We have moved!

OK, let's be honest... Google's Blogger isn't really as good as it ought to be, or at least it isn't easy enough to use to allow me a foolproof blogging experience.

Thanks for your patience, readers... and sorry for the dodgy posts that were inaccessible for unknown reasons.

I have migrated everything over to Wordpress, and it seems a whole lot better.

Find all my old Faerie Wood themed posts at http://hatchlingdragon.wordpress.com/

...along with a new one, posted today.

Adventures in the new realm... of desktop publishing

From 1989, Garry and I both used Atari STs. These were pretty typical 16-bit computers of the day, plugged into a portable TV because neither of us could afford a monitor. We played video games (heck, we even wrote a small adventure game together, using the Graphic Adventure Creator) but more importantly these machines also provided the medium in which we did a lot of our writing. Documents were created using the very humble word processor First Word, and shared by the simple expedient of passing a floppy disk back and forth. Images were shared as original artwork, scanners being far too exotic for our home-based publishing business.

It was in these formats that I got material for ‘Ug!’ magazine, and it’s how I received the first draft for Garry’s science fiction game set in the universe of Bell & Braben’s space-trading game, ‘Elite’. Faerie Wood was far from the only game that Garry wrote... but it was almost certainly the best.

For a year or so after it was first typed up, Garry and I tinkered with the Faerie Wood draft, off and on. We were only seeing each other in the holidays at this point, which was strange because we’d been virtually inseparable before the demands of my studies had taken me northwards. During those holidays, though, I’d played in a few games (Benjamin Smith the gnome, at your service...) and I was convinced that Faerie Wood was worthy of publication.

My first attempt at document layout was very much like an issue of ‘Ug!’ magazine. I tackled the chapter on player character races, using an A5 format allowing one page for information on each race, plus a picture... done on the Atari ST.

Meanwhile, Garry continued to write the last bits of the book, including for example all the preamble that is necessary when you move from running games to publishing a rulebook for the game, such as a section on “what is roleplaying?” and explaining how to read all those funny-shaped dice. At the same time, I was kicking the English into shape, and playing devil’s advocate to point out loopholes or potential misunderstandings in the rules.

During my studies, I worked each summer for a local business that designed and manufactured printed circuit boards. Despite this being an industry where you would more normally have found Microsoft DOS, that company had Apple computers. This was significant because the PC-based writing tools of the day were just awful when it came to WYSIWYG document editing. Like a lot of early Mac adopters, my boss was passionate about document layout. He allowed me to use his hardware, and he took an interest in my progress as I taught myself desktop publishing. It was he who provided my initiation into the mysteries of the ‘Grid’, and of en-hyphens, em-hypens, and smart quotes; all of which had to be put in manually for each chapter.

If I remember rightly, Faerie Wood’s change to an A4 booklet with a two-column format was a happy accident, occurring the first time we imported the document into Quark Xpress. In that style it looked right - offering readability and the potential to lay things out with some nice places for images. During my lunch breaks I would switch off my soldering iron for a while, and format Faerie Wood instead. I stayed late in the evenings too. Little by little, the chapters took shape.

Desktop publishing gives you a lot more control over document layout than conventional word processing, in terms of image placement and so on, but I had a particular advantage that few typesetters have: most of Garry’s artwork didn’t exist yet. Thus, if the paragraphs of information I was formatting didn’t fit quite right, I could leave a gap of any size or shape, within reason, and a suitable picture would duly be produced to fill the gap. Consider the L-shaped picture of a dwarf getting caught going through a dragon’s hoard, for example. This shows the good working relationship that Garry and I had, dating back to our work on ‘Ug!’ magazine. I only had to ask... and my wish was granted.

Except once.

Just once, I told Garry that a picture wasn’t good enough, and he was none too happy. It’s a very difficult thing to tell an artist something like that, but I felt that it had to be done. The original map of The Wood was dull. It represented hours of work, carefully cross-hatching to produce two different shades of grey... but it was boring. In a book otherwise filled with creatures, magic and folk, mere cartography simply didn’t suffice. Our only full-page illustration within the covers of the book needed... more.

