Hearts in Glorantha #4 (D101-010)

Hearts in Glorantha issue four emerged in Summer 2010, just in time for Continuum 2010, which despite its general all games appeal, was still a major Glorathaphile gathering due to its roots.

This was the last of John Ossoway’s covers, and personal high-point with it featuring virtually no-Dragon Pass material (aka “those hairy barbarians” as one reader succinctly put it). Instead, it had part of Jamie “Trotsky” Revell’s Western Glorantha supplement in the form of the Kingdom of Joruna. D101 would go onto publish a full book worth of his work as the Book of Glorious Joy (D101-011) a year later. I did a mini-setting, the town of Vastar in the Lunar Heartlands, which would be the first trip I would make to this region before 2015’s Red Sun Rising (aka D101-035 Gloranthan Adventures #2).

Wordplay the Big Five (D101-009)

This one was one of our big game releases and quite a significant milestone for D101 Games.

Wordplay the Big Five, cover art by Jon Hodgson

Wordplay was Graham Spearing’s D6 Dicepool narrative game that he wrote under a creative common’s license. My original publication plan was to do a standalone Fantasy game using rules and the Empire of Gatan setting from OpenQuest for D101. As well as contributing a setting or Theme, called Infinite War, to Graham’s big release of Wordplay, alongside three other themes. Mark Galeotti’s Cold Crusade (mythological superheroes), Charles Green’s Keep Portland Weird (Urban Fantasy) and Graham’s Epic Fantasy theme. For various reasons, Graham’s release of the core rulebook fell through, and Wordplay, the Big Five, was my release of the core rules + the themes as they were in 2010.

Here’s the content’s page

Everything was pulled together at breakneck speed, as was typical of D101 early releases, still keeping to a fast and furious Punk Rock ethic of Do it! The artists of Hearts in Glorantha came through big time. Peter Town and Ilkka Leskelä stand out especially as heroes who opened up extensive portfolios of illustrations that nicely illustrated a narrative game. Ilkka also, some fantastic full pagers, which he allowed me to use again in the recent OpenQuest 3rd Edition.  This one especially stands out for me.

Fantasia by Ilkka Leskelä

The book sold moderately well, making its costs and a little bit of profit, and was critically well accepted.  It was also the first big book RPG that I wasn’t the primary author of but instead focused on being a publisher. Which was a good experience in itself and made me more confident later on.

Monkey, The Storytelling Game of the Journey to the West (D101-08)

Monkey started as an idea back in the mid-90s. I was stuck for what to read in Fantasy and asked my mate Keary Birch for a suggestion. He pointed me in the direction of the Journey to the West or “remember that TV series on BBC2 during the 80s”, as he put it.

My next port of call was Monkey – the James Whaley translation and the abridged version published via Penguin Classics.  The full version of the book, which I got to just after 1st edition was finalised, is a four-volume series of 100 chapters, with each volume clocking in at 1000 pages. James Whaley’s version is only 40 chapters, missing out much of the repetitive monster-of-the-week type chapters that make up the bulk of the Journey itself and heavily abbreviating the start and end of the Journey. This version is very accessible to English audiences but at the cost of some detail and narrative logic.

I was immediately struck by the fact that this could be a Roleplaying game. There was a party of Adventurers, the Pilgrims: Tripitaka the Monk and his immortal guardians, Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy.  They have the main goal, go to India to pick up the missing scrolls of Buddhist teaching and return them to China, and be admitted into Chinese Heaven as Immortals. Along the road, a mythic version of the real-life Silk Road,  the pilgrims have to battle and drive off villainous demons who are keen to eat the Monk because doing so will gain whoever does so great power. So there’s a goal and conflict right there.

As well as the Whaley translation, I drew from two other sources of inspiration.

  • My shakey remembrance of watching the Japanese TV series Monkey, or Monkey Magic, from the early 80s every Thursday Night on BBC 2 as kids.

