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- [00:00]
Dirk Oblivion
Have you seen me, dice bag?
- [00:13]
Blythe
The Grognard Files?
- [00:16]
Dirt the Dice
Hello, my name is Dirt the Dice and this is the Grognard Files podcast where we talk bobbins about tabletop RPGs from back in the day. And today I'm coming live from my den here in the heart of the northwest of England. I'm completely and utterly surrounded by my stuff. On my right is the great library of RPGs and my grognard Files. This time I've been looking at episode 14 where we talked about fanzines. That was a long time ago, but fanzines are never too far away from my heart. I think I've said before that I really am a frustrated fanzine editor. And in this episode we speak to John Power Jr. Who is the editor and publisher of Weird Science magazine. He talks about his ambitions and inspiration for producing a role playing magazine, as well as giving insight in his background in gaming and beyond. This was a recording that was made as part of Virtual Grog Meet back in April.
- [01:28]
Dirk Oblivion
Also in this episode, I'm joined by
- [01:30]
Dirt the Dice
Judge Blythey, a resident rules lawyer, as we try and imagine a fanzine of our own, taking us back to 1983 to produce something that didn't exist and still doesn't exist, but it sort of does in your imagination. I'll be back at the end of this podcast to give you some parish notices, but until then, ramblers, let's get rambling. Okay. Welcome to Open Box, the part of the podcast where we look backwards to look forwards. How our gaming of the past has informed the gamers that we are today. I'm joined in the zoom of role playing rambling by the Grog squad as it's Virtual Grog Meet and by editor, art director, copy copy editor, marketing manager, publisher, chief cook and bottle washer John Power Jr. Of Weird Science. Hello.
- [02:25]
John Power Jr.
Hello. Thank you for having me.
- [02:26]
Dirt the Dice
And here on my left, I've got the ridiculous homemade shrine to the actor Caroline Munro. Now, John, would you like to give it a tap virtually across the ocean? Oh, and she's appeared as the journalist in Goody Two Shoes, a famous video of course, with pop star Adamant. So there you go. Because we're talking about magazines. John, you are an editor large of Weird Science magazine. How does that feel?
- [02:57]
John Power Jr.
Normally, very stressful. And yeah, I mean right now it's a very odd feeling. So I don't know when people will hear this, but our latest issue just came out about. Well, this week really. So the last like month has been a lot of sleepless nights. A lot of stress, a lot of panic, a lot of trying to fix things that inevitably go wrong. And, and then there's normally a week of sheer terror because, as I say, I do all the graphic design myself and I'm not a trained graphic designer by any measure. So there's always this kind of week where, you know, I've handed over £4,000 or whatever to a printer, sent it off to him and then it gets back and you're like, you open the box and it's like, what the hell have I done? But it's this time it's all good. So, so I'm in that kind of weird interregnum, kind of weird space and I've just started planning the next issue. Yeah, it's a very stressful job, but it's, you know, it's one I stupidly chose for myself. So I can't, you know, it's a bit much to complain, I think, you know.
- [04:04]
Dirt the Dice
Well, we'll talk a bit about the experience of producing the magazine and why you do it, but first of all, let's get an understanding of you as a gamer. So what's your history? What was the game that you were hot on when you first started?
- [04:20]
John Power Jr.
Oh, so I think I'm probably like a lot of the people who will be watching this. So I'm late 40s, grew up in UK, so very much fighting fantasy was kind of the gateway drug that got me into this at 6 years old. The weird one is I bought Dragon Warriors, Dave Morris's Dragon warriors. And I think I was probably about eight or nine or something. And anyone who saw it at the time will know it was the same size as the. It was done like a kind of Corgi paperback, kind of puffin, whatever it was. So it looked like a fighting fantasy book. So I bought it from a Sea Scout jamboree for about 50 pence secondhand and took it home, opened it up and I was like, hold on a minute, this is. Where's all the numbers telling me, you know, how I've died this time, none of that. So I was like, oh, okay, so this is something different. And I never really got to play it. But I, you know, I read it, but that just completely informed how I thought role playing games should be. This kind of slightly crunchy, weird old kind of low level sort of games. And then from that about when I was about nine years old, my next door neighbor, we'd been making games, weirdly, we made, we used to just make games all the time based on like, we had one or two. We had this game called the Sorcerer's Dungeon. I think I've actually got a copy, Sorcerer's Cave. I've got a copy of it over there. Some 1970s, very simple dungeon crawler. And so we used to play that. And then obviously we'd start making our own versions of it. And you know, we'd add things. I think someone. We didn't have Talisman, but we'd seen Talisman. So we kind of had this idea in our head of what talisman should be. So we invented our own version. And so that's what we just used to do. Like that's, you know, 8 year olds, 9 year olds, 10 year olds. We just used to sit in our living room and over the summer, you know, we cut out bits of card and paper and make these little fantasy games and we had no real kind of knowledge of what it was supposed to be. And then age 10, my, you know, for the podcast, this would be rubbish. But for people watching this now I'm holding up issue 81 of White Dwarf, which came out about 1986. And my neighbor got that and he was like, lent it to me. And. And it was the first time I realized that there was a world out there of people like us in some ways making this game. But there are all these proper games out there. And. And it was just. It blew my mind. You know, I was 10 years old, I was like, this is. I want to dedicate my life to living in these fantasy worlds. And first I read that and I was like, that's when I came like a forever GM dm. Because I read that and I was like, well, that's the best job. You know, you get to sit here and read all these incredible adventures. And, you know, I was a horribly nerdy kid. I was the kind of kid who, you know, sit him in front of a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and I'd be very happy just randomly learning about weird stuff. So for finding out that you could kind of parlay that aspect of yourself into, oh God, I want to learn about 15th century medieval city sewer systems. You know, and it's like role playing games are perfect for that because it both encourages you to be this awful person that's obsessed with, you know, trying to find out every little detail. And it gives you a way of, a legitimate way of being like, oh, what are you doing this afternoon? Well, yeah, I'm going to spend the afternoon looking into the, I don't know, the Holy Roman Empire or something to figure out one small detail that my friends who are like equally 10 years old will never ever care about or whatever. So that's kind of how we got into games. We were all just playing them and we're just kind of obsessed with them and never really dungeon dragons. Oddly I played it once as a kid. We did the Temple of Elemental Evil. So I guess this was AD&D first edition. It was fun, it was fine. But it just, it weirdly it wasn't. I think all these things are by chance. It just happens to be that someone happens to go to the shop one day and they don't have D and D, but they do have Call of Cthulhu. And so you buy that and then that becomes, you know, you don't have a million games, you have two or three. So you know, you buy that. And the games that we were playing was like Judge Dredd, Star Wars, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, all those kind of things were just. And Warhammer, fancy Roleplay. And at the same time we were, you know, the absolutely the perfect age for the all those kind of big box games Games Workshop released. So don't know, it's a bit blurry, but you got like Blood bowl, second edition and stuff like that up there that you know, you just spend your weekends Dark Future Blood bowl, all those games, Space Hulk and Beautiful. Time to be like 12, 13 years old really the kind of late 80s because it just. Yeah, it was a time of immense possibility I think in terms of gaming also not enough that you could kind of be bombarded. For me, they got me at the right age. But then, I mean I fell out of the hobby when I was about 15. Weirdly the last thing I ever bought was the 5th edition call of Cthulhu. Which is like the only thing I still have from that time. So a few years ago when I, I was like looking on ebay and stuff like that, trying to think, oh, what did I used to weigh and send you like oh my God, all these things like the art feature, 150 quid mighty empires, 200 quid. Blood bowl.
- [10:08]
Dirt the Dice
And so where did you, where did your copies go to then? Did you.
- [10:12]
John Power Jr.
Well, that was the thing. I sat there and I was like, oh my God, I'm. I've got like four grands worth of nonsense sat in my parents loft. This is amazing. So the next time I was back, had dinner and stuff and it's all nice, I was like, do you mind? I just, I just need to go up into the loft and try and find something. Fine. Went up there, you know, four inches of dust on everything going around and
- [10:35]
Dirk Oblivion
I'm like, this is odd.
- [10:37]
John Power Jr.
There's like teddy bears here, there's load of Lego, there's all this stuff that hasn't been seen for whatever. And I came down, I was like, they used to.
- [10:44]
Dirk Oblivion
I was like, do you remember those
- [10:46]
John Power Jr.
little toys I used to be into? And they're like, oh. My mum was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, yeah, do you know where they are? And she's like, oh yeah. Like a week after I went to university they all got dumped down the charity shop. Like literally I'd been gone I think one week. And she's like, my mum's family, I'm very much a hoarder. My mum has lots of hoarders in her house, in her family. People who collect, you know, genuinely the kind of people that need interventions. And she's the opposite. She is like doesn't like anything that's more than like five minutes old in the house really does repaints the place constantly. And yeah, I mean I've been gone five minutes and she literally turfed everything out. I mean we are talking about three grands worth night today in today's money. About three grands worth of role playing games, miniatures, all the. Literally every big box games workshop did between about 87 and 91. Heartbreaking basically. So I've been slowly, as the magazine's gone on, I've been. Every time we do an issue I treat myself to one object from the past to kind of slowly fill up the collection again.
- [12:03]
Dirt the Dice
But the odd thing is of course that your stuff is probably still in circulation being sold on ebay.
- [12:10]
John Power Jr.
Oh yeah, Yeah. I keep thinking off I'll buy it, you know, like it'll turn up and it'll be my little notes in the like sort of scribbled all over it or something. But yeah, it's, it's, it was. That was a hard wake up call. Kind of like. Yeah, she, she showed absolutely no contrition. I was like, you do realize how much that is? She said, how was I supposed to. You know, it's like. I mean she constantly. There's. We were just talking four year on like records behind me when I moved, I live in Belgium and when I moved over here I put half my records in storage and half came over here actually a third in storage, third here and then a third went into her spare room and 12 years later they're still there. And every. She keeps sending me like, oh, I met some guy at the pub, who apparently buys vinyl and he's gonna come around and price it all up. And I'm like, oh my God, please don't. That's worth even more than the bloody miniatures. You know, it's like there's some incredible stuff.
- [13:12]
Dirt the Dice
Obviously you've come back into role playing. You start to rebuild your collection and I'm gonna put this to you in a fighting fantasy way. There's three routes you can take. There's one where you just play the games and enjoy. There's a middle route which is quite easy going. Doing a podcast about it, for example. Come into it like some idiot and do a podcast about it, right? And then there's this really hard route, really difficult way that is doing a magazine about it. So why did you choose the really hard way?
- [13:45]
John Power Jr.
Well, mainly because if it isn't obvious now, I'm not a natural on doing podcasts or anything like that because, you know, I'm. I've only done like two in the whole history of the magazine because, and it's stupid because I really need to like publicize it obviously. But I'm generally like, oh my God, I hate doing this. I do. I blabber too much, my brain goes far too fast and I say too much. So yeah, when I thought about it, I was like, no, there's no way I can do a podcast, much as appealing as it is. But also I say, like, my background outside of gaming is in the media. So I've worked most of my life in the music industry and I've worked as a journalist writing for people like timeout and DJ mag and far too many websites to think about. But also my main employment has been doing PR and marketing for record labels. So I've always worked around magazines and around the media. And I love magazines like genuinely. As much as Weird Science is about games, for me, it's equally as much about magazines because like I said, like it was White Dwarf, like growing up in, growing up in the 80s in like West London, like suburbs, you don't you have a small world. It was a lovely, lovely world, but it's quite a small world. And for me, my exposure to the world and discovering all stuff was through magazines. I've got two older sisters, 10 years older than me, so I learned a lot by reading their magazines and not just because, you know, the, how can I put this delicately? You know, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire had some interesting articles for a 12 year old boy to be reading.
- [15:54]
Dirt the Dice
So yeah, I read those agony letters as well. So you're all Right, you're in safe hands, you know, you're in good company.
- [16:02]
Dirk Oblivion
But.
- [16:03]
John Power Jr.
