Posts from August 2009

One of the more interesting concepts developed in D&D 4E is that of the Skill Challenge. To those unfamiliar with 4E, the Skill Challenge is (usually) a formalized non-combat situation that requires a certain number of skill check successes required for the player characters to complete successfully, and with a specific experience point value awarded to the characters if they prove successful (or specific consequences if they fail). The degree of difficulty is set by the amount of successes required – an easier Skill Challenge might require 5 successes out of 8 attempts, for example, something made of sterner stuff might require 7 successes out of 8 attempts. Player characters can aid each other during some of these skill checks, depending on the situation … so in theory, it’s a good way to encourage the non-combat aspects of 4E. Pretty cool stuff, especially for a game that’s typically accused of being too combat-heavy.

I say “in theory” because I’ve noticed that the Skill Challenge tends to be easy to screw up. I don’t find it explained particularly well in the core rulebooks for 4E, and in practice … well, I hesitate to say that it’s “done wrong”, since some people seem happy with the results, but I find that too often it turns into an exercise in munchkinism, focusing on game mechanics rather than roleplaying. (The fact that the rules for the Skill Challenge in the first printing of the rules was a little wonky didn’t help matters, either). I think Wizards of the Coast has done a decent job of fixing the Skill Challenge mechanics with rules errata, and done a reasonable job clarifying the intent of the Skill Challenge through D&D Insider and various editorials on Dragon Online. The problem is that most of those clarifications aren’t centralized very well.

I’ve been playing 4E a bit lately, and have been working on an adventure where a couple of key moments are probably going to hinge around good Skill Challenges. Based on my experience, and my observations, here’s some of my ideas on how to make a good (or at least reasonably decent) Skill Challenge.

1. Don’t tell the players that they’re in a Skill Challenge.

It’s human nature, or maybe at least gamer nature. You want to succeed at things. Nobody likes to fail. So when the DM announces “OK, this is a Skill Challenge!” at the beginning of an encounter … most players drop all pretense of roleplaying, and start analyzing the situation in terms of what skills are needed, and how to maximize the results of those skills. Everything gets viewed through rules-tinted glasses. Which, of course, kind of defeats one of the idealistic purposes of the Skill Challenge – building a situation that encourages roleplaying.

I played in a 4E Living Forgotten Realms game a couple of weeks ago that featured a cool Skill Challenge - our characters needed to do some begging, borrowing, or stealing (depending on how we wanted to handle the Challenge) to obtain some supplies to fix a ship. Our initial reaction to this became “OK, who’s got the highest Diplomacy roll?” … and we set about trying to optimize our chances of success in terms of maximizing the strengths of our various skills. We determined that our sorcerer had a high Charisma and a really good Diplomacy skill, so we agreed to aid him, reached for dice, and …

And that was when our DM (Scott Roberts, one of the co-owners of the Gamer’s Gambit) gave us a curious look and said, “Guys, it's role-playing, not roll-playing. Put down the dice. Tell me what you're doing, and what you're going to say. Then you can roll some dice."

A golden opportunity for roleplaying. And I blew it. A little embarrassing, to say the least.

So, with a hint of chagrin, we did put down the dice. The player running the sorcerer, though, didn’t seem too keen on roleplaying the situation at first, so I stepped in with my dragonborn rogue, and Ken Hart (an esteemed member of Goodman Games East who was also at the table) started in as well with his longtooth shifter druid. Neither of us, skill-wise, were perfectly suited for the situation, but we both starting weaving a web of flattery and bald-faced lies to get what we needed accomplished. When we were done, we got the nod from our DM, and started to roll our skill checks. Our friend the sorcerer offered to use Aid Another to assist our rolls, but the DM wouldn’t allow it – his character hadn’t actually said or done anything to assist us!

I think a good way to run a Skill Challenge, at least from the DM’s side of the screen, is to never tell the players that they're *in* a Skill Challenge. Provide them with the situation, steer them slightly towards using some of the skills that might come in handy, but emphasize the role-playing aspects of the situation. As a DM, I won't use the words "Skill Challenge" until a player asks me "is this a Skill Challenge?" ... and even then, my answer will be "maybe". That way, the players are less likely to put on the rules-tinted glasses.

2. Make the Skill Challenge open enough for the players to freelance, but provide enough structure for the DM to know what works or what doesn’t.'

