I finally realized today that for me Gary occupied a truly unique position, one I think only a few others might have. With the exception of my family, I can’t think of a person who played a greater part in shaping the life I now have, moreso than any other mentor, friend, or boss I have known.

It was more than just his role in creating D&D. Every gamer who played has Gary to thank for that. But for me, Gary not only created a game, he created an industry, and then he hired me to be a part of that. I remember sleeping on the couch in his den when I came out for my interview. Because he thought I had talent, I was given a chance in the first place and it was while working for him and with him that I learned many of the skills of how to be a game designer. He instructed without trying, teaching through his games, his words, and his actions. And because he trusted my skills, I was able to grow and improve. If it had not been for that time at TSR, I do not think I would be as good a designer as I hope I am today. Quite simply, if Gary had not hired me, I would have been a burned-out English teacher somewhere by now. Instead his actions launched me on a path of opportunities and adventures I never could have dreamed of all those years ago.

And that is what I realized today — that my life was more linked to Gary than I understood. I cannot claim that we were close or good friends; since the years that I worked for him my life has gone in different directions. But that does not lessen the importance he played in my life and the respect I still hold for him.

LECTOR, SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE

Interested folks should come by and check it out. It might be really fun. If nothing else I’ll try to pontificate really well.

My latest discovery came as I was getting ready to put fill around the bases of some Masked Minions (from Paroom Station) and discovered my normal modeling stuff had dried out. Rummaging around I found a tub of “pre-mixed sanded ceramic tile adhesive and grout” from a table-building project I’d done before. With a little experimentation and practice I discovered it makes a really good basing compound. It’s thick and spreadable, dries slowly and works as a glue for anything you set in it. The sand gives it texture so it makes a good dirt surface. To work it I use a plastic-tipped bobby pin and a flat wooden stick with one end carved to a narrow tip. It helps to keep the stick damp for smoothing — until it dries the grout is water-soluble. It’s really good at filling gaps in a base, covering large surfaces, and building up a thick layer. The only drawback is that it doesn’t carve well when it’s dry.

You can find ceramic grout/adhesive at any hardware store for probably $5 to $10 a tub. One tub should last quite a long time.

The good part it I finally managed to upgrade my installation, found a nice theme that works well (Anaconda), and a really solid gallery plug in (NextGen Gallery) that is simple enough for me to use.

Overall the result is positively frightening. I declare myself the winner of this round!

Since I didn’t want to try resurrecting my atrophied HTML skills to build a web page filled with pictures, I decided instead to take advantage of the work of others, specifically Phpwebgallery and Photon. I tracked them both down through the Wordpress plugins page. Phpwebgallery is a stand-alone that lets you create and manage galleries complete wtih thumbnails, while Photon is a Wordpress plugin that links the galleries to your blog. All around it seemed like a good idea, especially since they’re both free.

However, good ideas can stumble a bit on execution. In this case it was a concatenation of circumstances. My “install web sofware and plugins” skill is almost as bad as my HTML skill. Now the creators of both these pieces of software are wonderful people simply for what they have done, but they are also French and my French is only slightly better than my HTML. There’s English documentation but when you run on the rocks of errors you pretty quickly need to know more. Fortunately, persistence, digging through forum posts in French and English, and downloading a few community fixes got things to a conclusion. It was definitely a case of two steps forward, one step back, mostly due to my own mistakes, but it now works, sort of. Somehow the gallery doesn’t look as nice as it is supposed to and I had to change Wordpress themes to get it to appear at all, but it does work.

The best lesson learned from the experience was how hard it is to write clear documentation — no matter what the language. Just like writing game rules, it takes practice not to fall into the trap of assuming readers know what you know. It wasn’t that the instructions were ever wrong. It just assumed certain things were understood without explanation, which for a software dilettante like me is not always the case.

If you want pictures for you blog, check out Phpwebgallery and Photon. Once you work out the hitches in installing, they’re very well done.

Fair enough. I’m not exactly blazing up the internet with with mountains of blog posts and a huge readership. In fact I think I’m the only readership. So it’s an even fairer question — why am I doing it at all? (Bear with me. I’m working through this — blog as psychotherapy.)

By nature, I’m a private person. I’m not a guy to post up lists of what I ate this morning, detail out my thoughts on a party I went to this weekend, or drop names about some conference I went to. I don’t go to conferences, at least not many, and what I do in my own time is generally consider my own business. It’s not that I don’t want others to know, it’s just that I don’t think most people will find it all that interesting. Sometimes I don’t find it all that interesting. I don’t want to expose my sins and faults and I really don’t want to deal with rejection.

So it’s pretty strange that I decided to try my hand at such a self-confessional activity as blogging. If you’re blogging you have to assume that others want to read what you’re writing. You’re standing on the soapbox and shouting, “Hey, look at me!” Strangers get to peek at your opinions and therefore your psyche. Maybe I joined because it’s what all the cool kids are doing. In truth I think I started because I went and got my own domain for email and such, but now having it I feel obliged to do something with it.

