Graham Buckley (8:25)
The thing is, we started with Maelstrom. The number of role playing books we were publishing started Spread out. I've always been one of those people where I tend to be the GM for our group and I have been for 43 years. Whatever, whatever it is, I will get these ideas. I'll be watching tv, reading a book and I'll go, that's what I want to run, that's what I want to run. And my brain will say, right, what can we run it in? And I'll look on my shelves. And we moved a few months ago. Not all of my game books are out, but I've got shelf after shelf after shelf of different rule systems and I look around and go, yeah, but I don't like that bit, that one. Oh, that was not going to work. And invariably I'll say, right, I'll write it. You know, I thought about running a vampire, werewolf, ghost type game after watching Being Human on tv, looked at vampire and werewolf and so on. Could not understand the rules for the life of me. So I thought, right, I'll write one. So I took the old face rip system for Marvel superheroes, took the lower end of it because it was sort of open source, and said, right, supernatural game. And so I've written lots of games that I want to play. So the whole Savage Worlds line of books and we've got several in that now came about because back in 94 I read a novel by Stephen Hunt, who's a very well known sort of steampunk author, and it was called for the Crown and the Dragon and it was a pseudo Napoleonic where you've got things called dragon browns. So these are the scum of the scum and they're recruited into the army because they're criminals, they're going to be hung otherwise and so on. And they're used almost as disposables, infantry, but you've got sort of army battle mages and you've got these strange inquisitors who, who are blind and their eyes are sealed over with skin and they can sort of interrogate people and then you've got Steam tanks and so on. I thought what a fantastic game setting that would be. And then never did anything with it from 94. And then a few years ago I was searching through some boxes and I came across a copy of this novel and I read it again and thought what a fantastic idea for a game setting, blah, blah. But of course, the Internet being what it is, I soon found that Steve, Stephen had a web page and a contact Us button. So I contacted him, said any chance of being able to do an RPG of it? And he Said, yeah, brilliant. So I thought, right, I need a system. And I think what was key was also being a huge fan of the Sharp books by Bernard Cornwell. When you read Sharp, he charges into battle and three Frenchmen jump in the way and he cuts them down and then he charges on and two more Frenchmen, he cuts those down and then he gets to the evil lieutenant who he's going to fight and then he has a long duel that takes 12 pages of text. And so I thought what I need is that I need a game with minion rules, but also has good rules for firearms, leaders, that sort of thing. And I did a bit of research and it kept coming back to Savage Worlds, because Savage Worlds has one of the best implementations of leader type characters in any rpg. It's obviously because it's built as a, as a flexible rpg, it can be used in any sort of setting. So you've already got rules for black powder and magic. And integrating all these, I thought, brilliant, let's go for that. So I contacted Pinnacle and said, you know, how do I become a licensed contributor? And so on and so forth. And then I wrote it, published it, and I thought, this is a fantastic system. And then that just expanded out. So we, we did, I did a book called Invasion, which is the old XCOM computer game, but Savage Worlds, and that is brilliant as a one off game. Some of your players can't make it, grab your characters, fight some aliens, you know, put it to bed for a few weeks. We also, and I'm just writing this at the moment, turned it into a war game and Savage Worlds worked brilliantly as a war game. Absolutely fantastic. So over here I've got some painted Normans, Saxons, Assyrians, Egyptian Pharaoh, Chariot, etc. Because I'm just writing historical, modern and sci fi setting codex to expand that out. So we did all of these. And then because you've got an RPG with a war game system using the same rules, I then wrote a campaign, a 20 part campaign where two of the parts are big tabletop battles. So you run your campaign, you then have your big battle, you then go back to running your campaign. And the Savage Gladiators came about because I was watching things like Spartacus and I thought this would be a brilliant sessional rpg. So like Invasion, you can, you can play it almost as a combat simulator rather than a full rpg. Of course, you know, there's lots of ways people can play it. You could play it as loads of character building, then a bit of a battle in the arena and then loads of character stuff and a bit in the arena or you can do bit in the arena, bit in the arena, bit in the arena, bit of tidied up in between sessions. Arena, arena, arena. You can play it in different ways. And I thought, you know, if we're going to do a gladiator's game, let's do it in Savage Worlds. Because, say I did it in advanced fighting fantasy, which is obviously a system I know well and I can publish in. You can have a gladiator with your skill and stamina and a weapon skill Gladiator one. Now, I've got some miniatures here. You know, sword and shield is not actually that different from that gladiator with a sword and shield, other than in the way they fight. Now, yeah, I could create different talents, but they would have a different talent. There's not much to differentiate them. Whereas, of course, all the experience of writing for Savage Worlds means that you can have a gladiator who has things like level headed. So this is an intelligence based gladiator. So keep getting extra cards, which means they get more jokers, which means they can, you know, get that bonus and get more bennies and then what they can actually do, rather than fight the opponent, keep taunting them. Maybe they fight as part of a pair. So they keep taunting and distracting and making them vulnerable and then the muscle head whacks them. And so you can build a gladiator based around intelligence or speed or agility or brute strength or just, you know, bloody toughness. So they don't hit that hard. But it's impossible to put them down because they just keep going and going and going. And because you've got that option of building them in different ways, but you're still growing in that power level. So you can still sort of go towards the, if you like, the season finale where they win in the arena in Rome and they're given their freedom and they ride off into the sunset with a big bang of money. Great. But you can also do it very much as this sort of sessional game, as you say, as a, as a tournament. Each player can have their own stable of gladiators because there are healing and recovery rules. You know, Bobby as the gladiator might get badly injured and it's going to take him two months to recover. So actually you're going to have to bring in one of the younger ones and hope he survives. If it does, fantastic. Because then you've got another gladiator coming through.