I noticed this in a Skill Challenge presented in “King of the Trollhaunt Warrens”. There’s a Skill Challenge in that adventure where the player characters can parley with a black dragon, rather than fight it … and if they’re successful in the Challenge, they can gain some information – and loot – that might not be available if they simply best it in combat. From the player side of things, I found it well-written – it listed some of the primary skills that the players could use (Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate – the usual suspects), as well as some secondary skills that wouldn’t seem terribly obvious to use, but might fit the situation if push came to shove. That was fine. I think a good Skill Challenge shouldn’t rely on the player characters being reliant on just 2 or 3 skills anyway; some should be better fits than others, but the players should have room to freelance and innovate.

But from the DM’s side of the Challenge … eh. I thought it left a bit to be desired. For example, the player characters may use Diplomacy “to flatter the dragon”. Really? Flatter it how? By calling its scales shiny? By kissing its fanny and calling it the GREATEST. DRAGON. EVAR? I’m all for being open and for freelancing as a DM, but in this case I think *some* guidance is needed. Not much, but something.

From that end of things, I think a good Skill Challenge should include one or two tidbits about types of flattery that would work better than others, and maybe even something that could make things go terribly wrong. For example: perhaps complimenting the dragon on defeating a past rival (something that could be learned with a History check, or dropped as a clue earlier in the adventure) might add to the chances of success, or even count as two successes. Or complimenting the dragon’s great jeweled eye might count as a failure, as the only reason the dragon has a jeweled eye is because its original was lost long ago in a battle with a paladin (again, something that could be learned as a clue or History check).

3. Make the Skill Challenge is something that can’t be replicated by combat.

The first Skill Challenge I wrote was for “The Warbringer’s Son”. I wrote it literally a week after seeing the 4E rules for the first time … and while it works, if I had a second chance, I’d do it much differently. Suffice it to say it involves a lot of running down corridors, trying to avoid dangerous areas and hiding from Very Bad Things. Sound much different than combat? Not really. There’s no real need for a Skill Challenge like that – if it’s like combat, it should either just be combat, or should be scaled back into something that’s not combat.

I realized that I keep talking about Skill Challenges like they’re roleplaying opportunites. Well, they are, but that’s not a necessary requirement. I could see ascending a giant clockwork structure being a great Skill Challenge, with Thievery checks to disable certain areas of the clockwork, or Acrobatics checks to avoid swinging pendulums, or an Insight check to find the shiny, jolly, candy-like button that switches the whole thing off. No roleplaying per se required for a Challenge like that … but it’s not something that’s like combat.

Anyway. just some thoughts on Skill Challenges.

Feel free to share your thoughts as well.

From the home office in Threshold, in the Kingdom of Karameikos ...

1. Your armor class is -3? Awesome.

2. They’re not wizards or sorcerers, they’re magic-users.

3. Your fighter’s strength includes percentiles after the 18.

4. Only thieves can climb walls.

5. Initiative involves a d6, not a d20. And everyone in the party goes at the same time.

6. Elves and dwarves have classes? What???

7. What the hell is this newfangled contraption called THAC0?

8. You know what weapon speed factor charts are ... you just choose to ignore them.

9. Saving throws vs. Rod/Staff/Wand. ‘Nuff said. (And when you fail your saving throws, you die – none of this softie “you lose points of Constitution crap.)

10. You’ve had a character that not only once owned the Machine of Lum the Mad, you also had a detailed drawing of the levers, buttons, and the rest of the control panel that made it work.

I love roleplaying games that are big, shiny, over-the-top games that make things go boom.

That’s certainly not the only type of game I like. My current Warhammer game, for example, has been repeatedly described as “CSI: Kislev” – the game prominently focuses on investigation and is heavy on roleplaying, light on combat. There’s been plenty of sessions where there’s just one combat encounter, if even that … two or more generally means things have gone terribly, terribly wrong for the characters. It’s a quirky game that moves along at an unhurried pace, and so far, it’s been a good game. And it’s not the type of game where things go boom.

But I like all sorts of flavors of gaming.

And big & shiny is probably my favorite kind.

I remember seeing the first advertisements for RIFTS in Dragon Magazine back when I was in high school. The Keith Parkinson cover pretty much told me everything I needed to know, but the enthusiastic ad copy written by Kevin Siembieda sealed the deal. Dragons? Robots? Aliens? Glitter Boy Armor? SOLD!!!

