Monday 30 November 2015

Art Imitating Life

There are times when writing for games is a truly magical experience--even a transformative one. I have said in the past how wonderful it is to be able to work closely with artists and how much I admire their ability to bring life to text and ideas. Watching an artist interpret and transform the text you've written and take it into a new creative dimension is quite an extraordinary thing. Or at least, for me, it is. So imagine my delight then at having an artist--in this case, the talented Scott Purdy--take my likeness and transform it into artwork for an upcoming, storytelling card game. Well, you can see the results to the left and the transformation below.

The 'Family Doctor' card here is part of the recently funded Cthulhu Tales game which I worked on with Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi, perhaps best known for 'The War of the Ring' board-game. In the game, players are inmates of an asylum desperately trying to convince doctors, police, or whomever will listen that you are, in fact, wrongly incarcerate and should be freed. Unfortunately for them, the other players are trying to escape as well and more than willing to throw hazards into the inmates way.

My unwholesome transformation into Dr Willett, Charles Dexter Ward's family physician, began with a simple photograph taken by my wife. This was whisked away to Mr Purdy's diabolical workshop and, voila!, my visage became that of the family doctor. You can see three stages of this transformation below.


I love the resulting graphic and I am particularly fond of the final resemblance to the late, great Roger Delgado, 'The Master' of Doctor Who fame. (That's the old, classic 1970's Doctor Who serial, folks, pre-Eccleston/Tennant/Smith/Capaldi/etc.) Anyway, it's an amusing comparison, although Delgado's sinister look beats mine any day.


So, yes, writing for games might not bring you critical accolades, great wealth, or fame, but there are very real perks to be had in working with great people, producing great games, and occasionally being turned into a family doctor.

Up next: An update on the novel...

Friday 20 November 2015

Cthulhu Tales - Kickstarter

Some months ago, I had the very real pleasure of working with Italian game designers Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi, well known for their award-winning War of the Ring game among many others. The project, at that time, that we were working on was called 'Arkham Tales' and, with a slight name change, that project has now come to Kickstarter as Cthulhu Tales.

Cthulhu Tales by Cubicle 7 Entertainment.

Working with these two Venetian gentlemen was a treat as I don't often get called on to work on card games. So it was a great opportunity for me to work in a different gaming genre. The results of my involvement can largely be seen in the titles and text on the cards.


The game is being produced by Cubicle 7 Entertainment who I've worked with a great deal over the past five years and who have become synonymous with high-quality games since their inception. Having had the chance to play-test Cthulhu Tales with my friends, I have no doubt that Cubicle 7 has another hit on their hand here. As always, it was a real pleasure to work with the Cubicle 7 team and to see them turn a project into a thing of beauty.


It is also really nice to see a narrative storytelling game like this making it to market. Add some willing conspirators and you've got all the components you need to spin Lovecraftian tales of your own. It's a lot of fun. Click the link below for Kickstarter page itself. And happy dreams!




Wednesday 28 October 2015

Trick or Treat: Halloween Bundle of Holding



A quick post here to highlight the latest Bundle of Holding here. This latest offering includes a number of the books that I've worked on for Golden Goblin Press and Cubicle 7, including Tales of the Crescent City and World War Cthulhu.

If you are not familiar with the Bundle of Holding, it is an opportunity to pick up a bargain on a few role-playing games--in this case, Lovecraftian horror-themed books for Halloween--and to support a charity. Follow the link to take a look.

Tuesday 13 October 2015

Positive Distractions?

Ah, the mind is a wonderful thing. Except when it is actively derailing you, looking for stimulation from the open window, the sounds of laughter down the hall, or the ever-present screed of human experience on Facebook and GooglePlus. I'm talking about distraction here, but particularly the kind of distraction that a writer has to fight off while writing a long piece of work.

Distraction is, quite frankly, a nightmare and a near constant problem for virtually every writer I know. Distraction leads to the Dark Side, to procrastination and generally getting less--or any--work done. But is it always so? Is that a 100% guarantee, a tarnished golden rule.

Well, if you are like me, then the answer is... no. Distraction might well lead to time wasted 98% or even 99% of the time, but every once in a while--particularly I find while working on longer pieces--distraction can be generative, in a good way. Sure, it's dragging you off-topic, but sometimes the result is actually quite helpful or, at least, interesting.

For example, whilst writing a piece of game fiction (usually working to a deadline), I might be distracted with daydreams of a work of Speculative Fiction or Fantasy. I used to actively try to shut these out, to focus on the work at hand, but increasingly I have been taking short breaks to write down the thoughts and ideas that come unbidden. Interestingly, as I've taken to doing this, these generative distractions have become more fruitful.

I might come away with a few lines of dialogue between characters I haven't even dreamt up yet. I might come away with a description of setting or action that doesn't have a home in anything I'm writing. Or I might come up with something like this:


"In that moment, he faced the darkness alone. The cold stone against his shoulders chilling him as the dull beat within his breast slowed. He lay helpless, bereft of any earthly protection. Time slowed around him. The all-encompassing shadow smothered him, stripping him of his senses, of all avenues of awareness—save for one. In that darkness, he was suddenly aware of the singularity of his soul. A mote of dust tumbling in a vacuum. And with that awareness came something else: the crushing realization of his own insignificance."

The paragraph above is the result of a distraction-break I took while writing up a piece of academic policy. The mind, as I said above, is a wonderful thing. I don't count myself as particularly capable where multitasking is concerned, but clearly my subconscious was working away in the background while I was composing a Higher Education policy statement. Even more fortuitous is the fact that I believe I know where I can use this paragraph.

So increasingly I am of two minds--there's a pun in there somewhere--about distractions. I cannot, and would not attempt to, deny that distraction as a whole is a major problem for writings. Indeed, I agree with that readily. But every once in a while, it proves useful, leads to something really interesting and useful. I now have a folder on my desktop full of ideas, random writings, and a few little vignettes. My hope is that, given time, I can come back to most, if not all, of these elements and find a place for this.

For now, my lunch is over and that policy document is not going to write itself. I can only hope that my subconscious will be actively chugging away at some new creative idea and that I will have the opportunity to capture it, pop it in my desktop folder, and make good use of it sometime in the future.

Friday 2 October 2015

Out of the shadows... again

How do you know when you are working on too many project simultaneously?

One might suggest that letting your blog go dark for nearly two years is one sign!

I am now in the process of streamlining my writing schedule, having discovered that, yes, I am not a born multitasker. Is anyone, I wonder? At any rate, this streamlining drops me down to a mere four on-going projects. In the next few months, I plan to be doing less and less of the game-writing that has taken up so much of my time over the past few years, and focusing on finishing my novel.

(That doesn't mean that I am giving up writing for games--which I love--so you'll still be seeing a few publications over the next two years. And, I have something very grand planned to immediately follow finishing up my novel. More on that later.)

This should allow me to also get back to some correspondence and write the occasional blog post. I'm also quite interested in having more of a conversation about writing and answering any questions that you might have, so feel free to add comments below, send me a tweet, or visit my Author Page on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/stuartboon.

Until next time.