Dilly Green Bean Games Almanac

C00B1

So the time has come to start talking about Chronicle 00: Book 1. It all started like anything does: with an idea. I had written the Xenomorph Invasion novel and of course it was a piece of fan-style crap. I hadn’t been to grad-school yet and I wasn’t even done with college.

Speed ahead.

I got a lucky break in the industry and met Mike Pondsmith. I started producing Fuzion games and before I knew it, Xenomorph Invasion was its own game. But I wanted to tie it in somewhere to Cyberpunk. In the timeline I just listed it as: Age of the Cyberpunk. And so it stayed…dead.

But was it?

Since meeting Mike Pondsmith, I have been very blessed with a good friend. I had gone from that art guy for Cyberpunk v3 to something more. It was a cool feeling. I didn’t know much about Mike (unlike all the fans) and I had no expectations. He was just the guy I worked for and talked to every now and then about teaching. While Mike was away at DigiPen, I was trying to hold the Fuzion ship afloat with yearly releases….and then came G-Core. Most people know this story (if you don’t there is something about it in an earlier blog post). But With Mike gone from the industry, I REALLY wanted to go back and do ALL the prequels to Xenomorph Invasion, including the Cyberpunk stuff. It seemed like a cool idea. I began to do extensive research on the genre. I spent a full year in college libraries and online digging. I immersed myself in cyberpunk anime and took lots of notes. I read about bio-punk, something Mike had touched base on with Cyberpunk v3 (which wasn’t received well). I wanted to know what made CPv3 so hated by the grogs. And as I researched I started to get the idea as to why (besides the fact it’s hard to accept change from someone as awesome as Cyberpunk). I decided to take different approaches, because Mike was right, bio-punk was next up in human technology. So as the text started to form and the setting cemented, I gave the project the title: Chronicle 00: Book 1 (inspired by Gundam 00′s title). And as the game swung into full production…….

RING RING

“Hey Jay, I just wanted to let you know I’m back, man.”

I had a heart attack. Mike was a great friend and with him back it also meant the last year of research was about to get fragged. After the call I hung up and sat on my couch. With Mike back I didn’t want to even go back to Chronicle 00. That genre was his baby. I was crushed. I spent the following 24 hours thinking and I decided to call him and let him know what I was up to. After I stumbled over my words, Mike told me it was ok and said to avoid the following or I’d be in trouble: rock rebels, netrunners, (and some other bits I can’t remember off the top of my head). And that was the end of the conversation…so I thought. The months that followed were phone calls back and forth, bouncing ideas off of one another. It was crazy. I would have handed the entire project’s rights over to RTG in a second if Mike asked. I was that gitty over the brainstorms. When I got ready to lock down the final story, I felt as if Chronicle 00 was getting TOO much into the Cyberpunk 2020 range. So how did I deal with it? In the original Xenomorph Invasion there were a race of robots that had assisted in human technology against the alien threat. That had to go. Chronicle 00 went from being a prequel to a whole new universe, as I tore away dumb ideas and integrated better ones into the epic storyline. The H-Bots, now Hyperions, crash landed on Earth and their tech was gathered by different corporations. While it didn’t change anything from the bio/cyber-punk genre, it helped pave the way for even bigger stories. The rock rebel, would now be a rogue mannequin called N-Gage, who would fight for the weak in Europe while searching for her ship. Other characters would include a renegade Navy Admiral and his fleet now turned pirates. My chick heroes would be decked out cyber-gals with hardsuits, wrecking havoc on the Japanese mega-corporation. Each one a solo operative. I took the lethal and made it manageable. Why use live ammo for everything? It’s 2075. Now the cops use EMP and taser rounds as their primary. And as for upgrades? Bio-Punk and Cyber-Punk are all in style, but each compete for the #1 spot. Using bio-punk was great. It was going to help medically explain things in later books. I’ll go into more detail in later blog posts.

As for the art…..If you haven’t been over to House of Jay or the new Chronicle 00 Facebook page, you should. I have posted lots of samples. My objective with this game was to do full production art instead of crappy Poser statics. The book is filled with goodies. Every now and then I’d go online and look for specifics (like a boomer fighting or motorcycle) to help guide me a little. One thing I love to do with art is really catch the moment. The angles, the shades, the effects have to have a special look. I think people will be pleased with the direction.

So that’s it for now. Pardon any typos. I’m writing this on a Saturday and my family calls.

Open Letter to our fans

Due to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, we at Dilly Green Bean Games will
be scaling back on our dark games and focusing on more family friendly ‘lesson’ games.
Chronicle 00: Book 1 will not be scaled back, but future G-Core releases will be. This fits
with our company’s Morality Clause. No one should ever murder a child and we will no
longer participate in the production of senselessly violent games that have swamped our
industry.