The “kitchen sink” approach wouldn’t be something I would want in a D&D campaign, but in the context of RIFTS, it seemed perfect. Despite issues I would have later in trying to freelance for Palladium Books, RIFTS remains one of my favorite games. I ran it on an almost-weekly basis for close to six years, and the adventures that were played in my various campaigns for that system rank among my favorite memories.

One of the main things I liked about RIFTS is its ability to just churn up adventure ideas. Despite the frequently wonky rules system, I was usually able to ignore all of their weird issues simply because of the great concepts in the game. It seemed like whenever a new RIFTS sourcebook would come out, I’d go over to the Game Room in the Woodbridge Mall, find the book, flip through a couple of pages, and … BAM. Ideas for an adventure, or a villain, or something just plain AWESOME would spew forth from the pages of the book and into my head, and I’d open up my wallet and buy the damn thing. It’s something I’ve always tried to replicate in the books I’ve written, even if I haven’t always been successful – putting those ideas and concepts in a book that just inspire you to run out and create an adventure.

Though there have been a multitude of games that I’ve read, bought, and played since RIFTS, nothing’s quite inspired me in the same way. None of them have provided that inspiration – “holy crap, I need to play this NOW!!!” – quite the same way. None of them have given a campaign’s worth of ideas simply by flipping through parts of a sourcebook for just ten minutes. And none have really made things go boom in quite the same way.

Until now.

CthulhuTech, to me, just drips with awesome. The best way I can describe it is this: Take a big helping of Shadowrun then add liberal amounts of Robotech & Neon Genesis Evangelion, a splash of Mike Mignola's Hellboy, heaping handfuls of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and other pulp horror stories, and, of course, as indicated earlier, a giant portion of AWESOME. Created by Wildfire LLC and currently published by Catalyst Game Labs, this game is nothing short of a home run – it’s easily one of the most impressive games I’ve read in years.

The backstory to the game is pretty ingenious. The year is 2085. Mankind, in developing free systems of bountiful energy that invigorates the planet Earth, harness extradimensional energies that inadvertently wakes up some of the sleeping horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos … and boy, does it piss them off. The Earth devolves into a world-wide conflict known as the Aeon War, where the planet has twice been invaded: once by drow-like critters called the Nazzadi, who are “aliens” really genetically engineered by the Mi-Go, and who later join humanity against their former masters, and then later by the Mi-Go themselves. Also, some of the “big guns” from the Cthulhu Mythos have showed up – Nylarathotep is around, as is Hastur, and the Esoteric Order of Dagon, of course, seeks to reawaken Great Cthulhu once more. The player characters need to fight against these horrors to save the world, but unlike a typical H.P. Lovecraft story, their weapons against such horrors are not libraries, books, and ancient relics, but giant guns, giant suits of mecha armor, and plenty of in-your-face things that go boom.

The main book is crammed full of campaign background and adventure ideas, each one better than the next – it’s enough to keep a campaign going for quite awhile. I give the writers of CthulhuTech a lot of credit; they filled the book with a lot of creative genius, and a lot of inspired hooks that made me go … well, “holy crap, I need to play this NOW!!!”

Unlike Call of Cthulhu (another game that I love), there’s nothing subtle about CthulhuTech. There’s no horrors lurking in the shadows. It’s not a game where people slowly descend into madness. The horrors are there, out in the open. They are ruthless, and they want to kill you. However, also unlike Call of Cthulhu, characters in CthulhuTech can have access to powerful technology – and weapons – capable of taking on these horrors. An investigator from Call of Cthulhu who encounters a simple ghoul is probably in big trouble, and should that investigator come across the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath or his or her lonesome … forget it. That character’s guaranteed to go insane, or die, or go insane and then die. In CthulhuTech? An investigator has access to high-tech armor and major artillery. That same Dark Young is still dangerous enough to drive a character in CthulhuTech utterly mad, or still come out ahead in a fight – but the character should be able to give a good fight, and even win if reasonably good tactics are used.

The rules use the Framewerk system, which I’d briefly seen and used before in Weapons of the Gods, and it’s an interesting system. The basic idea is simple – you roll a pool of ten-sided dice, and want to beat a target number. However, there’s a wrinkle to this. Based on the numbers you roll in your given pool of dice, you can choose the highest individual number rolled and add any appropriate bonuses to that to beat the target number. Or, if you get a set of the same number, like three 3s, you can add all them together, if that result is higher than the highest single number that was rolled in the pool. Or, if you get a straight – similar to poker, three or more numbers in a row, like a 3, 4, 5, and 6 – you can add those numbers together. That’s pretty much the consistent unifying mechanic for just about everything. (You can also use Drama Points, which helps your own rolls by adding to your dice pool, or taking away from an opponent’s dice pool, which is another wrinkle I found to be very cool.)