But for everything, it was like, you know, age 13, you know, reading my sister's copies of like, ID in the face. And that's how I discovered so much stuff that matters to me, you know, in terms of just in the world, but in terms of fashion, culture and music and film and all these things. And then as soon as I was kind of, you know, old enough to have a paper round and some money of my own, you know, you'd go down the shop and pick up, you know, your White Dwarf or whatever. But there was just, you know, I was, you know, religiously read like Enemy and Melody Maker and all these things select and magazines like that, and you just discovered so much more than was around you. So I've always loved magazines and I've always loved the way that they. They do that with Enemy or something like that is, you know, you'd have someone like Oasis on the front cover to sell the magazine, but once you've picked that up and read it, you read the rest of it. And that's how you discover stuff that you never, ever would have encountered otherwise. And I think that's why it's. What I love about magazines is that you might pick up, you know, it's the way the world's set up at the moment. Everything is so algorithmically driven that it's. It's a very clever funnel system to give you more of what you know and more of what you like. So, you know, you spend two minutes looking at a dungeon dragons thing on Instagram, then you're just gonna get Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons thrown at you constantly. You know, if you like one thing, it would just. It narrows your focus constantly. You know, we're more and more reduced to being. Serendipity doesn't seem to happen as much. You don't find stuff by chance as much, which is crazy because, you know, the Internet has made it so easy to discover stuff. And I think at first it did, but increasingly the way we Internet has made it harder and harder to lock. It locks you in. And it's great at first, you know, it's like things like Spotify or something like that. When you first start using it, it's like, okay, great. It's really shown me lots of some, lots of new music and stuff like that, but it, it very quickly goes, you like this, we're going to give you lots more of exactly the same thing or something very, very close to it, which Is on one level, great, but it means you don't find the stuff that might change your life, you know. And when I think about the bands and stuff like that, that absolutely like genuinely changed my life, it would be because I picked up a magazine because there was, I don't know, when I was 12, 13, 14 or something, sisters of Mercy on the COVID Probably weren't on the COVID of the Enemy at that time. But, you know, there might have been something about a band, Fields of Nephilim, Sisters of Mercy, something like that, that I happened to be into at. And then because you've got the whole thing, you read it, you know, you read it cover to cover and then because of that you find, you know, for me it was like discovering Aphex Twin or something like that, that completely. Then you're like, wow, this is so out of my sphere of reference. And then you hunt down and find out more about that and that changed your life. And that's what I hope with the magazine can do with certain Weird Science is that. I mean, what I haven't done with Weird Science is the obvious thing of putting Dungeon Dragons on the COVID every issue and then filling the rest of it with other weirder, cooler stuff from the indie world. That's what I. If I had a commercial brain, that's exactly what I would do. Instead I completely. I hire people to do these covers that don't tell anybody anything about the magazine at all. But.
- [20:00]
Dirt the Dice
But they are wonderful. And it's a good point. Yeah, it's a good point you make really. Because that is part of the enchitification of the Internet, isn't it, that people have lost their curiosity about what might be found. I remember getting. Do you remember Rockinvik? The old email round robin that was sent with like curiosities that you'd find on the Internet, like pictures of birds with arms and things like that. That's all kind of disappeared, doesn't it, in this new homogen emulsified world?
- [20:34]
John Power Jr.
Yeah, I think we just get con. Like the word I hate more than anything is content. But it's. That's what we get. It's just, you know, it's. And I'm. As you know, I can, I can get my high horse about this and I do frequently. But I'm as bad as anyone else. You know, I can sit. Like the other day I had the. I had a whole night free to myself and I thought, okay, got a stack of books that I, you know, I've been buying, but not reading as you do. And I thought I'd crack into one of them, but okay, I'm gonna treat myself first to a little two minutes on Instagram just to, you know, the new, you know, I can convince myself the new issues come out, let's see if anyone's talking about us. And then like four hours later, I've just watched, you know, I've watched a million Sopranos 30 second clips, you know, and you know, between like Sopranos and I Curb your enthusiasm, I can just sit there and watch these bite sized 15 second clips that they do. It feeds you and feeds you and suddenly it's one in the morning and you're like, okay, that was mildly amusing and pleasurable, but I haven't kind of, I've just watched something that I'd watched 10, 15 years ago.
- [21:42]
Dirt the Dice
Well, I think magazines do give you that opportunity of getting serendipity.
- [21:47]
Dirk Oblivion
Have you heard of Stack?
- [21:49]
Dirt the Dice
Because I show your enthusiasm for independent magazines. It's not my games collection that causes friction in our household, it's the amount of subscriptions I have to magazines. And there's a. As well as subscribing to Weird Science. If you're into independent magazines, you should subscribe to Stack because every month you get a independent magazine from anywhere in the world. And honestly you learn such a lot about culture, about different lifestyles and people out there.
- [22:23]
Dirk Oblivion
So that's the, that's the, that's the
- [22:25]
Dirt the Dice
thing that magazines can give you that other things can't, I think.
- [22:29]
John Power Jr.
And I would 100% recommend stack is great. Funny enough, I'm talking to Stephen who runs that tomorrow we're doing an interview about the magazine for them. But hopefully, maybe if you subscribe to Stack, you might get Weird Science one day. But yeah, no, totally. And it's like I buy so many magazines and there's a few that I buy regularly. 14 times. I've been a subscriber for I think 25 years or something like that. And I've got every single issue in over there. And it's, I think if you're gonna subscribe to one magazine, make it with science two. Make it 14 times as well. Because that's just, I, I don't know how you can create adventures or run games, you know, without that. Because it's just an endless amount of inspiration. But yeah, I mean I buy probably like 10 or 15amonth of different things, you know, and there's certain ones that I buy all the time, like pressing matters Mundial. But I'll just, yeah, I just go into a shop And I'll find something interesting. And like you say you just, you don't know what you're going to discover from it. That's what I always love about it. You just, even if it's like music, it's like you buy it to. Because do you think you know what's going to be in there? And then hopefully there's always at least one thing that you have, you've never heard of, you've never even had an idea that it could exist. And, and I say like the way magazines tend to work is you can actually like I worked on websites for a very, very long time, culture kind of music websites and stuff like that. And we saw it from the mid early 2000s to the, you know, 2010, early 2000s change so dramatically. The way originally people would come onto your website and they would go from page to page and have a look at what you'd posted. And it changed to people just sat on social media and they'd wait for the bands that they liked to say something, yeah, oh, we've been interviewed by Clash or something like that. And then you get all your traffic would come through a direct recommendation. But then people would never look. People wouldn't think, I'm on this website now, I'm gonna have a look at what else is on there. But as I said, like that's the thing. Like film magazines are like little white lines like it. And it's great because I just, I can't. There's no way you can keep up with everything. But it's like a very curated experience of someone going, you know, a lot of smart, generally people who know a subject very well going, well, this is what is interesting us this month. And I think that's a love thing to be able to just have and spend an hour or two reading and say when it's. When you find stuff that you had no prior interest in and maybe it sparks a completely new hobby or a new interest or maybe it's just a brief. You know, there's a magazine called Monocle that I get all the time and it's the most ridiculous magazine. It's, it's the kind of magazine that is. You assume it's read by Zurich bankers because everything is absolutely beautiful, design is gorgeous. They recommend like 500 pound cashmere jumpers and stuff like that. It's like, oh, if you need like a basic entry level sweater, here's our 700 pound one. It's that kind of magazine. But you know, it has interviews with. It'll have an interview of like the, I don't know, the person who's in charge of traffic control in Kuala Lumpur or something like that. And it'll be like six page interview with them and once you kind of reconfigure your brain to be like okay, this is, there'll be something of interest here it is, it's fascinating. You just get this complete like view on the world and I kind of. That's what I want with Weird Science. The. I mean that's why it's. People who've read it the last few issues will have noticed we've kind of expanded the non gaming content in there because just as when I always thought it was like oh, I don't want it just to be role playing games because I think there's all these blurry edges. So you know, I'm interested in war games, I'm interested in board games and I think I'm more interested in how any of these games make us what they tell us about the world around us or how they influence world or how the world influences them from that. I was like, well you know, if you're reading this you're probably interested in science fiction and fantasy, your science, these kind of things. I thought okay, we can have a space for that. And the other thing is I've always, there's always that thing where you pick up a magazine like Starburst or something like that and you know, or you know it'll be a music magazine or a film magazine and they'll have one page on games or something like that and you know they'll throw you a bone and there'll be. So I kind of wanted to be the reverse of that where it's like, you know, we can patronize the. Oh, you've released a film, have you? That's interesting. We might be able to find a page for you or something like that, you know to talk about it. But. But also yeah, just I wanted to kind of make it more of a, a cultural thing the whole way I look at games in magazine or want to look at games magazines as I say it's like looking at them as what do, what do games tell us about us? You know, whether it's social history or the time and you know, I think you can learn just as no one would ever question you if you said what do TV shows in the 1980s, you know, what does Boys from the Black stuff or what does a feed the same pet or something like that. Yes, they're entertainment and you know they were watched by millions. But they. You can use them. They're part of social history. You can look at it and say, okay, what does. You know, if you. If someone's looking back at the history of the 1980s in the UK, you can use films, you can use music as a way to talk about that. And I think it's exactly the same thing. You can talk about. What does Warhammer tell you about 1980s Britain? Quite a lot, I think, whether it was intended by, you know, there's a. You can overreach. And I think there's a lot of people like me who have, you know, share my kind of blatantly more, let's say, socialist beliefs or something like that, that want Warhammer to be this perfect satire of Thatcher's Britain. And I think that's a bit of a stretch, you know, having talked to, like, Rick Priestley and stuff like that, you know, they probably wouldn't come out and out say that, but at the same time, it was just what they were swimming in. You know, if you were vaguely countercultural in the 1980s and you were living in the Midlands in a vaguely depressed town, you know, there's absolutely no way that you aren't affected by the politics of what's around you. And even if you don't go out of your way to make Warhammer this perfect satire, and it's not, you know, it fails on several levels, but it. On, you know, you're still being influenced by that and. And the stuff that they're cribbing from. So 2000 AD, stuff like that, that's. Again, it's. It's people being written by people who are trying to say something about the world around them in a comic form, but also being entertaining at the same point. So sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But it's, you know, you're sw. There's all these influences around, so I think you can look back at it. And Malcolm Craig did a really, really good feature in our last issue on Cold War RPGs. So it's what he's doing a big thing on at his university. And, And I think it's.
- [30:24]
Dirt the Dice
I think. I think as well, I just want to point out your latest issue, issue 8 reminds us, doesn't it, you've got a really good article in there from Shannon Applekind about how role playing games themselves are rooted in magazines. That's where they started. So the chainmail was first printed through zines. And you've got a really good piece on Lee Gold, who of course had the alarms and Excursions which have finished recently after nearly 50 years. So role playing games are also rooted in that, these periodicals, aren't they?
- [31:06]
John Power Jr.
Yeah, 100%. And it's an. But it's a very odd history because it would be like if There was like two main music magazines for the last 50 years and they'd all been published by like Sony and Universal Records. And I think that's. There is this weird thing with print media and magazines and role playing games and like you said like the early history of it was all those apas and all those zines being made and incredible. I mean I've got this. Someone a year ago sent me this stack like massive 10 kilogram box of 80s British RPG zines and they're beautiful to read through and It's. And only 200 people might have read it. So it's like you're constantly reinventing the wheel unfortunately, which has been a problem that we've role playing games have had. But yeah, totally. So much of the early discussion and the people bandit hitting ideas back and forth and the just finding out what, you know, when they were trying to figure out what is this, you know, what are we actually playing? Because I think that's a huge question for a lot of them at the time was, you know, what the hell are. You know, this is something that is a bit similar to games that have existed before but not exactly, you know, it was its own thing. And so yeah, hundreds of these zines and people just spilling their creativity out into it. And then of course you have White Dwarf and Imagine and. But as I said it's very odd that you know the two, you know, when we think of role playing game magazines you'll probably think of early White Dwarf, you'll think of Dragon, you know, imagine if you're in the uk. But of course, you know, these were in house magazines. There have been very good non in house ones, Arcane Adventurer and few like that. But they tend to last about you know, 10 issues or something like that. And, and it was I. There was a lot of. There still is people. When I said I was going to do a magazine about role playing games I think the assumption for a lot of people I first spoke to would be oh, it'd be like adventures and new rules and, and stuff like that. And I did think about that and I was like, does that make sense? I mean part of it is, you know, the tradition of role playing game magazines is that they are just full of new rules and new adventures and new classes and all these things. I was like, well the thing is we're overloaded with that stuff now. There is, you know, when I was, you know, when we were kids getting it, you know, getting new adventures via White Dwarf was one of the only ways you could get semi official. You know, obviously we were all creating our own adventures, but that was our. You could you have the adventures in White Dwarf or something like that as a kind of yardstick to hold your own homebrew stuff up against and, and see what it is. And that was the only way we were getting new official content. Whereas today obviously it's. I don't know, you know, I imagine most of us have got, I mean far too much, you know, we're over drowning in new rules, in new adventures and at the drop of a hat, I mean, I've got a little hard drive down here with like a terabyte of PDFs of probably just all from about two bundles, you know, one of these big itch bundles for charity or something. And I've got like 10,000 PDFs now of every single game and thing you could possibly hope for. And if I want a new adventure, I can go on to drive through RPG and I can download one in seconds. So that was the thing when I started the magazine. I was like, okay, what actually are we going to cover? How are we going to do it? And I was like, well, I want it to be more like something like Little White Lies or you know, the Wire or like a music magazine where we treat games as cultural objects and worthy of discussing them as things that matter, not just as toys or whatever.
