Cruising around the web and found a couple of old Warhammer articles featuring yours truly:
Warhammer at Gamespot, December 2006
Warhammer at Gamespot, March 15, 2007
Feb 14, 2009
Jan 17, 2009
A History of 16CBH: Life Gets in the Way
Following Aes Sedai, Donald and I started working on a fantasy role-playing game called World Bazaar. This was meant to be a ‘no elves, no dwarves’ fantasy game set in the world of Archena. We wanted to present a complete package – a well defined world with rules tailored for the world, and we set about writing the game’s fiction and rules in our free time. Both of us had jobs and family and working was always a second or third impulse. Needless to say, it took a hell of a long time to complete World Bazaar. Actually, it never got quite right. Archena was a great universe with great races, but the system just wasn’t working. In those early days it was a rehash of the Palladium Fantasy system, (I know, I know, but I have such a special place in my heart for Palladium) but it just wasn’t working with our world. We modified, played, modified some more, and, eventually ended up with an early version of the Span system that Battleaxe uses now.
As we tuned and changed, we had aligned a number of artists to work on the project. This was a free gig and they were working for whatever cash we would receive from the backend. They worked very hard and were very good to us, producing a great body of excellent art for World Bazaar. In the end, however, we had put the cart before the horse so to speak, and had brought the artists on too early. We had full-time jobs and families and production was going very slowly. The two years it took to bake the Span system was too much and the fellowship fell apart. At the time, Donald and I simply did not want to go to press with a half-baked system. The play-tests were fun, but the system was still wonky. Additionally, the cost was just too high and we only had enough cash to publish the book once. And because we were paying on the backend, the personal cost was too high for the core artists we wanted. So, feeling like we couldn’t ask more of them, we thanked the artists for the work they’d done so far and froze production. We released the few contracts we had and went back to work.
So life again got in the way. My wife and I divorced. It was traumatic, and ‘the game’ was packed away with other mementos of that life.
That was 1996.
Flash forward to 2003 and I am graduating from college. The ghosts of Aes Sedai and World Bazaar were always not far behind. I decided that I wanted to actually produce a game. So, I cracked open the Span system and went to work. I started writing about another world I had been thinking about, a fantasy world called Mordredica. I assembled the system, wrote the text in about thirty days and ended up with a decent first draft of a finished product. As I said, it was my last year in college, and I was very much without money. There weren’t funds to publish on paper, there weren’t funds to hire artists. So I said, fuck it, and put it on the web for free. I decided that selling the game wasn’t the important thing, getting a game finished was the important thing (funny thing, I forgot this very same lesson some three years later while working on a much bigger game).
Battleaxe went up in September 2004 and has been downloaded nearly 50,000 times in four years. It has come close to winning awards and I have received a ton of positive feedback. And it’s grown too. We released the Creeping Dead in 2004, Battleaxe Adventures in 2005, and the revised Battleaxe Reforged in 2007. It’s been a good run so far, and partially because of Battleaxe I’m now a full-time game designer who gets paid for his work. It has all worked out in ways I never dreamed it would way back in 1995. Life still gets in the way, but this time it’s much different. Games are now a way of life for me and my family. It still takes me a dog-ass long time to finish things (can you hear me Black Sunshine?), but work gets done, the games get played and eventually they will become finished games. And who knows, maybe this time around we’ll be able to revive the world of Archena.
As we tuned and changed, we had aligned a number of artists to work on the project. This was a free gig and they were working for whatever cash we would receive from the backend. They worked very hard and were very good to us, producing a great body of excellent art for World Bazaar. In the end, however, we had put the cart before the horse so to speak, and had brought the artists on too early. We had full-time jobs and families and production was going very slowly. The two years it took to bake the Span system was too much and the fellowship fell apart. At the time, Donald and I simply did not want to go to press with a half-baked system. The play-tests were fun, but the system was still wonky. Additionally, the cost was just too high and we only had enough cash to publish the book once. And because we were paying on the backend, the personal cost was too high for the core artists we wanted. So, feeling like we couldn’t ask more of them, we thanked the artists for the work they’d done so far and froze production. We released the few contracts we had and went back to work.
So life again got in the way. My wife and I divorced. It was traumatic, and ‘the game’ was packed away with other mementos of that life.
That was 1996.
Flash forward to 2003 and I am graduating from college. The ghosts of Aes Sedai and World Bazaar were always not far behind. I decided that I wanted to actually produce a game. So, I cracked open the Span system and went to work. I started writing about another world I had been thinking about, a fantasy world called Mordredica. I assembled the system, wrote the text in about thirty days and ended up with a decent first draft of a finished product. As I said, it was my last year in college, and I was very much without money. There weren’t funds to publish on paper, there weren’t funds to hire artists. So I said, fuck it, and put it on the web for free. I decided that selling the game wasn’t the important thing, getting a game finished was the important thing (funny thing, I forgot this very same lesson some three years later while working on a much bigger game).
Battleaxe went up in September 2004 and has been downloaded nearly 50,000 times in four years. It has come close to winning awards and I have received a ton of positive feedback. And it’s grown too. We released the Creeping Dead in 2004, Battleaxe Adventures in 2005, and the revised Battleaxe Reforged in 2007. It’s been a good run so far, and partially because of Battleaxe I’m now a full-time game designer who gets paid for his work. It has all worked out in ways I never dreamed it would way back in 1995. Life still gets in the way, but this time it’s much different. Games are now a way of life for me and my family. It still takes me a dog-ass long time to finish things (can you hear me Black Sunshine?), but work gets done, the games get played and eventually they will become finished games. And who knows, maybe this time around we’ll be able to revive the world of Archena.
Oct 7, 2008
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