CthulhuTech also uses something similar to the M.D.C./S.D.C. system from RIFTS for damage. Humans use Vitality as their hit points, and most “normal” weapons do Vitality damage. Mecha and “big” weapons either Integrity as their hit points, or deal Integrity levels of damage. 1 point of Integrity = 50 points of Vitality, so an unarmored person with Vitality wandering into a battlefield filled with mechas blasting out Integrity-level damage is just asking to get greased.

And … wow, it’s a pretty book. The artwork is great, the layout is wonderful … you get a great feel for the game just, well, flipping through the pages. I'm usually the first guy to bitch about shoddy layout and crappy editing, so I'll give credit where credit is definitely due - overall, it's a well-produced book, one of the best I've seen in awhile.

Another nice thing I like about CthulhuTech is that it’s set up to be played a number of ways. Want a game that heavily relies on investigation, and not a lot of combat? No problem. Want to make something that’s totally over-the-top wall-to-wall combat? No problem. Want combat, but low-powered stuff that doesn’t feature mecha, and is more like “Band of Brothers” than “Macross”? No problem. And of course, you can definitely find something that falls somewhere between all of these concepts.

I haven’t quite decided where the campaign that I want to run will fall just yet.

But rest assured, when I figure it out … I’ll let you know.

Writing a tournament module is a lot different than writing a "regular" module.

When I write a typical module, I focus a lot on story, and on pacing. I want to have moments of crazy, full-on combat, but I also want quieter interludes that allow the players to catch their breath. I’m also writing an adventure that I want to equally be good for experienced gamers, as well as for brand-new gamers who are rolling dice for the very first time. I might make some things complex, but I’m mindful of the fact that I can’t make things too complicated.

Tournament modules, on the other hand … well, as Nigel Tufnel likes to say, everything goes to eleven in a tournament module. I don’t worry about pacing in a tournament module – everything’s in a redline maximum-RPM full throttle mode, going balls to the wall. Not only am I assuming anyone playing a tournament module is an experienced gamer, I’m assuming that they’re a very experienced gamer … and my goal is to test the limits of how good the players really are. A “typical” module, to me, is a way of telling an interactive story … a tournament module, on the other hand, is a competitive event, designed to test the skills and guile of players, and just happens to use the framework of an interactive story.

Which brings us to “The Warbringer’s Son” … and all the fun involved in writing that one. For the creation of that particular tournament adventure, in its own way, was a competitive event. And it sure as hell tested the limits of its writers.

I originally got involved with the Dungeon Crawl Classics GenCon Tournament for Goodman Games back in 2004. For that initial tournament adventure, a number of writers were invited to contribute individual dungeon rooms, which were assembled collage-style into a cohesive adventure by Chris Doyle. That adventure – “Crypt of the Devil-Lich” – was a great project to write. I didn’t really know what the main story of the adventure was … I just worked on two rooms designed to be vicious deathtraps for unwary adventurers. One involved a drow vampire sorceress in a chapel; the other a golden coin golem in a treasure room. Both were just meant to be Gygax-inspired carnage, and for the most part, it worked pretty well.

The tournament proved to be a big success at GenCon, and the tournament only got bigger and better with every passing year. In addition to continually testing the players in the tournament, the pressure grew to make each successive tournament adventure cleverer and more fiendish than its predecessors. Getting the assignment to write for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Tournament meant that the pressure was on – you couldn’t repeat what had been done before, and you needed to dip into the proverbial bag of tricks once more to find something players wouldn’t be expecting.

In the fall of 2007, I got invited again to work on the tournament. The project manager this time was Adrian Pommier … and this time, only three writers were chosen – Chris Doyle, Rick Maffei, and myself. Unlike previous tournaments, we wouldn’t be writing individual rooms for the tournament adventure – we would each be writing one entire level or round for the adventure, start to finish. Chris got Round 1, I got Round 2, and Rick got Round 3. And unlike previous tournaments, we would be writing for a brand new game system, just announced a few months earlier at GenCon 2007 … Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.

Now hold on to your hats, kids. The story’s about to get a wee bit complex.