- [35:12]
Dirt the Dice
I think, I think you do that really effectively. I think particularly in this issue that there's a kind of dialogue taking place between the different articles as well. So there's kind of a consistency to it. So well done for that. And the other thing I wanted to point out. Now you started this by saying you were a graphic designer, but the pages that you've done about Fantines are amazing.
- [35:38]
John Power Jr.
That was. I'm kind of torn about that feature because it's. Shannon sent it over and it was really nice. I kind of started laying it out and it was a real pain in the ass to lay out. I couldn't work out how to lay it out. And then I was like, it struck me, okay, what I'll do is because originally I'd done the, the fake zine for the Lee Gold interview and I, I did that and I bought some lecture set and I had a really, really, really fun time and I was like, this is so much fun. And I made the, you know, sat there scribbling away, making it. I thought, okay, that's really. That's nice.
- [36:17]
Dirt the Dice
I'll do.
- [36:18]
John Power Jr.
I thought, okay, I'll do a similar one for the Shannon article, but just as a. The COVID And then I tried to lay it out and I just. I couldn't. It took me. It just didn't look good at all. And then I struck me, okay, well, let's make a full zine and then we'll photocopy it and. And do all that. And I think it works. And I was terrified about it because I thought there's a very, very, very good chance that it won't have come out when it's printed. It will be too dark or it'll be too. I'll have messed something up and it'll be fuzzy or something. But actually, thankfully, it's come out quite nicely. But I did really enjoy doing that by. It didn't come out quite how I wanted because it was like. We went to print on, like, the Monday evening and this was like, Saturday afternoon. I got back from a trip. I looked at the magazine again just before and I thought, no, that's not good enough. I need to fix this. So it was like, in the space of like one afternoon, cutting, photocopying stuff, cutting it up. And if I'd had, like a couple of days more, I could have made it nicer, I think. But. But it was really fun. And I say, like, I love doing. And from doing that, we have had this idea of. I've been trying to think of a way of making. Of giving something back to subscribers because that's how the magazine lives, you know, and. And at the moment, if you subscribe, it's like a pound cheaper or something, which is, you know, nice. But these days that's what, like half a biscuit or something. So. So what I'm trying to do is I was going to do, hopefully in the next issue and maybe the issue after, we're going to start doing a little zine to, like a proper A5 zine to go with the magazine for subscribers of something either just related to the issue as a whole, but like, something separate in some way. Just because I had so much fun sitting there with, you know, the exacto knife, cutting things up and chopping it out and trying to. You like, adding tip X and stuff to make it look. Yeah, there were bits that actually were genuinely, like. I managed to cut myself doing it and did, like, shoot blood. So there's one bit where there's a load of tippets on it which is covering up, you know, quite gory. Blood spurt. But then there was other, other bits where you know, you're trying to make it look as old and as possible. So it's a bit of a conceit.
- [38:39]
Dirt the Dice
But yeah, I liked it a lot. I liked a lot. And, and it's very readable as well. So well done with that. I mean it goes back to your origins, isn't it, that DIY culture which is. Drew you to role playing in the first place.
- [38:54]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [38:54]
John Power Jr.
I mean as I said like when we grew up, you, you just had to make do with, you know, I wasn't, you know, I didn't grow up in on the poverty line or anything like that. I grew up, you know, nice kind of working class, lower middle class, family kind of thing. But you know, you just didn't have much, you know, you see, you invented, you took what you had and built on that. And that's kind of, you know, it's the perfect hobby for that I think.
- [39:23]
Dirt the Dice
Tell us how we can get hold of Weird Science, right?
- [39:29]
John Power Jr.
Yes. So the easiest way is just to go to, well, our website which is Weird W Y R D Science. And then if you click on Shop, so if you go there you can find all the back issues we got in print or a link to subscribe on the new issue. And yeah, we got a. We can ship worldwide.
- [39:51]
Dirk Oblivion
So it's.
- [39:53]
John Power Jr.
Yeah. If anyone's interested, check it out then head over there. Thank you so much for having me. And yes, sorry I probably waffled on in an incredibly random manner, but no, it's been a lovely to sort of the. When I got back into games, the Grognar files was um, a huge thing that convinced me that it was that you could, as you say, look back as well as look forward. And you didn't have to, you didn't just have to be focused on the glorious past. You know, there was a glorious future as well. So coming on here, it's like getting my Blue Peter badge.
- [40:24]
Dirk Oblivion
I feel like it's been a pleasure,
- [40:27]
John Power Jr.
so thank you very much.
- [40:28]
Dirt the Dice
Well, thank you, John. Thank you.
- [40:30]
Blythe
Open box.
- [40:32]
Dirk Oblivion
Welcome to the room of role playing Mumbling. And I am in a room. I've got Blizzard with me.
- [40:38]
Blythe
Hello there. Hello, Doug.
- [40:39]
Dirk Oblivion
Now this is a part of the show where we look backwards to look forward. Now I know that you've got some trepidation about this because you don't know
- [40:48]
Blythe
what's coming, do you? No, I never do. Let's hope it works.
- [40:53]
Dirk Oblivion
So what I'm going to do, because we haven't done this for a while, is I'm going to take us in a time machine back to 1983. We're in my bedroom. I don't know if you remember this era of my bedroom. This.
- [41:05]
Blythe
Remember. Yeah. I've not got. There's nothing wrong with me. I can remember things. Yeah.
- [41:09]
Dirk Oblivion
But if you look around the room.
- [41:11]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [41:12]
Dirk Oblivion
What are you seeing? What are you seeing around the room?
- [41:14]
Blythe
Is this. Which bedroom? Is this part for road?
- [41:17]
Dirk Oblivion
No, this is.
- [41:17]
John Power Jr.
Yeah.
- [41:18]
Dirk Oblivion
I have moved into the new work.
- [41:21]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [41:21]
Dirk Oblivion
And my dad has been quite extravagant with.
- [41:23]
Blythe
I'm seeing MSI. I'm seeing like 1980s red and white furniture.
- [41:30]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah.
- [41:32]
Blythe
That kind of bright color contrast furniture.
- [41:35]
Dirk Oblivion
White. White shelves, red tubing.
- [41:38]
Blythe
Yeah. And we painted your bedroom. I remember painting your bedroom. What color did we paint it?
- [41:44]
Dirk Oblivion
It was red.
- [41:45]
John Power Jr.
Was it red?
- [41:45]
Blythe
We painted the walls red, didn't we? Yeah. That high plains drifter painting painted the wall red. I remember that. Yeah. So, yeah.
- [41:54]
Dirk Oblivion
I can remember my dad went hog wild at NFL treated me. I got a desk and the desk was too big for the room. It looked smaller in the channel.
- [42:04]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [42:05]
Dirk Oblivion
And I built it myself.
- [42:07]
Blythe
So don't open those drawers. Yeah. Don't know. The front will fall off.
- [42:12]
Dirk Oblivion
And I remember this because this is the thing that on the top of the. I didn't have a reading lamp, so what I thought I'd do, I wouldn't ask for a reading lamp because they bought all this stuff. I used my bank lamp. As you read.
- [42:25]
Blythe
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [42:27]
Dirk Oblivion
But it leaked the, say, Latry acid, you know, leak. And it was from the day one that a battery acid had left us down there. And so whenever my mum and dad came in, I had to maneuver things to cover.
- [42:41]
Blythe
Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [42:44]
Dirk Oblivion
And on that desk, of course, is a silver Reed 17 typewriter. Because we're gonna need that.
- [42:51]
Blythe
Gonna need a typewriter.
- [42:52]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. And in the corner there is my dad, Mum and dad's old valve set,
- [42:57]
Blythe
color TV, first one they got in the 70s.
- [43:00]
Dirk Oblivion
Ignored the smell of burning. Yeah, That'll go eventually.
- [43:03]
Blythe
Yeah. Open a window. Yeah. As the dog. Open a window. Open a dog with another window. Yeah. Was it the dog? Anyway, everyone blamed the dog, but was it the dog?
- [43:16]
Dirk Oblivion
So. So we're in that room and I want to take you back to 1983 because that was the point that we thought we would do Fanzine. Oh, yeah, yeah. So this is an imaginative exercise over the course of the next 40 odd minutes we're going to produce a funzine. But the good thing about this is that it's a funzine of the imagination that we don't have to do.
- [43:41]
Blythe
Oh, thank God for that. That's a good thing because in those days there was no such thing as podcasts. And also the idea of a fanzine involved actual effort, didn't it? Whereas this coverage, it's just thrown together us talking in case anyone haven't noticed. So. Yeah, yeah, you don't have to actually do it. Well, that looks all right.
- [44:00]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. So what it'll do. We're giving a gift to people listening. It exists in their imaginations. We don't have to print it.
- [44:07]
Blythe
It'll be much better there as well. Yeah, it'll look better in their imagination. Yeah, well, I hope it will.
- [44:13]
Dirk Oblivion
It is as I've been listening to acfm, which is the podcast done by Diem in Kia and Nadia. And they are have. They would talk about hobbies and the political significance of hobbies, but they make a point in that about how projects bring men together.
- [44:34]
Blythe
Yes. Yes.
- [44:36]
Dirk Oblivion
It is odd that our friendship, we've known each other for a very long time. 47 years.
- [44:42]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [44:43]
Dirk Oblivion
What's banged us together is having like odd projects.
- [44:46]
Blythe
Well, I remember a while ago talking to someone knows, a social worker, a children's social worker, and they made a very interesting point. It was about like young people's mental health, how it said. They said that what boys do is they get involved in hobbies and interests. So often young, I mean young men's mental health has kind of suffered, of course. But they said that they cope with things by going playing football, taking a path of car customizing the bicycle, those kind of things that are very male orientated hobbies and interests. So they might not be very social with each other in the way that girls are, but that sociability comes through. Let's all customize our bicycle. Let's all do this. And that's. I suppose that's what we were like at role playing. Creating a fanzine was like these projects.
- [45:41]
Dirk Oblivion
Building a robot for the whole.
- [45:43]
Blythe
Yeah, building a robot. We're supposed to do that. Yeah. We had to know something real grand
- [45:49]
Dirk Oblivion
designs that it was going to be.
- [45:51]
Blythe
It sounded stupid. But then a few years later robot wars came along. People clearly doing that.
- [45:55]
Dirk Oblivion
Exactly.
- [45:56]
Blythe
The only difference is we couldn't deny to do it.
- [45:59]
Dirk Oblivion
That's the difference.
- [46:00]
Blythe
No, no technical knowledge whatsoever.
- [46:03]
Dirk Oblivion
We did follow the same logic in sticking a biscuit tin on a big truck or something. Wasn't it?
- [46:07]
Blythe
Yeah, we did do that. Yeah. Yeah. But didn't have like a hammer on top going up and down to smash someone else's robot to pieces.
- [46:15]
Dirk Oblivion
But now I feel like I've missed out. Yeah, yeah.