END

When I first heard about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting my heart was filled with terror. A dear friend lives not far from where the shooting happened and she has a child that goes to elementary school. I came home and quickly checked Facebook and learned that their family was ok, but shaken by the experience. I sat at home and listened to the news…as the number of dead came across the TV. All I could think about was my little girl, who was at her elementary school. I wasted no time picking her up from school early, as many of my industry friends did. It was this shooting that made me start to think.

And think.

And think more.

I sat down and drafted a letter to our fans about the direction I would take Dilly Green Bean Games. I did it with tears in my eyes. I made myself look at the faces of those twenty little kids that were senselessly murdered before I began. What if one of them had been my baby? Or my friend’s baby? And when the news went to a commercial, a preview for a movie came on….guns blazing. And President Obama came on and talked about guns and our violent culture. I knew better than to blame guns for this shooting. I have worked the front lines of city hospitals and experienced things that most people never will with those suffering from violent mental illnesses. But I also knew that the violent culture I contributed to as a game designer wasn’t helping.

I used to pride myself off of violent games. How many people could I kill in a story arc? How many guns could take out a superhuman? It was funny. But when you really look at it, it’s not. When you put a name behind every face you kill, it’s not even close to funny. It’s dangerous. In the military they taught us to be strong. That if you have to take a life you do it and move on. That was part of the job. But I am a civilian. And civilians shouldn’t be so callous with violence and death. Because when we do, it makes us lack an appreciation for life itself. It’s cool to wave that gun around or be all bad-ass. But you know what? It’s not.

I thought my change of heart would get some kickback. Right from the start a moderator from RPGnet told me “Fuck you, for your morality”. They then banned me because I was accused at first of self-promoting using a tragedy, which hurt me personally, and then they tried to continue the justification by saying that I had attacked other people in the industry by saying that our industry was swamped with violent games….which it is.

Yet, with every negative comes a positive. Right away fans e-mailed me appreciations for what I was going to be doing and what direction I would take when designing games. Because when you think about it, a hero doesn’t kill anyone. They save people. A cop doesn’t randomly shoot criminals, they arrest them. A game should be about story and lessons, not hack and slash and kill, kill, kill.

In 1988 I began running a super hero campaign called: Guardian Universe using FASERIP. It was a setting where heroes were heroes, villains were villains, and the uncanny did it’s thing. It was a mesh of horror movie fun and classic comic greatness. My players had many foes. From followers of the Ones Before to Cartel, who later turned out to be God Almighty. Each session’s story would usually depend on what horror movie I had seen that week. If we were doing all weekend games, they would fight Cartel and his crew. If it was a weekday, it tended to be a quick horror session. Amazing characters came out of these adventures. The one that sticks out for me is Sam, the relentless killer with no stats. The heroes would kill him and Sam would keep on coming.

When I came into the game industry, I really had no clue what I was doing. Luckily, Mike Pondsmith took me under his wing and gave me a lot of guidance. And that’s how Guardian Universe Core Fuzion was born. Later I decided that GU needed a new system and I wrote Guardian Universe II: Power Overwhelming. And still not happy, I did Guardian Universe CST. Then came G-Core and it all changed.

Here’s the continuity of the Guardian Universe:

Guardian Universe (original setting)

-Unpublished

Guardian Universe Core Fuzion

-Parallel Universe

Guardian Universe Covert Strike Teams (direct sequel to GU Core Fuzion)

Guardian Universe II: Power Overwhelming

-Parallel Universe

Guardian Universe III

-Parallel Universe

Each Guardian Universe setting touched base on the original, but because of game mechanics they were never direct spin-offs of the original campaign setting. And this is why I am now releasing Guardian Universe REVIVAL products. These are part of the original campaign continuity set in 2005. Each product will include background data for running games in the original setting. The first up is this product: Monsters Twilight 3.

After my Black Summer review I read two very DIFFERENT graphic novels by Warren Ellis. And I was very happy!

The first was NO HERO. This story was about a hippy who accidently created super version of LSD that had special properties: people who take it get powers….usually. So Carrick starts this secret order from where he manipulates the world using his super humans. The concept of hand picking heroes and creating them was pretty well thought out. The story was better. Summed up: the world governments have finally found a way to kill the super humans and are out for revenge. This leaves Carrick and his crew in a spot, as one hero after another dies. Now the term ‘hero’ is pretty loose here. They are far from your Superman happy types, instead they are more like your Authority style mental cases with baggage. But the plot twist comes with a guy who really wants to be a hero and runs around the city playing vigilante. He eventually gets noticed and Carrick offers him a gig. But when you take the ‘super drug’ you turn into whatever you really are inside. It took me a bit, but I didn’t catch on at first when the guy’s skin fell off…LOL.