The original tournament idea was this: we planned on writing an adventure for 7th-level characters called “Test of the Gods”. There would be a short, free adventure released in June 2008 called “Maze of the Cyclops” for Free RPG Day that would act as a teaser of sorts for “Test of the Gods”, laying down the groundwork for the story of the tournament module, and perhaps including a few clues for what players might expect in the tournament. With that in mind, we set about writing each round of the module in the 3.5 version of the D&D rules, expecting to be able to convert what we’d written into 4E somewhere in January. After all, that was when Wizards of the Coast promised to deliver the 4E rules to third-party publishers.

Yeah … that didn’t happen. Promises, promises. Thanks, Wizards.

So we waited ‘til February, waited ‘til April … and then we couldn't wait any longer, and some drastic changes needed to be made.

Without access to the 4E rules, “Maze of the Cyclops” was dead in the water – there was no way that would be part of Free RPG Day. Also, we came to the conclusion that given how late we would have access to the rules – and how little experience with 4E the tournament players would probably have by GenCon – a 7th-level adventure just wasn’t going to work. So we tossed aside all of the writing and preliminary work put into “Test of the Gods”, grabbed the outline of “Maze of the Oracle” … and slowly began reworking the plotline of that adventure into what would become “The Warbringer’s Son”.

But we still didn’t have the 4E rules.

And, to be honest, we really didn’t have them until the beginning of June 2008, just like everyone else. Which meant we each had two weeks to digest the rules, and come up with an entire round of a tournament … and make it something exciting, fresh, and unexpected. Because this sucker still needed to be playtested, and we were running out of time.

No pressure. None at all.

The next two weeks involved little sleep, a lot of coffee, a lot of frantically-scribbled notes at odd hours of the day, and a lot of writing and re-writing. Part of the problem was that I don’t think we thought the changes between 3.5 and 4E would be as drastic as they were. It wasn’t just a matter of “change some stats and you’re done” – there were a lot of fundamental changes that altered initial ideas for various rooms. But I think we treated this all as a challenge Nobody wanted to lose this battle, so we all took a “damn the torpedoes” attitude and forged ahead, working hard to create the best adventure that we could under pretty weird circumstances.

Somehow, we pulled it off. Rick, Chris, and I managed to write “The Warbringer’s Son” into a tournament adventure that worked pretty well, Adrian took what we wrote and polished it up into something even better, and it proved to be a hit at GenCon. “The Warbringer’s Son”, I think, was a great way to start the 4E era for the Dungeon Crawl Classics line. There’s one or two things about the round I wrote that I wish I’d written differently (the Skill Challenge in Round 2, in particular, is something that I think could be better) … but overall, I’m proud of this one. It’s probably not the best thing I’ve ever written, but it was written under very challenging circumstances, and it still came out pretty well.

“The Warbringer’s Son” … yeah. More like “Test of the Writers”.

If you’re interested in seeing what a tournament module looks like, I suggest picking this one up.

And let us know if we successfully passed the test.

I'm not at GenCon this year. (Probably a good thing, since I'd be busy shouting my extreme displeasure about the new incarnation of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game to everyone within earshot.) Lack of funds and a couple other factors made GenCon ... well, to be honest, I could've gone, but let's just say I don't think it would've been an ideal situation. So to my friends who are going, or who are on their way there ... enjoy! I'll miss your company.

Something I worked on recently, though, is there. And it's only available there, as a conventional special at the Goodman Games booth.

"Talons of the Horned King" is an adventure I've talked about before on this site. To be honest, it may be the one adventure I've written that best represents my own tastes and interests as a writer. While it's admittedly a dungeon crawl, parts of it have that sandbox feel, like "Lost City", where you can do a hell of a lot more besides kill monsters in the frozen wastelands of the North, and it includes a lot of eclectic interests, including some "Expedition of the Barrier Peaks" sci-fi influences. (And a sonic screwdriver.)

Writing this one, to put it mildly, was a bitch.

I had a lot of ideas of what I wanted the adventure to be, and what I wanted it to do. Within the confines of the D&D 3.5 ruleset, though, I found doing many of things fairly challenging, as I needed to clearly define a lot of ideas that didn't quite fit the rules. They sort of fit the rules ... but not quite. And since I believe anything you write for publication needs to be playable by the Rules As Written, this didn't really work for me. The adventure was rewritten three times, playtested a lot more than that, and was painful to write from start to finish. I was glad to see it finally done and published, if only because it meant I didn't have to work on it anymore.