- [46:18]
Blythe
Not really robot. I mean, people say it's robot wise. It's remote control car with a hammer on it, isn't it really? Yeah. It's not like a robo. It's not like C3PO, is it?
- [46:26]
Dirk Oblivion
No.
- [46:27]
Blythe
I mean, I used to quite like Robot wars, but I always remember thinking, is, is this a robot or is it like you said, just a big trout with the biscuits, you know, I don't know. It's not a robot, is it really? Not what I would in the popular imagination, a robot. No, a robot would be something that, I don't know, brought you a drink or something or engaged in conversation or tried to take over your house and kill you. That's a robot, isn't it?
- [46:54]
Dirk Oblivion
There are times watching it when you get that kind of frustrating feeling that this is very low grade entertainment.
- [47:01]
Blythe
It is. It is.
- [47:03]
Dirk Oblivion
When circular lots. Trying to push a biscuit tin into
- [47:07]
Blythe
a hole, you're thinking,
- [47:11]
Dirk Oblivion
what am I doing with that?
- [47:13]
Blythe
The biscuits and painted silver into a hole. Yeah. And at the same time avoiding the exciting flames that might be shooting out of one other part of the stage. So no one ever goes near. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It won't replace entertainment. Yeah, no.
- [47:28]
Dirk Oblivion
But creating fanzine has always been entertaining. So what we're going to do is we're going to create a fanzine. So we'll talk about aesthetics. It's gonna have to have a pink cover, isn't it? Because the local VG shop where we do the copying.
- [47:44]
Blythe
Yeah. We wouldn't want white paper because that seemed boring. But the only other color paper she got is pink.
- [47:49]
Dirk Oblivion
Yes, that's what you stuck with. So it's on pink paper and we need to come up with a name. Now to save us a bit of time, I have created a fanzine title Arama.
- [48:02]
Blythe
And there you have. You tested this by text on me last night, didn't you?
- [48:05]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, you got a bit confused.
- [48:06]
Blythe
I thought you'd gone mad. Yeah, just sending me Randolph. Doug's gone mad. The podcast gonna have to end. He's just sending random words to me. What's gone wrong with him?
- [48:16]
Dirk Oblivion
So what I've got. I've got two lots of 20 nouns.
- [48:21]
Blythe
Okay.
- [48:21]
Dirk Oblivion
With 20 verbs in the middle. All right. Are you with me so far?
- [48:25]
Blythe
I'm with you so far.
- [48:26]
Dirk Oblivion
I've got Them on the table. And we're gonna roll these not apparently at random, but actually at random. So you're gonna. You're gonna do.
- [48:34]
Blythe
Yes. Oh, this instead of just making a name up.
- [48:36]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah.
- [48:36]
Blythe
Okay. Okay.
- [48:38]
Dirk Oblivion
But they always have, like, convoluted names.
- [48:40]
Blythe
Yeah, they did have to have stupid names that. Yeah. Yeah.
- [48:44]
Dirk Oblivion
I think the one we went for was the Amtrak Adventurers Gazette.
- [48:49]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [48:49]
Dirk Oblivion
Which was boring compared.
- [48:51]
Blythe
Boring. Slightly pompous, but yeah. You had, like, tempestuous orifice and things like that. There was one called that.
- [48:58]
Dirk Oblivion
There was.
- [48:58]
Blythe
Yeah. I don't know why it sticks in my mind, but it does.
- [49:00]
Dirk Oblivion
Tempestuous.
- [49:01]
Blythe
Orific. Tempestuous or torching. Sorry, I can't remember.
- [49:05]
Dirk Oblivion
There was one called Verbal Diarrhea that I used to sign up. And the other one, I guess, is Doom's Book of Chaos. And that was actually done in Bolton. I only found out really recently that it was done in Bolton. So let's see what we can come up with.
- [49:26]
Blythe
Nice roll. Okay, here we go. So the first one.
- [49:29]
Dirk Oblivion
First one is eleven. Eleven.
- [49:31]
Dirt the Dice
So eleven is quartz.
- [49:34]
Blythe
Quartz. Quartz monster. Okay, roll again.
- [49:37]
Dirk Oblivion
Yes.
- [49:38]
Blythe
Twelve. Twelve.
- [49:39]
Dirt the Dice
Quartz monster Freezes.
- [49:42]
Dirk Oblivion
Eight. Eight.
- [49:44]
Dirt the Dice
Zordani.
- [49:45]
Blythe
Quartz monster Freezes Zordani.
- [49:48]
Dirk Oblivion
Are we going for that one or do you want. You can keep that. You can take that away with you Tonight.
- [49:52]
Blythe
Tonight. But if I go again, do I lose that one?
- [49:57]
Dirk Oblivion
I can speak in half.
- [50:00]
Blythe
Should we try another one?
- [50:01]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, go on.
- [50:01]
Blythe
All right. Okay. I'm not sure it works.
- [50:05]
John Power Jr.
12.
- [50:06]
Dirk Oblivion
You're all 12 again.
- [50:07]
Blythe
No, no, no.
- [50:08]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, yeah. So talk Amunda. Talk.
- [50:11]
Blythe
Among the. Yeah. Nine.
- [50:13]
Dirt the Dice
Nine meets.
- [50:15]
Blythe
Oh, this is more promising. 18.
- [50:18]
Dirk Oblivion
18. Doom.
- [50:20]
Blythe
Talk them under me to do. That's. I know. I prefer that.
- [50:25]
Dirk Oblivion
It works that one, don't it?
- [50:26]
Blythe
That's. Yeah.
- [50:27]
Dirk Oblivion
Talk them under me. He's doing. Let's have the third one, because the
- [50:30]
Blythe
best out of three so far. I prefer that.
- [50:33]
Dirk Oblivion
I did. I did spend an hour doing this,
- [50:35]
Blythe
so I wanted to get 10.
- [50:37]
Dirk Oblivion
10. Zed's crutch spike.
- [50:42]
Blythe
I really don't like it.
- [50:43]
Dirk Oblivion
Zed's.
- [50:44]
Blythe
No point going any further. Zed. What?
- [50:47]
Dirk Oblivion
Zed's crotch spike. I think it's like a Zed's crotch spike. Greg's crotch spike.
- [50:56]
Blythe
Greggs. Is that, like the softest rowers?
- [50:59]
Dirk Oblivion
They do Zeds. I forgot.
- [51:01]
Blythe
Zeds or Greg. Zed said.
- [51:03]
John Power Jr.
Greg said.
- [51:08]
Blythe
You said Greg said. I'm sure. Don't edit that out. You said Greg's. Come on. Right.
- [51:14]
Dirk Oblivion
Zeds.
- [51:15]
Blythe
Zeds. Crotch spike. Okay.
- [51:18]
Dirk Oblivion
I think it's a reference to David Bowie in the Labyrinth. Oh, yeah.
- [51:24]
Blythe
Okay. Right. Okay.
- [51:25]
Dirk Oblivion
And the next business.
- [51:28]
Blythe
Seven.
- [51:29]
Dirk Oblivion
Seven winds up seven again. Top deck. That doesn't work, does it?
- [51:36]
Blythe
Talk about it meets Doom.
- [51:38]
Dirk Oblivion
Talk Commander meets Doom. Okay, there you go.
- [51:40]
Blythe
That's a shot. It's Talk Commander's Doom.
- [51:43]
Dirk Oblivion
Talk Commander's Doom.
- [51:44]
Blythe
Yeah, I think that's. That's. That's that field that feels in keeping with the kind of names they had at the time.
- [51:53]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. Talk Commander's Doom.
- [51:55]
Blythe
Talk Commanders do.
- [51:57]
Dirk Oblivion
Our new fanzine, I can see it
- [51:59]
Blythe
in one issue only, being delivered straight to your imagination. This is the best place for it.
- [52:05]
Dirk Oblivion
So when. Think of fanzine, when you get a magazine, we used to get the White Dwarf. Where was it that you first went to?
- [52:15]
Blythe
Well, they were always full of things you would never use, aren't they? They were full of, you know. So you'd get a character class for D and D that someone had made of Armorer Gladiators. Gladiators. But there were always that character classes where you think, what use of this in the game? I mean, it's so niche. They're almost like character classes that White Dwarf rejected. You always get that feeling like, have you said this to White Dwarf? And they've rejected it? And then you sometimes got a scenario. And in a way, I always kind of ignored those things because.
- [52:44]
Dirk Oblivion
Yes.
- [52:45]
Blythe
Yeah. I was waiting for the articles. I think you were always going for. I was looking for an article about how to do stuff. Even though these things were written, you know, they weren't written by experts, were they? I mean, maybe there were no experts. There were there, but Looking for advice. Because at that point in our life, you didn't know many people who played. So you were keen. I was always kind of interested in what other people did or how they did it or what their opinion was on it. And in a fanzine was a way of getting that at the time. Because of course, back then that was all you had, wasn't it? Yeah, I would always kind of. Always kind of look for articles that were more general about stuff rather than very specific things for a particular game. Yeah.
- [53:34]
Dirk Oblivion
I really bought into the. In jokes that were in the. That kind of an editorial involvement.
- [53:43]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [53:44]
Dirk Oblivion
Where the editor was like talking to you about how it had been delayed and those problems.
- [53:50]
Blythe
Yeah. Because it was like. It was like. It was. It's like contacting the real world.
- [53:56]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. And did mention, like, oh, because I don't know, Zed Z O Greg is, you know, has not been done in his D and D campaign. And it was just those little bits. You'd only get like little bits of them.
- [54:11]
Blythe
They were like glimpse notices that other people were doing what you're doing.
- [54:14]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. Similarly, in the letters page is like.
- [54:16]
Blythe
Yes.
- [54:16]
Dirk Oblivion
He got that sense that people were submitting stuff and asking questions that you would ask. You were mentally asking as well.
- [54:23]
Blythe
Yeah, it was. It was. It was all. It was like the communicative element of it that you. You were hearing things. It was a. It's like a weird thing. Like it. It was like a phone tap or something, wasn't it? Where you were listening in to the world out there where other people were playing games, but when really it was just three or four of us that played it and didn't really have a sense of anyone else playing it.
- [54:47]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. And you get like the turns being played out of PBMs as well, didn't they? And just like listens. Some of it, like the diplomacy ones, just didn't understand, like a series of numbers. So you're trying to. You're like trying to decipher it and decipher as well, all the time. Trying to read between the lines of
- [55:09]
Dirt the Dice
what was going on.
- [55:11]
Blythe
It was a bit like a seance.
- [55:12]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, it was.
- [55:13]
Blythe
You're contacting the spirit world. There was definitely a spirit world out there. It didn't always quite make sense, but it was reassuring that it existed and it was out there. You were on your own. Felt like.
- [55:24]
Dirk Oblivion
Isn't it odd, though, that what they were trying to give you was like gainable content, was there?
- [55:30]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [55:30]
Dirk Oblivion
So they were trying to give you fanzine in the funds in. They were trying to give you scenari, new spells, new character class.
- [55:38]
Blythe
What they were trying to give you was, I've created this character class. I've created this, I don't know, pirate character class, something like that, that they would think, this is great because I'm putting it out there, or I've written this scenario and I put it out there and people will play this. And I like to say I'm giving you some kind of content, something to use in your game. But that's not quite what you were looking for, is it? You wouldn't necessarily use those things at all.
- [56:05]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. What striking. Now, if you come into the 21st century, that magazines that are out there, so like Weird Science and never mind the dice rolls and others that I produce, they don't have any of that gamble content in it is all about the chat and the articles and about the conversation and the cultural significance of particular games or where they fit in.
- [56:34]
Blythe
Arguably.
- [56:35]
Dirk Oblivion
Now I want more gainable content. Is that odd?
- [56:40]
Blythe
Well, yeah, I suppose it's not because I think as you, the more you play the game and the older you get, I suppose you get more confident about the way you do it, you know, I mean, don't know about you, but I kind of think this is the way I run a game, this is the way I play a game and that's that. Not that you can't learn new things and learn new approaches, but you have more of a sense of yourself. Whereas back then I don't think we did, did we? No. There was always that sense of am I doing it right? Whereas now I think, well, I don't care whether I'm doing it right. I'm doing it the way I'm doing it and it seems to work for the people I play with and that's good enough, really. And what I could really do with
- [57:19]
Dirk Oblivion
now is somebody coming up with a really good monster because I'm stuck.