Perhaps I’m a perfectionist, and perhaps I’m a tyrant, but Garry is one hell of a commercial illustrator. Despite the obvious ambiguity of our working relationship (the artist was also the author, and quite clearly didn’t work for me...) he went at it again. I hope he’s forgiven me. I hope that he might agree that the resulting map ­– complete with faeries, sunbeams, a flying teapot and so on – was worth getting right. It’s a very Faerie Wood sort of image, in its final form.

Little by little, the typeset copy of Faerie Wood took shape, until it was time to print off a final version. For this, my boss gave the laser printer a thorough clean, and we were ready to go. All he charged us was 50p for each printout done during the process, which was an absolute bargain when you consider all the hours that I had spent using his computers... and this was in the days when a laser printer cost something like £2500, and a good Mac was still more. (It was even more of a bargain because I may have somewhat, ahem, underestimated the number of prints I’d been doing... for which, sorry Roger, but budgets were tight. Practically non-existent, in fact.)

Commercial publishing would have involved the creation of bromides at this stage, for high-quality reproduction... but we simply weren’t in that league. Also, what we got weren’t final master copies, since they had only a blank space where each image belonged. A lot of old-school image manipulation remained to be done, with scalpel and glue stick.

Of all the pictures in the book, here’s my favourite:

The chapter where it appears suggests that this is herbalist is brewing up something in a cauldron, but we can’t be sure. Perhaps it’s his dinner, or his laundry. We simply don’t know... and maybe his nosey familiar doesn’t know either, as he peers over the rim. I love the stylised flames that lick at the bottom left of the image, and the facial expressions. Garry once told me that if the familiar were to ask, “What are you cooking?” the answer might be “You, mate!” with the smaller faerie picked up and dropped in the pot.

It’s that sort of game.

Learning our trade

Before there was Faerie Wood, the gang had another project. ‘Ug!’ Magazine was a low-circulation gamer ’zine, produced as a reaction to the dry nature of our wargaming club’s official magazine. We all spent our Friday nights at a venue where the majority of people were older, historical wargamers, with roleplaying (with its greater need to be able to hear clearly) relegated to various small side-rooms.

We were like oil and water, back then: not that we had anything in particular against wargaming. Warhammer was only in its second edition, and was actually a pretty good game, before the endless cycles of ‘enhancement’ and dumbing down. No... but our wargamers were middle-aged, sensible types who played an entirely unfathomable game called ‘DBM’, or at best played ‘Fire and Fury’, the American Civil War game. If they wrote anything for the club magazine at all, it was likely to a historical piece about Oliver Cromwell, or the invention of the sandbag.

This, we decided, would have to be addressed... and with the confidence of youth, we set about it. First, I approached the youngest club committee member and asked if it would be okay for us to produce a magazine of our own. He agreed, perhaps thinking that was the last he’d ever hear about it... or perhaps he was just longing to get back to arranging his Hoplites. Poor bloke, if he’d known what was coming, he might have asked a few more questions... but I never asked him for any money, or help of any kind: just for his consent. “Steve said it was okay,” was my only explanation on the night, about a month later, when the first copies of the magazine were put on the front desk for members to take.

The existing club magazine was called ‘The Naked Sword’. What would we call our contribution? I recall that Mark wanted to call it ‘The Naked Man’, and had ideas for a parody of the ‘gauntleted fist holding sword’ logo of our rival publication. Perhaps we should have gone with that... but in the end, it was the monosyllabic ‘Ug!’ – reflecting its barbaric roots in a gamer community who understood little of the old order.

The first edition of ‘Ug!’ consisted of just twelve sides of A5, which is to say three sheets photocopied double-sided, each with a single fold. I wasn’t able to staple it, but I reasoned that newspapers don’t have staples, or covers. Eighty copies were made. Eighty times six photocopies... this was going to be expensive! Well, actually that first edition’s reprographics came courtesy of my employer, late one night. There was a scary moment when one of my superiors showed up, but she just complimented me on “working so hard” and didn’t glance at the material coming out of the copier. Phew!

The hardest job was neatly folding 240 sheets of paper. If you’ve never done that... don’t. It kills your fingertips. Once done, though, and having collated the pages (manually, of course) we were ready to go.