My young son was also a Monkey fan 🙂

  • What I’d learned about Taoism and Buddhism from my own life experiences at the time. For example, the central Yin / Yang card drawing mechanism was drawn from the importance of that concept is not only the martial arts that I had been studying at the time, which were forms of Taoist Internal Alchemy, but also I Ching divination system.  The necessity of the characters to be nice and protect mortal characters came from the book’s reflection of Buddhist teachings and the fact that the characters, all through powerful immortals, were being coached by Buddhist gods to mend their wayward ways so they could be readmitted into Chinese Heaven.

I had spent a good fifteen years putting Monkey together when I finally go the first edition out in 2010. Internals were done on the cheap via clip-art.com where I raided their ancient Chinese category. Also of note on this front, the 15th Century woodcuts that illustrate Monkey Subdues the White Bone Demon, which is based on one of the chapters from the full novel. Because they were in the public domain, I could use these fantastic pictures of Monkey and the rest of the pilgrims to do full-page illustrations.

The cover was technically the first of the Jon Hodgson covers I commissioned. I consciously put Monkey to one side while I got more publishing experience putting out Hearts In Glorantha (see D101-03 to 06), OpenQuest (D101-06) and the Savage North (D101-07). It had to wait until July 2010.

Another D101 Games first, was that Paul “The Tweadmeister” Mitchener did proofing/editorial for the game. Neil Gow (publisher/author of Duty and Honour/Beat to the Quarters) was officially the games’ Monkey’s Uncle due to the excellent advice and encouragement that he gave over its rather wobbly development.

The book’s release coincided with Continuum 2010, a sell-out on a small (50 copies) but significant scale.

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I was immediately aware of its shortcomings and planned a 2nd edition ( D101-045) which was finally released in 2018. It is available from the D101 Games web store.

Also, it has a blog that has more about the game and its inspirations.

The Savage North (D101-07)

Aha, this one is definitely one of my favourites.

I realised quickly once OpenQuest 1st Edition came out that it needed an adventure/scenario pack which quite frankly showed how awesome it was. Life and Death was planned to do that, but I had descended into a pessimistic revise/rewrite loop which meant it wasn’t getting done any time soon. My friend John Ossoway had a series of old RQ3 Conan scenarios, which featured monsters from the  HP Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos, which he casually mentioned over a lunchtime meetup. Excited by the idea, I convinced John to let me release it as an OpenQuest adventure.

So the plan was.

For me to create a new setting. Which was faithful to the essence of Pseudo Vikings and a frozen North, fighting eldritch horrors in the wilderness, but didn’t include Howards or Lovecraft’s IP.  This led to the creation of the Savage North, which is made up of three kingdoms. The two kingdoms, the Drakkar, Nortland and Sonderland*** and the misty hill land of Bogdan.

To do editorial on John’s adventures, strip out the Conan + HP Lovecraft IP and convert it all to OpenQuest.  This led to many bloodthirsty demons replacing Lovecraft’s creations since I’m a bit of an 80s body-horror fan (Clive Barker, Chronenburg etc.). The adventures formed a mini-campaign, which took the characters up a glacier and through the underground dungeons that riddled it to face waking evil Serpentmen Priests. Then south for a spot of monster hunting while safely escort a Druid who was turned into a pig to a sacred grove to be turned back into a human. Finally, the campaign ended with a dungeon lair of a demi-lich on a remote island and a race against time to prevent the master from resurrecting as a full member of the undead nobility.   The whole thing was very Old School with dungeons and set-piece encounters along wilderness journies. John wrote one section of the first scenario to provide an excuse to replenish the party after it suffered a Total Party Kill.

John did all the internal art, including this map of the Savage North.

The Savage North map by John Ossoway

It was one of the most fun collaborations that I have been involved in, and that playful sense of fun translated into sales, with it meeting my expectations. One of D101 Games’ best sellers, it was a no-brainer when I did the OpenQuest 3rd edition that there should be a new version of the book entitled Saga of the Savage North.