- [57:22]
Blythe
Yeah. Or a great little one shot scenario for a convention. I, I'm, I'm doing in a month, two's time. Yeah, yeah. It would be really good. Yeah. So, yeah, I suppose you are, you're looking for stuff because I suppose again, come back to that thing of now. Time is more precious, isn't it? Because you're working, you've got families, whereas then you had all the time in the world to come up with a scenario. Exactly. That was, that wasn't the problem. The problem was, is the scenario. I've come up with a good way of doing this. So that's what you were looking for. Whereas now if someone said, right, are you running again next week? Come up with a scenario for next week. You think, all right, okay, hang on, have I got time to do this? What am I doing at the weekend at that kind of thing. Whereas back then if someone said come up with a scenario for next week, it pulled the time of the world, didn't you?
- [58:12]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. And also you just were more able to make stuff up as well. I felt more confident about just making stuff up because it didn't matter, did it?
- [58:21]
Blythe
Because it didn't matter as much. And I suppose because some things you'd never done before seemed exciting because you just never done it before. So things that might seem a bit hackney now didn't, didn't then. Because you'd never done that before. Yeah. Really.
- [58:34]
Dirk Oblivion
And also there wasn't the same commitment to having something that was narratively cohesive. It was more about.
- [58:40]
Blythe
Yeah, yeah.
- [58:41]
Dirk Oblivion
The next encounter.
- [58:42]
Blythe
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just fun to be in that world. Yeah. Knocking around, fighting monsters and doing things. Yeah.
- [58:50]
Dirk Oblivion
So we're gonna have a feature article each. Okay. What's your feature article? Or do you want me to go first with mine?
- [58:57]
Blythe
You go first. All right.
- [58:59]
Dirk Oblivion
So my first one is. It's something I was trying to pick up with you last time, but you kind of batted away when we talked about, oh, it's adrenaline, which is fair enough, because we haven't a lot to cover. But what is it about particular campaigns that makes you a gravitate towards them? Now, in 1983, this would be even more pertinent because what we'd be doing is looking at open box and you'd see these campaigns and games being presented to you and you had no sense really of what they were. And very often what you were doing was making stuff up. Like we were saying, you never. We could. Did we even call them campaigns? I'm not sure as we did.
- [59:43]
Blythe
No, I don't think we did. No, not initially. I think we did later on when the term became banded around.
- [59:49]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, I think it was the stuff you bought.
- [59:52]
Blythe
In fact, I remember your false memory days. I don't know, maybe you rumored it back one time. I don't know. But I think I remember a conversation with you, actually, once, and you telling me that something along the lines of, well, what you do is you run lots of games that are all interlinked because they call it a campaign. Yes, I think I remember that conversation.
- [60:17]
Dirk Oblivion
I probably got that from a fanzine.
- [60:19]
Blythe
Yeah. Yeah. They call it. I think you remember you saying that it's called a campaign, you know. Right. Okay. That's all you call it.
- [60:25]
Dirt the Dice
Yeah.
- [60:25]
Blythe
Then I think we just said, oh, we're running a campaign, then let's all run campaigns. That's what we're going to do.
- [60:30]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. And obviously we've talked extensively about the ones that we went towards and loved or Borderlands. And it had that gravitas, didn't it?
- [60:42]
Blythe
But I do.
- [60:42]
Dirk Oblivion
I do that thing. I do think that. Thinking, what is it? And then. And now that makes you think, right. I'm gonna. I'm gonna run this. I'm gonna commit to it. I'm gonna get the book. It's a big book. I'm gonna commit to it.
- [60:58]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [60:59]
Dirk Oblivion
And find the time. Carve out the time to do it. And at what point do you determine that actually this has got to end?
- [61:12]
Blythe
Yeah. It is a strange thing that. Why are you drawn to certain things? Some things just. You're drawn to another things, you know, you bounce off on a little thing or. I'm not interested in that. Yeah, it's strange, I think recently, like for my birthday, which was last week, I got the mythic Carpathia book for Basin and I've always fancied it. I've always fancied it set in like Eastern Europe, Hungary and Prague and all that vampires in it and a bit more kind of Eastern European. Oh, it's fancy. Why? I don't know why. I don't know why. It just has a certain sort of romance it air to it that I think, oh, that's good. You know, that kind of, you know, Transylvania, that kind of thing, you know, I think, well, I don't know why but somehow it pushes my buttons. Whereas other things don't. Yeah, it's an odd. It is an odd thing, isn't it? Yeah. Don't know that much about it. And sometimes reading, you know, reading reviews of campaigns, if you're trying to make your mind up in some ways they're not much use because you get people who say, oh it's not good and it's really good and you think, oh no, that's how much help.
- [62:20]
Dirk Oblivion
I think it just comes from an instinct. Yes.
- [62:22]
Blythe
Something that you hooked into. That's what I mean. Yeah, it does. It's an instinct or just something that somehow captures your imagination and you're not quite sure why that would be.
- [62:32]
Dirk Oblivion
There'll be a collective growing. Remember this is 1983.
- [62:36]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [62:37]
Dirk Oblivion
And I'm going to mention Runequest because that was like pivotal to what we were doing at the time. But I think this follows through to name right in the 21st century is what type of campaign get you drawn towards. So is it the episodic series of scenarios that are delivered and together that you need to deliver? So at the moment we're running the Borellis connection and that is a string of scenarios, a chain of scenarios in the same way that Borderlands was. On the other hand you can get the ones that we refer to them now as sandboxes but I'm not sure as they were.
- [63:19]
Blythe
But no, I don't think they were sandboxes.
- [63:21]
Dirk Oblivion
And they're like settings books, aren't they? Like Han was or Griffin Menti.
- [63:26]
Blythe
So yeah, I think the sandbox thing is kind of odd because as you know, one of my little hobbies is to look, I like quite, quite like looking at old D and D modules. Yeah. Because as you know, at the time they were all shrink wrapped in games workshop, weren't there? So all you Saw is the covers and the names and thought, well, that'll be exciting. And of course, you could buy them because they're prime directive. So. But I think what's interesting is those. See those settings, like Han, they weren't really a sandbox. They were just a setting, weren't they? That's all they were. Whereas if you look at some of the. There's a few early D and D modules from that period where they are the beginnings of sandboxes. So there's one called the Bone, the Curse of Bone Hill. That one I've talked about before. It got slagged off at the time, I think quite badly by some critics, but now it's held in a bit more high regard because it is like a sandbox. It's like there's something going on in this area, but you're just dropped in it and can work out what's going on and interact with various factions as you see fit. So it's the beginnings of a sandbox, but it wasn't called a sandbox. And I think they were quite rare back then because, as you say, settings like Han would. It's like Thieves World, isn't it? I mean, you could say sandbox because you go into Thieves World and you, well, do stuff.
- [64:55]
Dirk Oblivion
The places are open, but it's not really a sandbox.
- [64:58]
Blythe
I wouldn't say it's a sandbox campaign because there's no necessary overarching plot, is that. If you see what I mean.
- [65:06]
Dirk Oblivion
But what I want to say in this article for our readers.
- [65:11]
Dirt the Dice
Yes.
- [65:12]
Dirk Oblivion
Is that I'm dissatisfied with both, because if I look at the. At my past record, I tend to go for the episode once only because that kind of allows me to compartmentalize it more manageable. More manageable. It means that I can cut and paste stuff and do it. And I think. I think I like the idea of having, you know, climaxes along the way, so that it's kind of building up and that arcing idea that between each of these different scenarios, ultimately it's going to reach a point where everything comes together, like your massive Naya Flotep and all that kind of, kind of approach. But I'm always getting them. I'm a bit dissatisfied and plodding through them. What I really like as a player is the sandbox. This idea that you can feel your way around an area or an idea or a setting. But as a games master, I never go for those because I find I look at them and just think, well, there are harder work. Aren't they, they're harder work now and I think they were harder work then.
- [66:26]
Blythe
Yeah, hard work to roll. Because if you let players go anywhere it's difficult to, you know. Yeah, I suppose as well. What's interesting, the idea of sandbox. See we talked last time about Paris Trinax. Paris Trinix was a sandbox. But what was interesting about that was the length of time we would play it on a Saturday morning meant that you couldn't get that far into it and it allowed me to then prepare for the next one. If you think back to the 80s, we'd play for eight, nine, 10 hours. So if you had a sandbox and players went a bit off piste, it was a real problem because we were playing this for over six hours and what are you going over there for? Yeah, I've got to, you know, Whereas in Pirates of Drillax you would do something unpredictable. You would say, right, we're going to do some piracy here, then we're going to go over there and I'd go, okay, right, do the piracy. That takes a bit of time travel over there, give you a bit of an outline of the planet. Oh, it's 12 o'. Clock. You land on the planet. Okay, great. I've got time to prepare for it. But back then you would have landed on the planet and they got to have another six hours. Yeah, I've not really got anything ready. I didn't think you were going to do that. So I think back then the episodic things were far more appealing because there was that sensory. You knew what you were dealing with.
- [67:48]
Dirk Oblivion
I think my experience has been burned from the Conan.
- [67:52]
Blythe
Yeah, that was a. You're still smarting a bit from that.
- [67:56]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, yeah. Sets Conan and the Sorcerer.
- [68:00]
Blythe
It was terrible though.
- [68:01]
Dirk Oblivion
It was terrible.
- [68:01]
Blythe
It's not your fault. I think there's a couple of things in it that when you told me about them I thought stupid, stupid.
- [68:09]
Dirk Oblivion
But I was drawn to it because it seemed like a.
- [68:12]
Dirt the Dice
The premise was good, it was like an interesting idea.
- [68:15]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. But it's only when you get into the reeds of it you realize that, oh God, this is.
- [68:22]
Blythe
It's not been put together properly. So there's a few plot holes and bits that you think, oh no, that doesn't make sense at all.
- [68:28]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, yeah. And I think since then I've been quite cautious and similar with the Borales connection, which I'm loving, but it's just hard to keep that, that momentum and I think I feel that I was enjoying it more when it was the Sandboxing thing in Saigon.
- [68:47]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [68:47]
Dirk Oblivion
Because you had like the location was in one place. And I think in some ways having a campaign that is just moving around a place is more. It's more interesting to develop, I think. So I am seeking a campaign that actually pushes me. So rather than having a string of scenarios, I want one that is more of a setting.
- [69:14]
Blythe
That would be your feature article.
- [69:16]
Dirk Oblivion
That is my feature article. Signed off. Dirt the dice. Thank you. And I probably put questions at the end to invite a response from the fluttered pair. Yeah, yeah. So what's your feature?
- [69:28]
Blythe
My feature article. And this. I think this is still a bit of an issue today, but certainly was an issue then, would be handling NPCs in games.
- [69:39]
John Power Jr.
Yes.
- [69:39]
Blythe
I think back in the day, when you start out role playing, it's all about fighting. So the most particularly then those games back then, RuneQuest Travel. Yeah. DD, it's all about, oh, monsters, treasure, get your character better with his sword, fight bigger monsters. That kind of thing is. That's an easy way into it, isn't it? Yeah. Where that's an obvious and easy thing that you do, what you do with this game. As I remember our first games, I think the first games were Rukus. Players were really just set piece fights, weren't they? Set piece was fights.
- [70:13]
Dirk Oblivion
Set piece fights.
- [70:14]
Blythe
I remember
- [70:17]
Dirk Oblivion
Grindle we mentioned before it came like an arch enemy, didn't you?
- [70:20]
Blythe
Yeah, for some reason.
- [70:22]
Dirk Oblivion
For some reason. I think mainly because I used the Medusa figure.
- [70:27]
Blythe
Figure for him. It's like an old woman. Medusa.
- [70:30]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah.
- [70:31]
Blythe
You painted the hair gray. It just looked like gray hair rather than snakes. So, yeah, it's like an old woman with crazy hair.
- [70:38]
Dirk Oblivion
So I got it into my head
- [70:39]
Blythe
that it was ultimately evil, evil behind it all.
- [70:43]
Dirk Oblivion
And so all that meant was, like, for months, really. And things were thrown at you.