A proper little storm in a teacup resulted. It was very satisfying. For the first time, the young people of the club had a chance to say “this is what we do”. This is what wargaming and roleplaying mean to us. In the editions that followed, we reviewed computer games, and wrote about live roleplaying... we included ‘advertisements’ that were actually games supplements detailing equipment for use in Shadowrun and Car Wars. We had campaign reports, allowing people to learn about what went on among the mysterious group of roleplayers who shut themselves away in the kitchen, and we had short stories by friends of friends who weren’t even members of the club, but wanted a place to publish. (In the days before the Internet...)

First, though: trouble. Two of us got called before the committee, to discuss the ‘Ug!’ situation. Were our overlords unhappy? Had we offended somebody?

Not really. ‘Ug!’ was wacky, and it had a strange teenage blend of being terribly earnest while also trying to be insincere... but it never really crossed the line. The only people who might have been aggrieved would have been Games Workshop. Even then, we were reporting on the games they were spoiling, although it would be some years before their arrogance peaked when they ceased to talk about wargaming and started to call it ‘The Games Workshop Hobby’. But we took them on. ‘Ug!’ feared nobody.

From our overlords, there were no complaints about the content of the magazine. Just this: that a club can’t have two magazines. They were concerned, they explained, that if we continued to produce the rival publication, The Naked Sword might wither and die... and then what would happen if (for example) us young folks found other interests and ceased to produce our magazine?

In this, they showed foresight of the kind that you’d want in a club committee, and they were right: ‘Ug!’ managed just eight issues before its creators were scattered to universities all over the country, and publication ceased.

Before that, though, a deal was offered, in that ‘Ug!’ would appear within The Naked Sword. They’d take care of all the printing (hooray) and the combined club magazine would begin with the grown-up historical wargamey stuff, with the back of the publication for ‘Ug!’... as many pages as we wanted. (I wish I’d thought, back then, to demand the ‘double-fronted’ format that we would later use for our Faerie Wood supplement booklets, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.)

The deal was struck. The club magazine would survive, stronger than ever – and fatter than ever, reflecting the interests of all the members. And here's an example.

This is the ‘front cover’ of ‘Ug!’ in its fourth issue (actually appearing as Page 11 of The Naked Sword)... and just look at the contrast between the two publications. One minute you’re looking at an extraordinarily dull page supplying answers to a crossword you probably forgot all about, even if you attempted it... and then you get a Robsonesque pictorial mugging. Look out: ‘Ug!’ has arrived!

(Let's just pause for a moment to reflect upon the last line of that issue of the Naked Sword: “ANSWERS TO MAYS CROSS WORD PUZZEL.”

Yup. All caps. ‘Mays’ gets no apostrophe. ‘Crossword’ has apparently reproduced by mitosis, splitting like a bacterium before your very eyes to become two words. ‘Puzzel’ has been spelled in a distinctly puzzling manner.

Quite simply, we had been presented with a chance to shine. To out-produce and out-create our elders and betters... and for them to have to thank us for our contribution, and copy and distribute it. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, quite frankly. As Mark eloquently put it at the time, “We flop our c*cks out and p*ss all over the Naked Sword.”

He works as an English teacher, now.

Ah, literature. Can you imagine a horde of trolls, Starship Troopers and Cthulhu doing battle in the library at Alexandria? The chaos spread. ‘Ug!’ was official. It couldn’t be stopped. And to give the older generation credit, I must say that they never tried to stop it. I think they were taken aback by just how enthusiastically we launched into things, though.

We were fresh out of school, newly employed and with time on our hands in the evenings. No more homework! Working on ‘Ug!’ was fun compared to school, although it demanded a lot of the same skills. I’d done ‘Graphical Communication’, and here I was, editing and typesetting a magazine at nineteen. It was produced via a combination of electric typewriter, 9-pin dot-matrix printer, and Letraset rub-down lettering for titles, plus occasional bits of line drawing by hand, and photocopied abstract oddments that were included through the use of a scalpel and a pot of glue. Back when cut and paste really meant cut and paste!

