And then we've had we've had a professor who's an expert on or we've had a professor who's an expert on, or we've had a teacher who's got a doctorate, but he's an expert on hip hop. Like, we just like, there's just all these people

that we've been able to bring in. There's a woman who's an author who lives, I think down in Orange County now, but like Teresa Halverson. And she's written several books. And we've just had people on. Teresa Halverson and she's written several books. And we've just had people on. Bishop O'Connell is a good friend of Ed's,

like best friend. You know, and it's just like we've had, yeah, it's been really neat. And it's just, like you said, we ask people to come on and tell us about the thing that they love, that we love that they did. So. Most of us don't get the chance to do that too often.

Yeah. Or if you're doing it with your family around, they're like, oh, we've heard this before. Yeah, thanks, Ed. Pass the beans. Yeah. So, but yeah, so thank you. Thank you so very much.

Very pleasure, and I really enjoyed it. So, appreciate it, guys. Ed, what do you want people to read, consume or take in? Um, I am going to very strongly recommend, uh, the game Blood Bowl, um, because it is, it is way too much fun. It is over the top. It is cartoony. Um, and, and it's actually manages to be strategic at the same time and and yeah it's a it's a personal favorite of mine for a long time so since we mentioned it a little bit ago that's that's what's front of mind right now

cool I'm going to recommend a Marvel multiverse role-playing game, Spider-Verse Expansion, by Matt Forbeck. Which should have just dropped, to be perfectly honest. So y'all need to go get your copy. And yeah, that's, get it. If they buy it from anywhere else, do you make more money off of it than other places? I don't get a royalty off these things. I get a bonus that Marvel put,

they give out bonuses for the comic book writers as well. So they gave me a similar bonus for the books itself. So just buy it wherever you get it from. You can get it electronically through Demiplane or World 20 or you can get it through Amazon. I always say go to your friendly local gaming store because I like to have them around. Yes.

It's almost like humanly big. So wherever makes you happy, buy it where we can. I had a friend of mine buy it at Home Goods. He bought the original game at Home Goods. Like how the hell is that there? Yeah. There's a lot of penetration, more to penetration with Marvel.

It's kind of ridiculous, but. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. That's great. And what would you like to recommend there, Matt? Oh, what I want to recommend? Oh, everything. Now, the funny part is I've been so noticed the grindstone for the last few months.

I don't even, I've not been having a lot of fun, right? So, let's see, what have I been playing? We just played a really cool game called Let's Go to Japan the other day. It comes from AEG. And it's basically it was a guy who was the developer for AEG decided he wanted to go to Japan, then the pandemic happened. So instead of going, he actually made a board game about it. And it's all about planning out your trip and having good fun that way.

That's a great game. Wormspan is another great game that came out from, I don't know the lower name, Elizabeth Harker, like right now. Wingspan is another great game that came out from, I don't know the lower name, Elizabeth Hartger, like right now. The woman who made Wingspan too, right? Okay. Which is a fantastic game. Wormspan is the same kind of game, but with dragons in it.

So, and it's a lot of fun. That sounds cool. Tons and tons of fun, we play that. And the other one we play a boatload of is Betrayal at House on a Hill, right? So if you like, Betrayal at House on a Hill Hous and tons of fun we play that and the other one we play a boatload of is betrayal at house in the hill right, so if you like betrayal house and it was like a lot of other games where you It's actually you're it's a it's a co-op game when my kids were really young

We started playing games and I realized that they couldn't play games like munchkin snap your bunny tapes games because they would Just fight like crazy, right? Because they can say oh, it's just part of the game. Like, no, my brother just insulted me and he took it on me instead of them. So we started playing co-op games. Betrayal of House and the Hill is from Avalon Hill. It's actually a Hasbro game. Mike Selinker is one of my friends who developed it and a bunch of other friends I know wrote on it.

But what happens you play out this game by moving tiles and then a certain part of the game, there's a twist, a reversal, and one of you becomes the traitor, right? And then everybody else has to try to beat you up. And then you have to try to do whatever, the haunting you're doing, or the werewolves, or whatever you're controlling, or whatever.

So it's a really neat game, and it has that wonderful little twist, that pivot moment. And we've played the crap of that. There's also a legacy version that Rob Davio developed that's really fantastic to play too. And it's the only legacy game I've actually managed to finish with the kids, right? We tried other ones, legacy games are the ones

where they actually have a plot that carries you over from session to session. You usually play like two or three sessions. And as you get to like session three, they're like, if this happened, open up this box. If this happened, open up the other box. And so there's actually a story that's developing through the games you're opening up, with the bits you're opening up. And you put stickers on the board to change the board as you go along too, right?

Like permanent. Oh, wow. Like I need. And Betrayal at House on the Hill Legacy is the only as you go along too, right? Like permanent. Oh wow. Like I need. And Betrayal at House on the Hill Legacy is the only one that we've actually managed to finish because we just enjoyed playing the game so much. Very cool. Very cool.

Well, heck, that's great. Ed, you don't want to be found, where can they find us? We, collectively, can be found on our website at wubba wubba w www.geekhistorytime.com and you can go through our archive there and find any number of topics. Find the one that catches your interest and, you know, bounce around however you like. We can also be found on the Apple Podcast app, the Amazon Podcast app, and on Spotify. Wherever you have found us, please take the time to subscribe and give us the five-star review that you know we deserve.

And especially if you can give us a six-star review, do that for these last couple of episodes, because Matt Forbeck has just been awesome as a guest and you know give him that bonus star in there. So yeah, but what about you, Damien? Where can you be found? You can find me on, let's see, April 4th, May 2nd, June 6th, and we're still deciding about July 4th. But at the Comedy Spot in Sacramento at 9 p.m. Capital Punishment is running its monthly pun tournament. Spin that wheel. Pun, battle, win.

Get your tickets early, go to comedyspot.com, go to the calendar section, find our show, Capital Punishment, capital with an O, and get your tickets so that you don't miss it because it's sold out. If you are not local, then you absolutely should watch it online and stream it, and it translates very, very well.

So, yeah. And Matt, where do you want people to find you? You go to forbeck.com, that's F-O-R-B-E-C-K dot com. You'll find me there with a list of all the stuff I'm doing. I occasionally blog there, although it's fallen off over the years. And you can also find me on just about any social media network you want to go to, because I like to get out

and wander around the internet. Sure. Sure. Well, this has been just a joy and a pleasure. So thank you for Capital Punishment, or Capital Punishment. Ah, got another plug-in for, sorry, gotta look at my right arm. For a Geek History of Time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s.