- [70:49]
Blythe
Yeah, just things.
- [70:51]
Dirk Oblivion
I bet it's Grindel who's done this.
- [70:54]
Blythe
But I do think one of the hardest things when you start roleplaying is the handling of NPCs, and certainly was back then, I think, because it's a slightly trickier leap of the imagination, isn't it? So when you're like 14 years old, it's quite easy to think of fighting a Manticore. Like some scene from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. It's very easy to do that, isn't it? Because you've been brought up on those kind of films. Well, what's more difficult, particularly at that age, is to understand how the local captain of the city guard might feel. About you lot carrying your swords around or. Yeah, that's me. It's a more difficult thing, isn't it? And difficult thing to get your head around? Maybe it's generally, but it's more difficult when you're that age. And certainly when I started playing, I remember thinking maybe like in travel there was all the stuff we signed where it all went like all traveller games, then everyone just becomes a space pirate. Everyone just starts shooting people. And it was fine, the fights were fine. But dealing with the kind of law enforcement elements of it, thinking, well, if they're doing this, what are the local law enforcement thinking? What are they gonna do? What about that guy who survived and escaped and he knows who you are, what's he gonna do now? You know, like thinking through these imaginary people's reactions and actions to things you're doing. It's all right if you shoot like Traveler, you shoot at someone with your laser rifle and they shoot back. That's easy to run, isn't it? But if you shoot at him and he runs away, gets in the escape pod and thinks, well, they just tried to kill me, what's he going to do? Yeah, where's he going to go? What are the consequences? You see what I mean? Those kind of things I think are quite tricky and they were certainly tricky back then because it was almost like an unexpected consequence of role playing game. So you get into role playing, all right, you can be in a spaceship and fly around and do some piracy, do this and do that. Oh, that's all great. That all makes sense to you when you're 14. But what's trickier is almost like role playing adults. Yes, you see what I mean? So you actually required as a kid to sort of role play an adult npc, you know, the local law enforcement on the planet you've landed on. And how are they going to react to what are they going to say? What are they going to do? You know, what's the view of you if you try and brag them? What's their reaction?
- [73:35]
Dirk Oblivion
I think they're really tricky things and. But I think underlying that was our obsession with creating NPCs as well. And we used to have these things called scenario nights on a Monday night where we got together and it was about the painfulness of having to create NPCs but we were obsessed with creating stat blocks for those NPC rather than creating personalities with an attitude. And I think it came later. I mentioned this before that when you saw it in Imagine magazine. Imagine magazine, when they presented pellinor and they used to give a little bit of a flavor text about what that person was like, what motivates them, who they didn't like.
- [74:26]
Blythe
Yes. Yeah. And it's just a few bullet points really of give you enough to think, oh right, okay, I get this. But it never really occurred to us. You're right. Because one of your big gripes about RuneQuest you say, oh, creating NPCs so difficult. You've got to go all the stats, work out their armor on each body part and then work out skills. It was really tedious, time consuming, but
- [74:49]
Dirk Oblivion
one of the genius bits of Apple Aid. It wasn't really the stats blocks could have used anything. We used our brains and just thought, well, I could use anything for the blocks. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't matter. It was that little block of text that explained who the person was. And we never really got past that because as you say, we were just obsessed with working.
- [75:13]
Blythe
Yeah, because you're just a kid and you haven't really thought about what these people might really think or do and how they might respond to things in a. Obviously not the real world, but in a kind of assumed real world, what would they really think? So I think that would be my feature article. It would be about what tips on how to make your NPCs more obviously I don't think I'd write. I'm sure I'd write it though. I picked a feature article. But what I'm saying is it's one I want to read, not maybe it's from another submission from someone else. Someone else come in and we thought this is good, isn't it?
- [75:48]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. Just to build on something that you were saying and bringing it into the 21st century and US now. Because it's all about looking backwards to look forward. I feel at the time we were comfortable about playing adults and I always remember that when we picked an aide, other than traveling where you acted, that was kind of part of the mechanics built into the mechanics. And some other games you determine the age through the mechanics. But very often we picked an age. It was always like 22, 23. Seemed very old.
- [76:25]
Blythe
Quite mature. Well, quite old. Yeah.
- [76:30]
Dirk Oblivion
However now we knocking on 60, aren't we? You, you feel a bit uncomfortable if you're asked to do the other way. So some of these games that are around now, like Tales from the Loop.
- [76:43]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [76:44]
Dirk Oblivion
Play Kid, Play Kid. And all the hang ups that come with kids and particularly someone like Monster Hearts. Yeah, we have a discussion about that. Because Monster Hearts deals with like the sexuality between well, didn't he think it's
- [76:58]
Blythe
from the floods like that. So that the sequel to Tales from the Loose Things from the Flood is a bit like that. And I must admit, you've run things from flood a couple of times. But when I've run it, I've probably torn down all that element of it. But yeah, that talks about those kind of things because you're actually older teenagers. 16, 17, 18, 19 kind of thing. And it brings in all those kind of things that. Yeah, as an adult, it's very slightly uncomfortable, don't you think? I don't ever want to play teenage boy who's got some, some, you know, hang ups about, you know, the sexuality or something. I'm not sure. Yeah, nothing wrong with that. But I'm not sure I'm the right person to be playing it.
- [77:37]
Dirk Oblivion
I don't know, around a table with other people and the. So. So there we are at the extreme ends of this future article as kids feeling uncomfortable playing adults and what the.
- [77:49]
Blythe
And now as adults, you're very comfortable playing child. Even though I have been a child. But it was so long ago. It's just a vague memory. All I can remember is your red painted walls, your leaky biplane, all the other emotional trauma I've packed to where I don't want to revisit it in a game. And put them in.
- [78:06]
Dirk Oblivion
And drawers, but don't open.
- [78:07]
Blythe
Don't open the door. Yeah, because the metaphor now, isn't it? Yeah, put a thought. So your memories in that drawer. Don't open it. Yeah, yeah, just. Just play Dungeon Crawl classics and fight monsters. Nothing more complicated than that. Thank you very much. That would be. That would be my feature article, but signed off someone much cleverer than me, maybe a bit older.
- [78:29]
Dirk Oblivion
Okay, you've got one bit of Gamble content to deliver.
- [78:35]
Blythe
One bit of Gamble content.
- [78:37]
Dirk Oblivion
Oh, now at the weekend we're going to be playing Corum, Stormbrigger, Morpecon and I am struggling. I'm struggling with one aspect of it and which I've never struggled with before and I never did back in that bedroom in 1983. And that's making up a monster. Making up a monster is really hard. I want to design a monster that's fitting in the world, but make it a bit more interesting. And so because in the spirit of Moorcock, making it unusual and having to kind of describe it referring to something that exists but it be.
- [79:15]
Blythe
Or do you find you think of something like. Oh, that's just like a Manticore.
- [79:19]
Dirk Oblivion
Yes. Oh, that's just Like a basilisk.
- [79:21]
Blythe
Oh, that's just like a hydra. Oh, it's all been done.
- [79:25]
Dirk Oblivion
It's all been done.
- [79:26]
Blythe
It has all resulted with ancient Greeks and the monsters. You've done it all. Why?
- [79:32]
Dirk Oblivion
And I'm sure that we've discussed this before, but you always end up like making something big. It's something that exists in the world big. Like the badger, as we.
- [79:42]
Blythe
A giant badger.
- [79:43]
Dirk Oblivion
A giant badger, for example.
- [79:45]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [79:46]
Dirk Oblivion
Or you end up hybridizing a badger with a goat.
- [79:50]
Blythe
Yeah, yeah. Or some such.
- [79:55]
Dirk Oblivion
And you can't really get out of that. Or you make something that is so monstrous and not of this world that it becomes like HP Lovecraft comes off the shogh. You have stuck a shogh.
- [80:06]
Blythe
You realize you've stuck a shogeth in it. Really intensive, but you have.
- [80:10]
Dirk Oblivion
There must be some way of creating a monster.
- [80:13]
Blythe
Well, there are some games that have tables. I mean DCC has a table for creating monsters. I think I recently got Shadow Dark and that's something. So there are some games that do have little tables in. To create monsters. Yeah.
- [80:26]
Dirk Oblivion
So what does that do say, like.
- [80:28]
Blythe
Well, you just said roll and for what it looks like, roll for special ability roll for this stuff, you know, and it kind of gives you a supposed. Stick some ideas together for you. Yeah. I think DCA is one for like. I think it's for demons as well. It's got one where. But whether that is really what you're after, I don't know. You'd probably roll on the table. Oh, no, I don't like that. Roll again.
- [80:50]
Dirk Oblivion
So it's a work in progress. And what's the deadline for this magazine? Might never come by then.
- [80:58]
Blythe
Might never come.
- [81:00]
Dirk Oblivion
But I'll work on this month, next week.
- [81:02]
Blythe
Because that at the time in the
- [81:04]
Dirk Oblivion
80s that descent seemed like a lifetime.
- [81:07]
Blythe
Next Tuesday.
- [81:08]
Dirk Oblivion
So making a monster. But you might have to wait for it.
- [81:10]
Blythe
Making a monster. Yeah. I don't know what game of content when I put in. You see again, I think. I think now, as you said earlier, the game over content I would like is a nice little scenario that I would read and think, ah, that's quite cool. It's quite clever. That's quite cool. I'll run that. But back then I don't think that's what I would have. I wouldn't have necessarily considered gamble content then.
- [81:32]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. I would probably come up with like
- [81:35]
Blythe
a cult for RuneQuest, wouldn't I? Or something like that. Imagine doing something like that. I did the last thing I would do now it's the last Thing I would do now.
- [81:42]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, well, I did do that. I do remember Marthian Chronicles, the Martian Chronicles. Now this isn't going to be in Maine's list of stuff for granted because I think there were only about five of them produced. But it was a friend we met in York. Was that this Right. And he produced a fanzine and he put my Cult of Aqualass in there. Yeah. And my scenario with hallm lock shells and noddled.
- [82:12]
Blythe
Oh, Nadalde's quack. Nadalde's quack. Duck, duck. Detective. There you go. You see Detectives again.
- [82:19]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. I think there's still room for scenarios. I want to say the one pager but they're always.
- [82:29]
Blythe
I never convinced by them, never convinced me why you sessed me. Fitting up a page. You can use more than one page. We're not going to hold it against you.
- [82:37]
Dirt the Dice
Yeah.
- [82:38]
Blythe
You got four or five pages if you want.
- [82:40]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah.
- [82:41]
Blythe
One page scenario. Okay.
- [82:44]
Dirk Oblivion
But there are 8:30 if you're going ichar on.
- [82:47]
Blythe
Yeah, yeah. There's loads of stuff.
- [82:48]
Dirk Oblivion
There's lots of stuff and there are some. Some real gems in there. Yeah, you can get them for old school essentials and stuff like that. But how do you find the ones
- [82:58]
Blythe
I know and that's the problem. How do you find the ones that are any good? Is what you get is people say. And I've bought things that people say. The reviews. Oh, it's brilliant. It's brilliant. I know it's not. Yeah, you know. And then you find others, you think, oh this is really good. But there's no real way of knowing, is there? No. Until you've got it and. And you're either gonna go that's great or no, it's not disappointing.
- [83:22]
Dirk Oblivion
And that's why I think you need magazines. Cause it's all very well to say there's all that content out there on the way.
- [83:29]
Blythe
Curation of it.
- [83:30]
Dirk Oblivion
Curation.
- [83:30]
Blythe
Curation of it. Someone has decided if you trust the editor, you trust the person curating it, he's okay, I trust you. You've picked some good scenarios and good things before so I'll assume it'll be good again.
- [83:43]
Dirk Oblivion
There is something to be said for something that pulls together stuff that's on that edge and drive through and pulls it together once every quarter and says these are our selection of the. And put it out as an actual magazine, a physical magazine that you can
- [84:02]
Blythe
hold because there is a bewildering amount of stuff out there. You go on drive through loads and loads of stuff in the loads of system agnostic stuff. And if you're looking for something to run, it becomes a bit bewildering at times. A bit. You just do. For God's sake. I don't know. I'll give up, you know. Write your own. Yeah, but at the time I felt lucky for something. I could have ripped me out.