I threw together this web comix from John’s art, and I think it sums up the sense of mischievous fun we had 😀

Notes:

*Drakar was a land of pseudo-Vikings, with a touch of the North East of England where I’d lived as a teen. There’s an Angel of the North, a massive statue that comes to life and crushes its enemies, a city called Newcastle, the twin river gods Way-Ai and Kan-Ai and Howay the Hunter God.

OpenQuest 1st Edition (D101-06)

In a way, I think I’ve said enough about OpenQuest recently, especially since I’ve been working on the third edition for over a year,  which is now out!

OpenQuest’s story starts around 2005. I was regularly going to cons, about every 3-6 months then, and well into writing adventures. Sick of me going on about it during TV time, my wife challenged me to write an adventure and release it. Drivethrurpg.com was a thing then, for pdfs anyway, and Mongoose RuneQuest (MRQ) was out with its OGL Systems Resource Document. So over several lunchtime writing sessions at work, the adventure pack that was to become Life and Death* started to take shape.

Then one day, it occurred to why not publish a ruleset to go with it?  As a long time RQ fan, I was amazed that no one else had seized on this opportunity**, and in a wonderful, joyous sense of naivety, I set about working on it on days I didn’t feel like going out into the grey rainy Manchester city centre.

By 2008 I had the core of the game, which was at that time called SimpleQuest. My design goal was to make something that was easy and straightforward to play, D100 games at that time, even the modern MRQ often descended into a mess of crunchy rules when the basic core is quite straightforward yet. I also wanted to make something that would be accessible to my friends on the UK con scene that used D100 as a default system. So I took a spirally bound printout to Continuum 2008 (D101-02) and ran an early version of Life and Death there.

So the rest of the year was heads down get it done time. I used a mix of public domain art and art generously done by Simon Bray, another D100 fan who got what I was doing with OpenQuest.  The game’s name got changed from SimpleQuest to OpenQuest in October of 2008, at the suggestion of Tom Zunder (who runs The Tavern BB) since it reflected the open gaming nature of the book.

OpenQuest’s 1st Cover by Simon Bray

So September 2009, it finally came out. As a free pdf and a paid-for low-cost Print on Demand book available from Lulu.com. This initial release went well, with something like 700 downloads of the free pdf within two months, but I was less than impressed with the sales of the physical book – which I needed to do more than beer money to pay for production costs of further OpenQuest supplements that I had planned. So I had a rethink after four months or so and started charging for the pdf. Suddenly the game was paying for itself!

The second big change was the cover art. It was nice that people cared about the game, but I got incessant calls to get a new cover. Initially, I was resistant, I like Simon’s cover to this day as a piece of vibrant art, but my publisher’s head won out in the end. Jon Hodgeson, who I was already in contact with to do Monkey’s 1st edition cover, was able to modify an existing cover to fit OpenQuest***. Sales then started to go up. Not in a way that was making me zillions, but away that showed that I had something to build upon.

OpenQuest’s 2nd Cover by Jon Hodgson

All in all, we had about five versions of OQ1 to fix typos and rules****, and I also played about adding extra content. This was fairly typical of indie-RPGs of the day, so I felt justified doing it. Plus, it was fun to grow the game this way.  I released two mini-settings with supporting adventures, the Savage North (D101-07) and Life and Death (D101-015), both in 2010.  While this was going on, I was getting more feedback from the fans, and it was obvious that a second edition was on the cards. So by summer 2012, OpenQuest 1st Edition had had its day, and OpenQuest 2nd Edition was upon IndieGoGo.com being crowdfunded. But that’s another story 😉

Next up The Savage North (D101-07)

Notes:

*Life and Death is currently out of print. The plan is to re-work it

** It became very clear why no one else seized on it later on. About five years later, Mongoose gave up the MRQ 1 license and released a second edition. At this point, the RuneQuest logo license, which, if you were saying “hey, this is compatible with RQ” was important, just disappeared. So you were stuffed if you had gone down that route. Cakebread & Walton, for example, took a year to redo their MRQ version of Clockwork and Chivalry game, moving it over to OpenQuest as a standalone game (so I guess it worked out well :D). But the rest of the more casual hobby publishers who used it were stuffed, and their supplements eventually disappeared.   The MRQ 1 Systems Resource Document hung around, and is still on the internet to the best of my knowledge, but was the subject of some dispute as revitalised new management at Chaosium pointed out that several Glorantha elements had been released in it without permission – which of course invalidates the whole thing. Today, as a result, OpenQuest is based fully on the successor to MRQ1, through MRQ2, Legend, which was released in its entirety as Open Gaming Content under the OGL. One of the reasons I didn’t release Life and Death under the MRQ Logo license was that I saw that it could be withdrawn at any time. Even though I checked with Greg Stafford just before release, he was ok with it and never had any of the disputed Gloranthan material in OpenQuest, which has always been a non-Gloranthan game. Still, I didn’t twig that the MRQ SRD was on shaky ground until much later. Wiser eyes would have seen this mess straight out of the box. If I had realised this, I would have worried myself to death and never have done OQ. So it’s good my publishing naviety won out here 🙂

***The (in)famous Halfling to Duck change.

**** OQ 1 had a car crash of a proof/editorial. In the case of one proofer quite literally, another had a major life-changing crisis that took him out, and I had the game over the situation of my second child being born, literally the month I decided to publish and be damned.   Part of me wishes that I had taken more time to squash the typos and clean up the rules mistakes. My rather happy punk rock attitude to getting games done in the early days of D101 gave us a reputation based on that, which some reviewers focused on and highlighted in their reviews. That made me very angry until I took practical steps to fix it and realised that they only said what they did because they cared about the books and wanted them to be better. But I stand by the decision to publish when I did. I don’t think I would have done it otherwise. My second child was a more bumpy ride than my first, which was effortless, and I think I would have lost the momentum of getting it out there. Plus, it gave me and a great many others, who told me in person at cons or via emails, a great sense of joy.

Hearts in Glorantha 1,2 and 3 (D101-03 to 05)

Hearts in Glorantha (HiG) was a big part of my publishing life for a good decade-plus. It ended just under a year ago, something I’ll cover when I do posts about the later issues (7 & 8).   I remember the first three issues fondly because they just got done to the bi-yearly schedule that I set myself, and they were, on the whole, well-received.

My early years of running convention games were running Gloranthan games, first RQ3 in the dying light of the system’s popularity in the late 90s, and then a rapid succession of three editions of HeroQuest. I organised a group of demo referees, the Ring of HeroQuest Narrators, which warped into the semi-official Masters of Luck and Death before imploding. Monkey and my own efforts were on my mind, but I still lacked the impetus to actually get down and publish it. That impetus came unexpectedly one morning just before I set off to work in  May of 2008 as I sat and read a 30 page + thread on RPG.net where an obvious sockpuppet called Angry Agarath attacked everyone involved in Gloranthan publishing from Rick and Jeff at Moon Design (who had just taken over from Greg Stafford’s Issaries Inc) to the fan publishers over the lack of urgency on the publication schedule. AA really riled me up, and after spending 45 minutes reading every post, I thought I could have a go at filling the void and Hearts in Glorantha was born. A quick check with Jeff Richard, who greenlit the fanzine, and I was off on a crash course learning InDesign, emailing potential contributors and artists.

Three months later, Hearts in Glorantha issue 1 (D101-05) was released to many happy Glorantha Fans at Continuum 2008 in Leicester.  I’ve always followed the Pink Faries mantra (via the Henry Rollins cover version) of DO IT, so this, in my mind, is the official birth of D101 Games.