Or so I thought.

About two years ago, I got on an "old-school" gaming kick, playing a bit of first edition AD&D and Basic D&D. I thought it might just be a nostalgia kick, but it wasn't - I really enjoyed the games, and it helped immensely in my understanding of game design. I decided that it might be fun to write a 1E AD&D module, to really dig into the rules and the game system ... but I didn't really want to write a new module from scratch. So I decided to convert one of the Dungeon Crawl Classics I’d written for Goodman Games to 1E.

Which one?

Inexplicably, I decided to go for “Talons”. Call me a masochist.

But I’m glad I did.

Turns out that “Talons” was always a First Edition module desperately trapped inside a Third Edition body. The conversion process to First Edition was so smooth, it was scary. The module seemed to flow a lot better in First Edition, and I think the adventure’s finally found its true home. It worked in Third Edition, and I eventually came to like that iteration of it … but I think it’s really good, properly converted to First Edition.

That’s not to say that there weren’t a few challenges. It was funny to realize how many times I’d written stuff like “… players notice X with a successful Search check” in the original version of the adventure. A lot of the 3E version of that adventure was heavily reliant on skill checks, so converting it to 1E – with its total lack of skill checks – made for some interesting conversion choices. In addition to poring through the First Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, I did a lot of reading through the old TSR AD&D modules for guidance as to how to handle such matters. “The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth” and “The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun”, in particular, proved to be terrific guidelines in figuring out how to handle some more complicated things.

For the most part, I just turned everything over to DM fiat. Stuff like “… players notice X with a successful Search check” because “ … players notice X if they carefully search the far end of the room”. For stuff that was a little more arbitrary, I lifted a “Skill Check” that I found – courtesy of one Mr. Gary Gygax – from “Forgotten Temple”. Here’s a sample of what I used in “Talons”, though the original concept comes completely from that Gygax-penned adventure.

Crossing the bridge requires the player characters to roll a score of their Dexterity or less on 4d6. Failure by 4 or more indicates a slip, but the falling character can attempt to roll a score of their Dexterity or less on 4d6 again to grab onto the bridge and avoid falling. Falling from the bridge causes 3-18 points of falling damage, as well as 3-30 points of potential damage from the ice shards below (a saving throw vs. Poison allows characters to successfully land between the shards).’’

There’s other stuff like that, but you get the idea. “Lost Caverns”, “Forgotten Temple”, and the original “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” provided some other ideas for how to handle certain situations, but overall, the conversion process was pretty easy, and pretty intuitive.

Interestingly enough, I originally started writing this conversion purely for selfish reasons. My intent was to do the conversion, run the adventure for a few friends, and see how it went. That was it. At some point during the early stages of the conversion process, I mentioned the project to Joseph Goodman – he’d previously published a few 1E conversions of other Dungeon Crawl Classics, so I thought he might be interested in the “Talons” conversion project. The original response went something like “sounds cool, let me know how it goes …” and I never heard anything beyond that, so I just kept slowly plugging away at it between other writing projects.

Then, in March, I got a follow-up note.

“How’s the conversion coming? I’d like to release it at GenCon, if you’re still working on it.” So 1E “Talons” went from the back burner to the front burner … and now it’s at Indy. Cool stuff.

If you get a chance, pick up the adventure at GenCon. If you’re into First Edition AD&D, I think you’ll like it. A lot.

I’m just happy to see this one the way I think it was really meant to be played.

Even before my sister Laura got an adventure published in Dungeon Magazine, I wanted to be a game writer. However, her success made that desire seem achievable. The idea of writing for a gaming company no longer felt as pie-in-the-sky-unlikely-to-impossible as, say, becoming a New York Times best-selling novelist like Peter Straub or Stephen King … or becoming a guitarist in Megadeth, which were two of my other dreams. Unlike those flights of fantasy, the possibility of becoming a game writer suddenly felt possible.

It just took a long while for me to get there.

Something, I think, that every aspiring game writer needs to keep in mind is the following: a rejection letter (or notice, or e-mail) isn’t an end. Rather, it’s a stepping stone. As you keep writing, and keep submitting things to various game companies, each thing that you write and submit is a stepping stone towards further success. Each thing you write and submit gets your closer to your goals and dreams. Now, there may be way more stepping stones on your path to success than you want … and you may choose to abandon those stones and their winding road before you hit your final destination. But I’m a big believer in something one of my father’s friends once told me:

“Work long enough and hard enough, and eventually no one can deny you success.”

