This is the one that pretty much got my freelancing career started.

When I first starting running games, my games of choice were some of the earlier editions of D&D and AD&D, and the first incarnation of the Warhammer FRPG. The first adventures I ran were published adventures, like “Dwellers of the Forbidden City” and “Shadows Over Bögenhafen”. Later on, as I got more confidence and gained more experience with running various game systems, I started writing and running my own original adventures, set in my own campaign worlds. The stories framing those adventures probably weren’t all that great, but they were mine. I learned a lot writing and running those adventures.

However, while the stories were original, the mechanics weren’t. I never really deviated from what you’d find in the rulebooks for those games. If there was an evil wizard in one of my AD&D adventures, all of his spells came from the Players’ Handbook. If there were monsters in a dungeon in a Warhammer adventure, they came from the rulebook or from a White Dwarf magazine article. I liked creating my own stories, but I didn’t tinker around with the games in terms of mechanics. For one thing, the existing mechanics worked; for another, I didn’t have a lot of confidence – yet – in straying too far from the Rules As Written.

When I started running RIFTS, though, that changed. I think it was because of the wide-open gonzo nature of the game. There were a lot of stories I wanted to tell in my various RIFTS campaigns, and quite honestly, the rulebooks didn’t nearly begin to cover what I wanted to do. (To date myself, there were only four RIFTS books when I started running the game: the main rulebook, the first sourcebook, and the Atlantis and Vampire Kingdoms world books.) The monsters were limited, the equipment was limited, there wasn’t much there in terms of magic … if I wanted to tell those stories, I was going to have to develop my own source material and game mechanics.

Also – although the possibility that rules could be “broken” hadn’t yet dawned on me – I did realized that certain aspects of the game really didn’t make much logical sense. So there were certain parts of the game where I started to adjust the rules so they’d make more sense for my gaming group.

So I began tinkering. I wrote my own monsters, my own spells, my own equipment, my own rules … in other words, I started designing. Again, I don’t think I knew what a game designer was at the time, but that’s what I was doing. Using the basics of the rules system, I went beyond just writing adventures, and started developing original game mechanics as well.

While running RIFTS and developing new material for my campaign, I also spent a bit of time submitting articles to Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, which at the time were still run by TSR. All of these proposals got rejected, but I had it in my head that I wanted to write games somehow, or to work for a gaming company.

Somewhere during this time, while getting yet another rejection letter from Dragon (poor Roger E. Moore, who edited the magazine at that time – he must’ve hated reading the dreck that I sent his way) – I took a look at my desk and saw all the spiral-bound notebooks I’d filled with ideas for the RIFTS campaign. A lot of it was very, very detailed. And that’s when it dawned on me: why write something for D&D? Let’s write something for Palladium instead?

That didn’t exactly work out as expected. You can find the full story of that saga HERE, but suffice it to say that the material I wrote for that campaign never got published by Palladium Books. However, it did lead me to write two books. The first was “The Banwok Hunters”, and then I followed that up with a second book called “Demon Heart Falling”, which you can download HERE.

Much like “Demon Heart Falling”, I got a trip out of re-reading “The Banwok Hunters”, which was originally written about fifteen years ago. It brought back a lot of fond memories of that old campaign. I’d forgotten about stuff like the Hellstar Complex, the base that the player characters used (which was really a landbound version of the Liberator from Blake’s 7), or the villainous cybernetic Tyrannosaurus Rex known as Jericho (who I based on the Ultra-Humanite). Lots of gonzo, over-the-top stuff in there, which reflected that campaign pretty well. Crazy, but tremendous amounts of fun.

I hadn’t bothered to scan “The Banwok Hunters” into digital form only because my own copy of it was pretty crappy. I was afraid to put the pages through the scanning feeder, as I was pretty sure they’d get shredded in the scanning process. Fortunately, my friend Eric had a copy of the book … so, thanks to Eric, you now have a copy as well.

Curious to see what all this looks like? Download it by clicking: HERE.

I’m curious to hear what you think of it.

Enjoy!