Anyways, NO HERO was a good choice. If you are looking for something that isn’t DC or Marvel, this is a must read.

Now second up was SUPERGOD and I have to say this was the best read all year. Imagine a world where each country makes their own superhuman. Now we are not talking Wolverine, we are talking GOD scale heroes. And then imagine them being so dangerous that they could destroy the planet. That is what SUPERGOD is about. It’s mostly a series of unfortunate events that cause each superhuman to come together in a nasty battle, compliments of the Krishna (the superhuman from India) who has decided to wipe out all the bad and recreate it in its own image. The whole story is told by a researcher from England who was a handler that country’s superhuman. Every section is epic and SUPERGOD is hard to put down once you start reading. Warren Ellis gives you a GRADE A piece here.

Thank you Warren Ellis for restoring my faith in you.

I normally don’t do an online criticism of an author, let alone one I am a fan of, but this time I will. As a superhero junky and game designer, I like to see what people are doing with the genre. After burning through several graphic novels I moved onto Warren Ellis’s Black Summer. As a fan of Ellis this seemed like a good premise according to the write-up on Amazon. What I got was something far less thought provoking and more of a very poorly presented, drawn out, political rant about George W. Bush and the Iraq War. With past Ellis titles, he has come around with a good ending that provokes thought. With Black Summer, I came away feeling empty and let down.

Black Summer is about a team of heroes called ‘The Seven Guns’ who have been augmented by the government to help fight injustice. Their leader, John Horus, murders George W. Bush and all his staff (all unnamed) with the justification that GWB’s war in Iraq was illegal and GWB’s election was illegal too, hence why he needed to be murdered. Add to that John Horus wants to give back America to the people. This is all explained in the first 2 pages of the graphic novel. I stopped at that point and asked myself if I wanted to read what was turning into a Liberal rant by a non-American writer. Because it was Warren Ellis, Mr. Authority himself, I pushed on. After all, Ellis had always had a good moral ending to all his tales, no matter how dark or edgy. Sadly Ellis failed. The story continues on as John’s team tries to come up with a strategy to take down their teammate, all while they kill American soldiers mindlessly and trash on America in general. Even with some great plot twists (faked suicides ect) Ellis failed to understand WHY the US military goes to war, instead running off of aggressive Liberal views that lacked teeth. He almost touches bits and pieces in a right way, and at one point it almost seems like Ellis might bring it back around. But again….he fails to do so. As I finished the last page I kept wondering WHY Warren Ellis would write such a bad piece of work. The answer is simple: knee jerk reaction. It seems the only logical answer.

This year’s TotalCon was another fantastic convention. Being it was our forth year, you never know what will happen. My wife and I left Thursday night at 10pm from Maine because the weather reports were calling for lots of snow. Of course they had been saying it on and off for weeks and the storms didn’t come or didn’t give out a lot of free snow. We got into Massachusetts and stayed at Best Western in Haverhill. Funny place really. 24 hour CVS next door. Shady people coming and going. Cops on the hill. But our room was nice and my wife and I enjoyed the quiet time.

Friday afternoon we left Haverhill and went to Mansfield for TotalCon. We got to the hotel before check in, but the front desk manager, Teddy set us up in a nice room early and really took care of us. Which of course was nice after he and I went at it during the first TotalCon I went to because of different issues. He has really come a long way and I highly recommend dealing with him when it comes to customer service. My wife and I got settled we got our passes and headed to the vendor room to visit Brenden Hill from Crossroad Games. I have been a customer of Brenden’s store for quite a few years. While at SnowCon we networked him up with Angie Heroux (who makes stuff happen at TotalCon) which led to him coming to TotalCon as a vendor. He also brought Jeremy Brown from The GUILD (a youth leadership program). After saying hello to him we visited Tricia Pfeffer (another vendor) and Don Higgins (diva artist and friend). I will say that the vendor area this year was really well stocked. I left with a Heroclix Sentinel during that visit. The evening schedule was crazy. Wes (the big guy who runs TotalCon) ran some panels that Blix (Studio 187), Ben Morgan (Chapter 13), James Carpio (Chapter 13), Don Higgins and myself sat in on.

Here is another killer G-Core review. You will need to right click and save (it’s a podcast). Thank you to Walt for giving G-Core a great review!

http://www.hazardstudio.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/gcore.wav