HIG 1 was a real hodge-podge of what I ever could pick up at short notice.  But it worked, and I was happy with it. It had a gaming background, fiction, a couple of Stewart Stansfield’s infamous Duck articles and a very quick adventure by myself.  But that’s how I wanted it. It was a magazine, not a supplement in disguise. I also set the Editorial policy, which lasted for the magazine’s entire run, where I resisted setting a theme, so authors could be lazy and write to order, because I wanted folk to come up with inspirational pieces that had just lept into their imagination. The feature for each issue was whatever came out from what was submitted. For issue 1, it was the very appropriate Mythology.

Hearts in Glorantha 1, cover by Darran Sims

HiG 2 (D101-03) and HiG 3 (D101-04) came along according to schedule. It debuted our consistent look and feel, with John Ossoway creating a new logo, doing the cover (which he would do for the next three issues), and setting up the layout templates. HiG was also the Creature Feature, which saw Dragonnewts, Chaos Elves from Dorastor, Jack O Bears, Harpies rub shoulders more of Stewart Stansfield’s Ducks.

Hearts in Glorantha 2, cover by John Ossoway

HiG 3 was, amongst other things, an Undersea Feature, which featured a write up of an all Mostali (Dwarf) mini-campaign, We All Live in a Brass Submarine, by Richard Crawley, as well as material from a never-released HeroWars era Men of the Sea second book by Nick Davison.  I also got in there with an OpenQuest Scenario (the only OQ Glorantha adventure) based on the premise of WHAT IF the Big Rubble was in Dara Happa, and it was Solars vs the Lunars? To my knowledge, this was the biggest stretch of YGMV (Your Glorantha May Vary) ever published (Fan or Official) and I’m quite smug about that 😛

Hearts in Glorantha 3, cover by John Ossoway

Worth noting, as well as articles by Gloranthan Luminaries such as Mark Galeotti and Jeff Richard, each of the first three issues had a one page bit of fiction by Greg Stafford himself based upon the three approaches to Gloranthan Magic.

In many ways, HiG 1-3 is where I learnt the hard way how to publish, and while Monkey and OpenQuest, my first two RPG releases, got put to one side they were both the better for what I learnt from doing HiG 1-3.

Part of me cringes when I look at the sloppiness of the layout, and my editorial. The whole thing was part of a learning curve and I was still in a happy fan publishing punk rock frame of mind, which helped me overcome some pretty crippling “omg, omg, I can’t believe I’m allowed to do this” self-disbelief.

I’m also very proud that I used HiG to get other authors work out there, and into the hands of fans.  It’s the reason why to this day, D101 Games is not an exercise in pure self-publishing, that I have other people write and draw for it.  HiG was especially good as a recruiting ground for many artists that would go on to illustrate other D101 releases.

Next up: OpenQuest 1st Edition (D101-06)

D101-02 D101 Games at Continuum 2008

My local gaming cons have always been important to me. It gets me out of my home and lets me try out ideas with other roleplayers. Most D101 Games releases have had an outing as a convention game at some point.

Continuum 2008 held at Leicester University, was a medium-sized gaming convention of about 200+ attendees, held over the Summer.  I’d been going since 1998 when it was called Convulsion and was a Gloratha/Call of Cthulhu/Chaosium convention. At some point in the early 2000s, the organising committee resigned en-masse, leaving Lawrence Whitaker as chair of a new convention, that was really just the old one continued with a new committee. Hence the name Continuum.

“My attendance at Continuum 2008” was important in the D101 scheme of things and why it is counted as a release for the following reasons.

  1. I spent a lot of time talking to people and promoting the idea that I was doing D101 Games.
  2. I was running the early version of OpenQuest, which was known as Simple Quest Zero Edition, for several of the games I was running over the weekend.
  3. I took along a box of forty copies of Hearts in Glorantha Issue 1 that sold out!