- [84:23]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah.
- [84:24]
Blythe
You know. Yeah. No, yeah, that's good.
- [84:26]
Dirk Oblivion
So you're doing a little scenario.
- [84:29]
Blythe
Well, yeah, no, I'm doing a cult for Room Quest.
- [84:32]
Dirk Oblivion
Call for Room Quest.
- [84:33]
Blythe
I wouldn't do a scenario. Are we talking about then? Talking about then I would do something like a cult for Room Question. Yeah. Because that was our obsession, wasn't it? Room Question. Obsession. Know cults of cults. I used to love Cults of Pratt.
- [84:47]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. I was not quite convinced by your submission. Do a.
- [84:52]
Blythe
You're judging me by. You're judging me now because you know I've got a bit of a grip against RuneQuest. But not then. You wouldn't. You wouldn't have said that then.
- [85:00]
Dirk Oblivion
No, that's true.
- [85:00]
Blythe
You wouldn't, would you? See? Yeah.
- [85:02]
John Power Jr.
What's that called?
- [85:03]
Blythe
Self.
- [85:03]
Dirk Oblivion
Goats and bad years.
- [85:05]
Blythe
Giant badges.
- [85:06]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah.
- [85:06]
Blythe
Giant badger coat.
- [85:08]
Dirt the Dice
Giant badger.
- [85:08]
Dirk Oblivion
Giant badges. Okay, so this is the best bit.
- [85:12]
Blythe
Knife. Okay.
- [85:13]
Dirk Oblivion
Okay, we've got some correspondence.
- [85:16]
Blythe
Letters page.
- [85:17]
Dirk Oblivion
This is the letters page.
- [85:18]
Blythe
Who the editors have to respond.
- [85:19]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. So we've asked the grog squad to write in as if they're writing in from 1983.
- [85:26]
Blythe
Right. Okay.
- [85:27]
Dirk Oblivion
All right.
- [85:27]
Blythe
And it was interesting.
- [85:29]
Dirk Oblivion
Okay. Dear Dirk and Blythe. That's us. We weren't known as that then.
- [85:34]
Blythe
I was kind of known as Blythe, wasn't it? Yeah.
- [85:37]
Dirk Oblivion
I was known as Tiarti.
- [85:39]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [85:40]
Dirk Oblivion
Charity.
- [85:41]
Blythe
People be puzzled by that.
- [85:43]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. Charity.
- [85:44]
Blythe
Don't explain. Don't apologize, don't explain for it.
- [85:47]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. Dear Charity and Black, I'm hoping to go to university this September.
- [85:56]
Blythe
Well done. Well done. What do you. Well, at the time we would have said, what's a university?
- [86:02]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. That's something that other people.
- [86:05]
Blythe
That's a lot of people going to university. Not us. That.
- [86:09]
Dirk Oblivion
Cost caps.
- [86:10]
Blythe
Some pasties. Any. Go on, carry on.
- [86:13]
Dirk Oblivion
Dad, what's the university?
- [86:15]
Blythe
Cloth caps and pasties and dying industry. Yes. Permanent unemployment. Staring us anyway. Go on.
- [86:24]
Dirk Oblivion
What the hell's the university? Never you mind.
- [86:27]
Blythe
Don't worry about that.
- [86:28]
Dirk Oblivion
Get to work.
- [86:28]
Blythe
Get a job in a factory. There aren't any of them all sure. Oh, on that case, go to university now.
- [86:34]
Dirk Oblivion
My mother just caught me reading Apple Lane.
- [86:39]
Blythe
What are you going to say then?
- [86:42]
Dirk Oblivion
Instead of doing a level revision, she Looked at the book in disgust and said, you need to grow up. If you get to university, you won't find anyone who wants to play baboon games. Please could you advise me? Eli should reply to her. And that's from Simon in Middlesbrough.
- [87:05]
Blythe
Goat Major.
- [87:08]
Dirk Oblivion
It's fucking agony.
- [87:09]
Blythe
And say the doctor.
- [87:10]
Dirk Oblivion
It's an angry answer.
- [87:11]
Blythe
They're not baboons. And these are not just games. That's the answer, isn't it?
- [87:17]
Dirk Oblivion
I found myself in that position. I probably. When I left school, for reasons unknown to myself and you.
- [87:27]
Dirt the Dice
We both did the same thing.
- [87:28]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [87:28]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. We weren't doing business to this, didn't we?
- [87:30]
Blythe
We did, yeah. I think we were slightly seduced by Margaret Thatcher's entrepreneurial. Yes. Given that she shut all the factories apart from Vantona, which was a knicker factory, wasn't it, where they would recruit, like loads of girls from. Do you remember, they come to school and all these girls go on going, working at Vantona. And you'd think, well, it was the nicker industry thriving. But, you know, like, everything else is dying outside.
- [87:57]
Dirk Oblivion
It was slightly sinister, wasn't it?
- [87:58]
Blythe
Like Logan's one. It was like, cold.
- [88:00]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. Yeah.
- [88:01]
Blythe
I'm going to Bantona. You are. What the hell's that?
- [88:05]
Dirk Oblivion
They would come in, would they, on careers and they would do presentations. Yeah, yeah.
- [88:13]
Blythe
What's that about?
- [88:14]
Dirk Oblivion
Anyway, anyway, so we did.
- [88:16]
Blythe
We went business studies because we fought for about five minutes.
- [88:19]
Dirk Oblivion
We had to do something.
- [88:20]
Blythe
But we had to do something, didn't we? When you're being offered YTS in Grimsby on a trolla, business studies is a better option.
- [88:29]
Dirk Oblivion
I would say that I failed that year because I got nothing out of that year.
- [88:34]
Blythe
I didn't get anything out of that year because of role playing games. I would. But I would also say I didn't get anything out of that year because it was very boring. It wasn't really me. And when you think of when we did go to university, the subjects we both did are about as far removed from business studies as you can. Can possibly get.
- [88:52]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah.
- [88:53]
Blythe
So I don't think it was all role playing fault. I think it was also. It was really boring.
- [88:58]
Dirk Oblivion
It was really boring. But what you could say is that we were getting an education through role playing games.
- [89:04]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [89:04]
Dirk Oblivion
Because it was expanding our hinterland of games.
- [89:07]
Blythe
Yeah, of course.
- [89:09]
Dirk Oblivion
And we were investigating things like history and literature.
- [89:13]
Blythe
Yeah. I would also say to go back charge and to ask his mum, how do you know there's baboons in these games? Because I'd say That's not immediately apparent.
- [89:24]
Dirk Oblivion
She's been reading that.
- [89:25]
Blythe
She's been reading them. Aren't you? Yeah, she's been. Right. I'd challenge her there. I'd say, how do you know? Because it's not immediately apparent. At a curse. You glance at the RuneQuest 2nd Edition Rules and Apple Layer, I'd say it's not immediately apparent there's baboons in it. Well, there's a. Quite.
- [89:39]
Dirk Oblivion
You can.
- [89:39]
Blythe
You can question the questioner there. I go. Up major.
- [89:42]
Dirk Oblivion
Dear Mr. Dice and Mr. Blythe, for my birthday this year, my mummy and daddy took me to.
- [89:49]
Blythe
How old is this person pretending to be Mummy and Dad?
- [89:53]
Dirk Oblivion
I don't know. I might be quite young because our readership is a cross section.
- [89:59]
Blythe
All right, fair enough.
- [90:00]
Dirk Oblivion
My mummy and daddy took me to see Return of the Jedi at the cinema. I had my two best friends with me. We loved the movie. It was ace. We've been playing lots of games of Star wars with our new action figures, but we're running out of ideas. I'm sad that Darth Vader died. I liked him. I'm also sad that there'll be no more Star Wars.
- [90:23]
Blythe
Grow up and play some baboon games. That's the answer to that one.
- [90:26]
Dirk Oblivion
Could you recommend some games for us to play to keep our dreams alive? And that's from Christian F. I. But I remember seeing Return of the Jedi and when I saw it, I felt privileged. Do you know why I felt privileged?
- [90:43]
Blythe
Why do you feel privileged?
- [90:44]
Dirk Oblivion
Because I felt we could emulate what happened in.
- [90:47]
Blythe
Yeah. It felt like all the other Muggles in the cinema couldn't do that. But you could leave and go, I'm gonna recreate this. Yeah, yeah.
- [90:57]
Dirk Oblivion
Playing this world.
- [90:58]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [90:59]
Dirk Oblivion
All the things. Like the rancor monster was brilliant. So the rancor monster, you were instantly stating it out in your head.
- [91:06]
Dirt the Dice
Weren't.
- [91:06]
Blythe
Yes, yes. Yeah. Thinking, oh, I'm gonna put that in.
- [91:09]
Dirk Oblivion
Oh, he's. He'd be a bit. At that time, he'd be a bit earnest about the fact that he used a big femur bone to fight with him. And I don't think the odds are on the monster.
- [91:22]
Blythe
Yeah, yeah, yeah. As Luke's got. We got the strength to pick that up and wield it.
- [91:27]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, I'm sorry.
- [91:29]
Blythe
Sorry about that. It's only gonna do D4 damage anyway.
- [91:32]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, yeah. Always eating. Yeah.
- [91:35]
Blythe
Save us to be an so.
- [91:38]
Dirk Oblivion
I mean, we are going to do
- [91:39]
Blythe
a episode on Star wars, aren't we? At this time, the Star wars role playing game exist.
- [91:45]
Dirk Oblivion
I Don't know.
- [91:46]
Blythe
It did. It came a few years later. So your only option there is to play Traveler or Space Opera but I suspect might stumble your brain because it's so complicated.
- [92:01]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. We are going to do an episode on Star wars at some point but we played been building this one for three years and we're reluctant to do it, aren't we?
- [92:13]
Blythe
Because you bigger topic, doesn't it?
- [92:14]
Dirk Oblivion
It's a big topic.
- [92:15]
Blythe
Yeah, it is.
- [92:16]
Dirk Oblivion
And it's something that's very close to
- [92:19]
Blythe
our hearts but it's closer to other people's.
- [92:22]
Dirk Oblivion
Yes, that's your problem.
- [92:24]
Blythe
Yeah, yeah. We love Star wars as a massive part of our life, but there are other people who love it more than we do. And you know, once we start talking about it, will we cause offense? That's the worry, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. But I think my advice to him is go and buy Traveller and try and emulate Star wars with it and fail like I did. But it'd be too late then because you'll be bitten by the bug. And even though Traveller won't emulate Star wars, you still won't be able to stop playing it.
- [92:55]
Dirk Oblivion
Dear Dirk Oblivion, I also play Runequest down in Essex. I've heard of Manchester in our geography all level classes. It sounds like an interesting place. KCM has just released Pavis and the Big Rubble box set.
- [93:11]
Blythe
They're amazing.
- [93:12]
Dirk Oblivion
I heard that KSIEM has signed a deal with Avlon Hill to Bubba's request.
- [93:17]
Dirt the Dice
I'd really get your. Like to get your thoughts on that. It should be great.
- [93:22]
Dirk Oblivion
Right. Thanked Peter for Matics Avalon Hill Runequest Avalon. Well, they're going to do it and so this was a point, wasn't it, where there was a lot of excitement about Avalon Hill getting into the role playing games. And I think we've talked before about powers and perils. It was always it's like build up like this. There's going to be like a panacea of role playing.
- [93:48]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [93:49]
Dirk Oblivion
And we didn't get it because we couldn't afford these order. We didn't get a big rumble.
- [93:55]
Blythe
No, no. I remember I have again vivid memory of seeing the Avon Hill Runequest box set and being like astonished at the price of it.
- [94:04]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. But even if you go back to Big Rubble on Payless, it goes back to my feature article Peter from Essex. In my feature article I looked at them and I thought has it got scenarios in it? If they not link scenarios to like. It's like a picture of a city and this. And I felt Like I'd had my fingers burnt with Trollpak, which was all very interesting to me, but what was I meant to do with it?
- [94:36]
Blythe
Yeah, that was true though because you were really taken with weird with Trollpak. I remember being again kind of envious because Traveler didn't have anything similar. Not like that. Then it didn't have anything that really went into these alien races or anything like that. Remember the guy saying gret. But then like you say, you didn't really run anything with it because you didn't know what to do with it. Yeah, it was just like a. Oh yeah. But what do I do with this from a gamble perspective?