My submissions and proposals to both Dragon and Dungeon Magazine began in earnest shortly after “Lady of the Lake” – my sister’s adventure for Dungeon Magazine – was published. The early submissions sucked, to be honest, and I got nothing but a litany of form rejection letters (“Dear Contributor, we regret to inform you …”) for my efforts. But I kept plugging away at it. Eventually, I got more rejection letters, but they were the personalized kind – Dave Gross, I think, was the editor for Dragon Magazine at the time, and Chris Perkins was the editor for Dungeon Magazine. Both started sending me short but kind personalized rejection letters, some with some quick hints of how I could improve both my pitches and my writing. Those were lessons I took to heart, and eventually – many, many years later – they led to my first success, getting a “Bazaar of the Bizarre” article published in the pages of Dragon called “Tools of the Trade”.

In a certain amount of irony, though, right around the time this article finally reached print, I decided to get out of gaming for awhile. So – although I didn’t realize it at the time – I took the relationships and the experience I’d built up with the editorial staffs at Dragon and Dungeon, and threw it all away. I left my path of stepping stones … and when I decided that I wanted to write for game companies again, I had to start all over again, back from the beginning.

It wasn’t really until Paizo took over the publication of both Dragon and Dungeon that I decided that I wanted to write for those magazines again. Paizo, in my opinion, injected an excitement and a creative enthusiasm into those magazines that had been missing for a while. So I began my submissions again, and like before, I initially received nothing but the familiar form rejections (“Dear Contributor, we regret to inform you …”). But as before, I also eventually began getting more personalized rejection e-mails, this time from the likes of Mike McArtor and Wes Schneider (“Hey Mike! This looks cool, but we already have something similar in the works …). Though it could be frustrating at times, I could see myself going along a similar path to the one that had worked for me before, and I think if Paizo had retained the rights to continue publishing both Dragon or Dungeon, I eventually could’ve gotten something published in their pages.

However, that didn’t happen. Wizards of the Coast took back the publication rights for both Dragon and Dungeon, which meant that if I wanted to get something published in either of those magazines … I needed to start over from scratch. Again.

So I did. I've been patiently sending proposals to the folks at Wizards of the Coast, and been receiving rejection notices.

However, more importantly, I also still wanted to work with Paizo.

And lately, I’ve been able to do so.

The big break came in the form of “Flight of the Red Raven”. Paizo held a GameMastery Open Call contest, in which the winner got the right to write GameMastery Module W3: Flight of the Red Raven. Although I didn’t win that contest, I was a semi-finalist in the competition … and between that, and the relationships I’d started building earlier submitting stuff for Dragon and Dungeon while Paizo held the rights to those magazines, I landed my first Paizo gig. Wes Schneider asked me to write the monsters for a Pathfinder Adventure called “A Memory of Darkness”, which turned out to be a blast … and also turned out to be a pivotal stepping stone.

Because that led to a gig writing up some monsters for the upcoming Pathfinder Bestiary. “How many monsters can you write up in two weeks, Mike?” It turned out to be fourteen. So if your characters are killed by the Pathfinder versions of the owlbear and the purple worm … you’re welcome. I had a hand in making them a little nastier.

And then that led to another gig, writing up yet more monsters … this time, for a Pathfinder Adventure called “The Bastards of Erebus”. (Love that title!) I got to create a bunch of creepy new creatures for that one, including the haniver gremlin and the shadowgarm … and I got to update everyone’s old-school favorite – the good old rot grub – for the Pathfinder system.

And that led to a book about river kingdoms, which will be coming out later this year, and features a wonderful collection of co-authors. It still surprises me to see my name included in the credits with theirs.

And that’s led to … well, let’s say for now it's led to something else that’s pretty cool and currently in the works.

They’re all stepping stones. It took a lot of rejection letters to reach this spot. The road was practically paved with them.

It was worth it. I’m enjoying the journey. Perhaps more so than I have in a long time. And I hope it keeps going for a while longer, whether with Paizo, with Goodman Games, or with any number of companies I’ve been fortunate enough to work with … or with a few companies that still haven’t sent me anything but form rejection letters so far.

Hope you’re enjoying your own journey, even if you’ve experienced your own frustrations and rejections along the way. Trust me, I’ve been there, I can sympathize … and I can tell you that I really believe if you work long enough and hard enough, success will find you.