So I’m left with a quandry. I post because I can, but at the same time I’m almost relieved that no one reads this. The blog becomes my own private diary and if I don’t have visitors I don’t have to worry about exposure. But at the same time, I’m blogging, and any measure of being good at it involves other people reading what your write.  So part of me wants readers (other than the automated spam comments), but that means trying to get exposure and that means… And around and around it goes.

Basically, I’m a great case study for some neurosis. I need to think of something worthwhile to say.

The most memorable thing I remember about the system was the rather strange way I decided to handle character creation. Instead of just rolling numbers and having a bunch of stats, I thought it would be fun for players to actually think about their character’s background and history. I think the reasoning was that all of Howard’s characters had histories; they came from someplace, learned things from their parents or their youth and all that shaped what they were and why they acted as they did. Conan wouldn’t be Conan after all if he hadn’t come from the cold north and had a particular view that gods didn’t care, magic was sinister, and destiny was what you made yourself. But to the point of the game, I wanted the player to have a past. So I made a sort of mad libs character sheet. Fill in the blanks about your character and his family and those choices shaped his stats and what he (or she) knew. It was a fun experiment.

The game used a universal results table that was in vogue at the time. It’s a technique well suited to fast play and drama, although the GM frequently has to fill in a lot of gaps. It allows for big heroic moments and imaginative descriptions of just that Good, Excellent or Amazing result translated into.

Nonetheless, the game was a pretty minor blip in the ocean of RPGs at the time. So I was was surprised (to say the least) when a friend sent me a link to ZeRFS (Zeb’s Fantasy Roleplaying System). Apparently the Conan RPG wasn’t as complete a blip as I thought. ZeRFS is the work of dedicated players who have stripped the the system down to its basic rules (sans the Conan material) for use as a universal ruleset. It made me hoot and smile. I really hope their project succeeds. If you like RPG games you should really check them out.

Honest, I didn’t pay them any money or anything!

I first became aware of the game at SXSW; there were cards and stickers promoting the URL. There was clearly money involved here, so when I got back I checked it out. The site was a teaser, and when you went there it was all lots of links and snippets from strangers talking about the “crisis” in Denver and how they all met. It was all very fragmented and, frankly more trouble than I wanted to invest — but it had a countdown to a launch date so I figured I’d come back. Ergo, as a teaser, it worked.

So, shortly after it launched, I game back. Not quite on launch day, work and birthdays conspired against that, but within the first week. The problem was it was still very fragmented and very mysterious. I poked at it some more — clearly there was something there — but I could not find the lever in, the thing that said “Here is what’s going on and here is what we want you to do.” So, I gave up again, not really because I wanted to but because figuring out what I was supposed to do was more effort than what I judged the reward would be. Aside from the time spent figuring it out (which I could barely afford), it was clear there would then be time spent “playing” the game. So, my estimation was that I would use up all or most of my time doing the first, which would be pretty unsatisfying since then there would be nothing left to spend on actually enjoying World Without Oil. Clearly, I was not their target audience.

But then, who was their target audience? I’m about as game savvy as they come and I was passing on this because it was too much work just to start to play. How many other people passed through and said, “Thanks, but no thanks?” Worse still, how many people just came, blinked in confusion and went away? That leaves a small group, who both “get it” (i.e. can dig through the material and learn how to play) and have the time to play.

If I read its intentions correctly, World Without Oil wanted to raise people’s consciousness about an issue, to get a dialog going. But you don’t do that by being obscure. A good dialog needs participation of a broad community where lots of voices can be heard. Instead, World Without Oil feels one-sided. Either you “get it” or you don’t, and if you don’t then you’re obviously not meant to be part of the conversation. The straight-forward explanation of what was going on and what it wanted you do was buried three clicks deep through small links. It reminds me of my ancient days of paper gaming when fans would get outraged because we actually thought it was a good to improve the editing of our rulebooks so that more players could understand them. We were “ruining” the game because now anyone could play.

All this leads to the real question — why do ARGs deliberately want to appeal to only a small set of elites? Why not make them more accessible to a wider group of players? It’s quite possible this is literally an accident of birth. Several earlier ARG’s have been marketing vehicles where the goal was to create a buzz for a product. They were intentionally mysterious and appealed to only an elite set — in part because they were trying to attract the elites, the people who who will generate word on the street buzz. Reaching the masses was less important than creating press. But here, PBS paid good money for World Without Oil, I’m sure. It was in there interest to reach as many people as possible.

World Without Oil could have been vastly more successful if it had been honest at the beginning — “We are a game. We want you to imagine what if… Go.”

Don’t use the fiction to hide what you’re doing; get users in and then let them get lost in the fiction.

It only took 8 (or so) failed installs, the sudden panic as I remember what I’ve forgotten about HTML, scanning template designs, and a trip to the zoo — but now there is officially a Cthulhu Monkey blog.

I know it looks pretty much like crap, my categories are probably all wrong, and it’s confused and unclear what this is all about… but it should get better.

So stay tuned to learn more about the adventures and opinions of Dr. Cactus, Old Man Tentacle, the dim-witted Duckshoe, and me, Cthulhu Monkey.

More on us later.