- [95:02]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then it had scenarios in it, but they just felt like, do you want these?
- [95:08]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [95:10]
Dirk Oblivion
And I think similar with Pavis and Big Rubber. I love the covers. I love the idea of them but they were expensive and I thought, but I'm not going to be burnt again.
- [95:22]
Blythe
Yeah.
- [95:23]
Dirk Oblivion
What I want is Borderlands. I want seven adventures.
- [95:26]
Blythe
Seven adventures? Yeah. You know it going to be. Yeah. Seven runnable adventures. Yeah, yeah. But they just were very expensive. They have them. They all boxed out. I don't know how much it was.
- [95:35]
Dirk Oblivion
It means it was about 30 quid, wasn't it? I was told.
- [95:38]
Blythe
Yeah, but. But in those days everyone. That was a lot of money. It was, you know. Now it seems ludicrous that that would be an off putting price. But I think at the time it was, wasn't it?
- [95:50]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, seven, eight quid was felt. Felt like a lot, wasn't it?
- [95:53]
Blythe
It wasn't like Runequest box set like 7.99 or 8.99 or something. That was almost a tenner, which was quite a lot. And then this came along and it was 30 or 40 quid. It just seemed like, oof. One more. All right.
- [96:06]
Dirk Oblivion
Hi Dirk. Longtime reader, first time writer. I'm a big movie fan. Do you think that we'll ever see role playing games that are dedicated to a particular film or movies? I love a game in the Star wars universe or play as Indiana Jones or maybe capture Ghost as a member of the Ghostbuster franchise. I'd even play game based on the Planet of the Apes. So the film's Alien and Blade Runner. Enjoy the show. Keep up the good work, Mike.
- [96:39]
Blythe
Well, just you wait, little Mike. It's all coming your ways. Give it 40 years. They'll all be there for your.
- [96:44]
Dirk Oblivion
Own it. You'll have so many.
- [96:47]
Blythe
You won't. You'll have so many. You have so many that you want to do yeah.
- [96:52]
Dirk Oblivion
And you'll get to the point where you think, why didn't I just do this with something else?
- [96:57]
Blythe
It's funny, though, that question, isn't it? Because of course, some of the things you mentioned there would soon appear, wouldn't all of them? Yeah, you know, would soon appear and then all the other things are going to be a bit later, aren't they? Yeah, but what's kind of interesting about that, I think, is at the time, we were very sniffy about that, weren't we?
- [97:15]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, absolutely.
- [97:16]
Blythe
We were very sniff. I don't. Didn't. I mean, we played Ghostbusters with Mike. Somebody else will call Mike, he might be a bit older. And it was really good. It was a really good game. And I was amazed how good it was, given that it was quite an old game. But at the time I think we were a bit. Oh, I'm not playing like Ghostbusters. No, my imagination, my credible imagination, because I'm recreating Return of the Jedi in my own way, so. And it was like the Indiana Jones game that was. I mean, that was a bit panned, wasn't it? By critics.
- [97:50]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, stuff like that. So mainly because they put trademark on Nazis, didn't they? Yeah. Remember they had tsl, were obsessed with putting TM on it.
- [98:04]
Blythe
Yeah, they did. Oh, I know they were, yeah. Trademark on. Now it's a pretty. That Nazis aren't trademark, because then you could stop doing it. Breach of trademark. Stop doing that anyway.
- [98:13]
Dirk Oblivion
But, yeah, but there was always this feeling that.
- [98:16]
Blythe
And you still.
- [98:16]
Dirk Oblivion
You still hear it today, to be honest. This idea that, well, Indy couldn't die, therefore. Where's the fun in that?
- [98:24]
Blythe
Yeah, where's the fun in it?
- [98:25]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah, people say now, though, they say, oh, you can't die very easily.
- [98:29]
Blythe
Yeah, you can't die.
- [98:30]
Dirk Oblivion
So what's the. What's the point?
- [98:33]
Blythe
But we played games, we played Tales from the Loop, and in Tales from the Loop, you literally can't die. Yeah. And as I always say, one of the funniest things about that game, I ran it. First game I ran, I go. It was two sessions for you in edit and in Tales from the Loop, you can't die. You just become broken. So the worst thing that can happen to you as a kid is that you become broken. You fail the scenario and it's resolved in some other way by law enforcement or whatever. And we were on the one with dinosaurs, didn't come through the time portal and you failed. You both failed and were broken. And they would see you. Hope it's not. If you'd have been killed, you'd have got bothered. But the fact you were. You just. Just. Well, you failed.
- [99:18]
Dirk Oblivion
There's been some glory in that.
- [99:20]
Blythe
There'd be some glory. Yeah. But you. You failed. What happens there was. It's just sorted out by other kids and police. Oh. So like you said, the idea that you can't. You might be able to die, but you can fail, can't you? Yeah.
- [99:34]
Dirk Oblivion
But a lot of these film franchise wounds that came around that time were trying to eat the Star wars one to some extent. And Ghostbusters, you start to get this idea of story in it, didn't it? To try to.
- [99:49]
Blythe
Yeah, yeah.
- [99:49]
Dirk Oblivion
Reconcile that it was less procedural like Oxygen.
- [99:52]
Blythe
Yeah. And a bit more open and. Yeah.
- [99:56]
Dirk Oblivion
Narrative and. Yeah, there we go. Well, that got a lot to look forward to.
- [100:03]
Blythe
Be Great magazine. Great fancyness in your imagination.
- [100:06]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah.
- [100:07]
Dirt the Dice
Right.
- [100:08]
Dirk Oblivion
There we go. I think we've got enough there. And why do you think so? Fantastic. I think we can staple that. Eh?
- [100:15]
Blythe
Get it. Get it on the old photocopy at the VG shop.
- [100:18]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah.
- [100:19]
Blythe
Or one of those banda machines.
- [100:20]
Dirk Oblivion
Remember that?
- [100:20]
Blythe
The purple things that are purple ink.
- [100:23]
Dirk Oblivion
That.
- [100:23]
Blythe
The smelly, weird smell stuff.
- [100:24]
Dirk Oblivion
Well, that in that VT shop we
- [100:26]
Blythe
used to go on, people wondering, what's a VG shop? It was just called the VG shop, wasn't it? It was a VG stand.
- [100:34]
Dirk Oblivion
I don't know.
- [100:34]
Blythe
I don't know to this day.
- [100:35]
Dirk Oblivion
I think when you said veteran gnomes,
- [100:37]
Blythe
we used to call it veteran gnome shop. But that was. I mean, it obviously wasn't that. If it was and someone knows, I'd be amazed. But yeah, I don't know what it was, really. Stuff.
- [100:46]
Dirk Oblivion
We used to go to the VG store. We were the only people who used the photocopier. Yeah. Because they used to have to take all the beams off. It didn't.
- [100:54]
Blythe
Well, he had a photo.
- [100:55]
Dirt the Dice
He had.
- [100:55]
Blythe
He advertised a photo photocopying service in the window. And yet when you went in with any photocopying, it looked incredibly irritating that you asked for photocopying and you finally say, oh, stop advertising it. Get rid of your copier, you miserable old kid. Why are you doing that? It's like really put out by it, wasn't it?
- [101:13]
Dirk Oblivion
Yeah. He could see his eyes literally rolling.
- [101:16]
Blythe
Yeah, he was. And it's like, oh, here they come. Weird sheets that they don't understand. They want. They want like. Like 10 copies of a RuneQuest character sheet or something like that. Yeah, yeah, he did. He was really annoyed I think he
- [101:28]
Dirk Oblivion
got that pink paper just to put us off.
- [101:30]
Blythe
Yeah, possibly, but he didn't.
- [101:32]
Dirk Oblivion
It is a little bit difficult. We're still here today.
- [101:35]
Blythe
We're still here 40 odd years later. But he put us off Mr. VG's shop. What was he called? Oh, I don't remember his name. No, it wasn't bg. It wasn't like Vernon Green. It wasn't his name. That was vg. I don't know what it stood. Right, let's put it in there.
- [101:53]
Dirk Oblivion
And can you remember the title?
- [101:55]
Blythe
Talk a Madden Meet Doom.
- [101:57]
Dirk Oblivion
There we go. Yeah, it's landing on your doorstep in your imaginations.
- [102:03]
Blythe
That's place for it.
- [102:05]
Dirk Oblivion
Thanks, Blythe. Goodbye. All right, it's Cowy Norland Rex's Gaming Rexes or whatever it is.
- [102:13]
Steve
Thanks for the intro, Dave. I'm Steve, host of All Anthraxis Gaming, a podcast documenting my ongoing mission to run, or at least play all of the RPGs that I seem to be incapable of stopping myself buying.
- [102:26]
Dirk Oblivion
And you'll see me frequently fiddling with something in my hands.
- [102:32]
Steve
Each episode I get together with a group of fellow gamers that have either played a game I've run or who've GM'd a game for me. We chat through what we've enjoyed about the game and some ways we could have improved the experience whilst making a series of terrible jokes along the way.
- [102:46]
Dirk Oblivion
Was it hot chat action?
- [102:50]
Steve
Sometimes be kind game designers who really should know better to come along and talk to us about their games and maybe run an actual play segment to give us an idea of their vision for their game.
- [103:00]
Dirk Oblivion
I've told this story before won't bore anyone.
- [103:03]
Steve
Our topics range from old school favourites like Runequest through to some of those newfangled narrative games or the cool game kids talk about. When you listen, I want you to feel as though you're sitting around our gaming table taking part in our post game chat and helping dispose the last of the crisps and ale.
- [103:18]
John Power Jr.
I'll just wax my bowstring and think
- [103:20]
Dirk Oblivion
about the death of the tainted.
- [103:21]
Blythe
Oh no. 89 8.
- [103:23]
Steve
So if you like listening to people droning on excitedly about games in a range of regional British accents, All Anthrax's gaming vexes is the pod for you and you'll find it on your podcasting app of choice. On occasion you may even hear something really insightful. But I'm making no promises. Over to you, Dave.
- [103:40]
Dirk Oblivion
Find the boxes and make it a Titan.
- [103:52]
Blythe
There isn't another bit.
- [103:54]
Dirk Oblivion
Thanks to John for appearing at Virtual Grog meet.
- [103:57]
Dirt the Dice
There is actually more of that and it's been included in Dirk's dossier. You should also make sure that you get hold of a copy of Weird Science. The new issue is particularly brilliant, I'd say, and well worth investing your time and money into getting hold of a copy. I've put a link in the show notes to where you can get one now at the time of recording, it's Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK and it's blistering with heat. So the perfect time for me to be holed up in the Den talking to you, preparing for UK Games Expo, which is next weekend in Birmingham. And normally when that finishes, my mind starts to think of grog meat. Hang on a minute, but I can hear you say, have you already had grog meat this year? Well, that's right. Back in January we had a meet up in Manchester. However, we're going to have another one in November. You'll be able to see on the grognardfiles.com for details but. But we're actually changing location just to test out Preston in a bid to
- [105:06]
Dirk Oblivion
try and restore some of that feeling
- [105:08]
Dirt the Dice
that we had 10 years ago when we started afresh and everything seemed unfamiliar and different and also gives people who can't get to Manchester an opportunity to try a different city. As I say, more details can be found in the grognardfiles.com and the best way to keeping up to date with any of this is to follow us on Patreon. Thank you to all those who chip in every month to make sure that this show stays on the road. It's that time of year when there's a few bills come in for hosting costs etc, so it's good to know that we've got the backup of the Grog squad chipping in a few coins each month to keep it going. If you've backed us in the past and or if you're continuing to back us now, it is really appreciated, thank you. Especially in this cash stream track times.
- [106:04]
Dirk Oblivion
We did actually have quite a lot
- [106:07]
Dirt the Dice
more correspondence for the Thunder page copy of the 1983 fanzine. I'm pretty sure that you'd like to hear our responses to those, wouldn't you? I'll include it in an extra episode that we'll put out, just us looking back over our experiences at the UK Games Expo this year, so. So until then, adios amigos.