I also wrote a longer review for this blog just after returning.

Here’s a quick gallery of photos.

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D101-01 The Website

The first release is not actually a game or a book, but this website.

Let me explain.  When I first moved to the Greater Manchester area and worked in Manchester city centre, I became quite obsessed with the history of Factory Records. How they ran their business along anarcho-syndicate lines, and how some their of releases weren’t actually records but ventures important to the label’s owners. So, for example, Fac 01 is a poster advertising a club night that they used to run, where various bands associated with the label played. Similarly, D101-01 is this website (and associated blogs), and D101-02 is my convention attendance at Continuum 2008 (which I’ll cover in my next blog post in this series).

The start of D101’s web presence was a Livejournal.com* blog, which I started when I started planning what D101 Games would be and, more specifically, what Monkey, which was going to be my first release, was going to look like.

In 2008 as things got more serious with books actually being for sale, being a web developer/programmer as my day job at the time, I signed up with a hosting company. I created a WordPress Multi-Site – which is still the bedrock of the site** and hosts all the sub-blogs (including this one) and domains like openquestrpg.com.  This multi-site approach has let me blog about various games and themes (for fantasy, see my long-running The Sorcerer Under the Mountain blog), which is a good marketing tool and a bunch of fun to boot.

Other big changes to the website over the years

Changing to D101Games.com. Being proud of being a British Game Designer and because it was cheap as chips, the original release of the website had a .co.uk domain name. But business sense prevailed, and since the .com domain gets much more views, I eventually about 2009 moved over.***

Div Theme. I’m not a graphic designer, so Elegant Theme’s Div for WordPress gives me all sorts of nice responsive layout controls, so it works with mobile devices and tablets without me doing anything, and a nice inbuilt page builder so funky page layouts are a breeze.

Woocommerce. An Open-source and free shopping cart for WordPress. This has allowed me to run my own web store quite profitably and do direct to customer sales, which before 2016 I could only do at conventions.

Mail-Chimp. I use the free version of this, and it lets me build up email lists to announce new releases/Kickstarters etc.  This is why I don’t have to do Farcebook to promote what I do with D101 😉

Having a well functioning and well-constructed website has been a core business activity from day one.  More important than having a Facebook page. It’s also a focus. So much of what I do is through the web, from producing the books through print on demand sites like Lulu.com. So in retrospect its only fitting that this site is D101’s first release 🙂

Notes:

*To my great surprise, my d101 games blog still exists over there, but I won’t link to it because Livejournal.com, which was a happy little internet start-up that began as a bunch of friends running it off a couple of servers in San Fransico, has long gone down the toilet as it was sold on.   All the content was migrated over here long ago.

**D101 Games is hosted with a Manchester company called 34sp.com. They are a great little outfit with great service, and although they don’t officially support WordPress Multisite, they have gone out of their way to do so over the years.

***once I stopped using d101games.co.uk it was quickly snapped up by a company that holds domain names that have been used in the hope that someone will pay them zillions of dollars. At one time, rather worrying, it had a mock site that was all about gambling and poker. Not sure why? In the hope that I’d buy it to stop them damaging my business’ image? Or simply to attract purchasers with the whole “games” thing. Oh yes, and having “games” in my URL gets it banned via BT’s Strict parental controls.

 

 

D101 Games at 60 (releases)

So OpenQuest 3rd Edtion is now out.

You can go grab it here, from my web store in both pdf and print/pdf bundle.

Also, the new edition of OpenQuest is my sixtieth release, or to give its stock control number is D101-060.

That’s right D101 Games is 60 releases old. Which keeps up with the fact that it’s been up and running since 2008, and roughly put out five releases a year.

Some of the copies of OpenQuest as seen in the hands of Kickstarter backers

So I’ve decided to celebrate the fact we are now an elderly games company, I’ll be doing a series of blog posts here about all sixty releases.  Although some of them may be grouped to save time :).