The real star of the show, though, was Garry’s artwork. He understood what would survive two goes through the photocopier. (Once to copy all the pasted-together bits and pieces onto a single sheet, and then again after you’d painted out all the join lines with correcting fluid.) His pictures of the period are bold, confident and fun. There was a series of cartoons, each featuring a worm in a variety of different situations. In one, he’s an executioner, complete with a black hood, with a beheading axe clasped in his tail. In another, he’s a cowboy, with a holstered belt, six-guns and a Stetson. In our fourth issue, the ‘Science Fiction Special’, he’s Space Worm. No reason: just because.

When I look back at the copies of ‘Ug!’ (I kept them all) I have regrets. My editing was often far too heavy-handed. I simply couldn’t let something pass, back then, if I knew it was wrong. (Proper grammar Nazi, me... although I still had trouble with ‘which’ and ‘that’, here and there... as you may have observed within Faerie Wood.) I forced my contributors into a style that wasn’t right for them... and in the live roleplaying article, I cut big chunks out of it. The author didn’t write for me again.

I was learning the trade... and sometimes you have to learn the hard way.

Of all that ‘Ug!’ was, the one part that has aged well is Garry’s pictures. Perhaps he would disagree; certainly his style has evolved since... but there were some things that were simply right. Like the time I said it would be fun to have a join-the-dots picture of stars in the night sky above Stonehenge, which would reveal the purpose of the ancient monument...

 Yes, an ‘Ug!’ magazine exclusive; Stonehenge was a giant’s toilet.

This was ‘Ug!’ magazine, in its essence. I still have a fondness for ‘Sid the Snotling’, the choose-your-own-adventure serial in which readers moved between numbered paragraphs like the adventure gamebooks that had been popular in the early 80’s... only with a useless and feeble protagonist. I’m also pleased to have given young writers like Stephen Hooker and Andrea Noakes an early outlet for their creative juices. I think that the alternative rules we published for ‘Space Hulk’ were far more interesting than the official ones... but all good things must end, and ‘Ug!’ was no exception.

From Episode 2 of ‘Sid the Snotling’ - note the paste-up construction, from the days before desktop publishing

I was the first to head off to university, leaving the rest of the team with a supply of articles to ease the transition. Tony Brotherton took over the job of editor, and I have to say that he did a really good job of it. Where I’d been too heavy-handed as editor, and perhaps had too narrow a vision, he produced two issues that were genuinely fun for me to read, when I got copies in the post. At last I was in the role of reader, rather than creator, so I know ‘Ug!’ was good. After Tony, Mark Cook took on the mantle for the final two issues, and you know what they say: you should never give a monkey the keys to the banana plantation. He had some fun with it! Again, things I would never have thought to do... and which therefore needed doing. (Although I should say that Mark’s earlier contributions were also very good, such as his interview with gamebook author Joe Deaver: Mark had the instincts of a great journalist.) Mark would later edit his university’s student magazine... and if ‘Ug!’ never quite crossed the line, that certainly did. (For which, well done Mark!)

And that was it. The four of us had scattered, and ‘Ug!’ was no more. Thereafter, anything I cared to write had to appear in that other part of the club magazine, The Naked Sword. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, as two years of rivalry had caused our traditional wargaming counterparts to raise their game, and the whole thing was better produced and a lot less stuffy.

One item of note in a late issue of ‘Ug!’ was a report from Garry in which he described a new game that he was running, where each player took on the role of a diminutive faerie. I couldn’t participate in the campaign, being over two hundred miles away, but I was hearing a lot about it. Faerie Wood was born; its creator was our artist and among its earliest playtesters were my fellow editors. In some measure I think that Faerie Wood really can trace its lineage back to ‘Ug!’, the crudely-photocopied underground magazine that tried not to take anything too seriously.

Fixed Costs

In the days before digital printing services such as Lulu, everything hinged upon setup costs. Physical printing plates had to be made for each page of our book, and that cost a lot of money.

Additional money was required to get the printing press running exactly as required, and it would produce a lot of scrap in the warm-up process. That’s where all those slightly misprinted paperbacks that you see in cheap bookstores come from; a few hundred books from the beginning of a print run, while they were still trying to get the alignments right.

