Scribblings - A Light In The Dark (Part 1)

Let me say right from the off that this was not a professional bit of work.

My dear friend, Nathan, (now a dad) was always trying to be an editor or movie mogul. Back in his youth, he decided to put together a fanzine, and he needed material. I provided him with some artwork and a few articles (most from my memories of a UK magazine called IMAGINE that TSR used to publish). But Nathan needed something more, something...great.

Not being one to be put off by such requests, I instantly told him I could put together a sample module for him. At the time, I was doing Shift DM'ing with my friend, Jon (Lord Zir).

*** Shift DM'ing ****    A term coined when Jon and I took turns on different days to run stuff. It was a crazy time since there was no real chance of putting an adventure together. So we mostly wrote on the fly. This meant we had outrageous adventures and that no topic was too strange to be covered.

Jon is a master of running real real odd adventures--talking rabbits, moving trees, killer apples, and beery rivers are all typical things Jon will have in his adventures. He had just run this real real odd one about the sun and the moon and a man called Mr. Death. It was a typical "far out" adventure, a little shaky in places, but over all great fun. I decided that this would make a great adventure for Nathan's fanzine. (In the cold light of day, I can now see how this was probably not going to help the mags circulation.)

I sat down and rattled off the basic module, adding bits and taking bits from other stories as I saw fit. It turned out to be a LOT harder than I thought. I ran modules with a carefree abandon; I didn't need to be told what creatures would and would not do--I had it all in my mind. But modules will be read by people who (thankfully) don't have my brain patterns.

So I had to write out all the details, and it turned out there were a lot of options. After trying to cover everything I could think of, I gave it to Jon for him to work over. Hours turned to days that made it to weeks, and then after a mystical MONTH, the module was finished. I scribbled up a few pictures and put it all together.

Nathan was very happy; he made it the centre part of the magazine. We poured in all our spare cash and the A4 work of art was ready to ship out to people. We sent it off to a few published RPG magazines (GM being one), and waited for reviews. We got a total of two reviews, one bad and one worse :(

The mag looked cheap (hey, it was a fanzine!), the layout sucked (HEY, we just had a manual typewriter, cut bits out, glued them down, and photocopied it), and the pages didn't follow on (well, have you tried to use a single-sided photocopier to do back-to-back pages?). About the only thing the two reviews did agree on was the module. Both thought it was weird.

I was writing at a strange time. I no longer wanted power characters; I didn't need to complete published modules. I just wanted roleplay. I wanted an experience.