In a regular print run, that’s no problem, but in our case a few hundred books was all we wanted. The sale of those books would have to carry the full cost of all the setup and printing operations.

The ‘brave’ solution to this is to be more aggressive in your marketing, and to do a large print run, so that each book’s share of the fixed costs becomes vanishingly small.

We weren’t brave. Garry had inherited a small sum a while before, and I’d worked for just under two years before starting university. What money we had wasn’t going to be replenished any time soon. We decided to keep things small and simple.

In my university days I had a sideline in designing things for people. Business cards, takeaway menus, flyers, price lists... anything to defray the ‘huge’ cost of my recently acquired Apple Mac. I would produce a master image and then take it to a print business where I got to know the proprietors quite well. Naturally enough, it was them that I approached once we finally had Faerie Wood looking how we wanted it. (And that’s a tale in itself...)

The printer’s opening shot was that we could have one hundred books for five hundred pounds.

We could afford it! We’d be in print!

And that was about all you could say about it: having decided upon a retail price of just £6.95, five quid a copy for printing would leave us able to sell the book to fellow gamers but unable to give shops a trade price. Still, what we wanted was that Garry’s book would be in the hands of gamers. Perhaps we should go for it?

Those pesky setup costs. The printer offered us twice as many books if we’d go to eight hundred pounds, and we would continue to get more for our money if we wanted to gamble still higher.

Well... we didn’t want to gamble, or not that badly. Fortunately, while I hemmed and hawed (and probably dashed out to a payphone to talk to Garry... remember payphones?) the printer checked his sums and decided he could do a little better. A new offer was laid before me, which was eventually hammered into this form: two hundred books for £500. Also, being as much a bookbinder as printer, he offered to throw in a few special hardback copies as well.

That’s how we got just under two hundred copies of Faerie Wood for five hundred pounds, plus six clothbound copies that we could sell for a premium... and two very special ‘half leather bound’ copies that we kept. Mine is number two, complete with some very kind words from Garry on the inside.

I wish I could say that we lived happily ever after, but by the time our books appeared, relations with the printer had soured.

The books were late. So late that they weren’t ready by the time I went south to meet up with Garry, en-route to a gaming weekend (Baycon ’93) where we had intended to sell the game for the first time. The printer had to courier thirty copies to us, at his expense, or we’d have had nothing for our launch. Needless to say, he wasn’t happy. And neither were we: those first books all came with mere paper covers, in bright green.

A few weeks before, I had visited the printer, and been shown the card they proposed for the cover. I’d rejected the default that they had in stock, saying that it was a blue-green, ill-suited to a cover depicting a forest. I wanted a leaf green. This they eventually provided... but not in time for our launch event, so we had to sell books with flimsy paper covers in bright green. They blamed me for being picky; I blamed them for being slow.

Then Garry found that some of the books hey sent us had pages that were upside down. Every book had to be checked, and if faulty the staples had to be prised apart, and the pages rearranged. Some books had to be cannibalised to provide good pages to go in others... so we weren’t happy, and the printer wasn’t happy... but the book was done at last. If you’ve never held an actual, real book in your hand and known that you created it from nothing but ideas, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s like parenthood, only without the vomiting.

Perhaps in a future article, I’ll talk about taking the book on tour and trying to sell it to the world...

Garry actually looked quite a lot like this, back in the day...

An interesting footnote to this tale concerns the last time I talked with the owner of the print shop. (I saw him once, after our transaction was completed, but he just scowled and turned away, so after that I didn't get any more printing done there...) Anyway, last time we did speak, he said that he was confident that we would be back for another print run. In fact, so confident was he that he’d kept the presses rolling: he had another batch of books all ready for us, available by negotiation whenever we wanted them.

Now that’s interesting, if you think about it, because potentially there may be two hundred or so more copies of Faerie Wood out there in the world than we know about... although on the down-side, that means several hundred instances of Garry’s copyright being violated. If you should ever come across one, see if it’s been signed and numbered by Garry...

An Introduction

Faerie Wood: the roleplaying game

I'm sure I could do a more glitzy job of this, later, but it’s waited twenty years already, so why not make a start right now?

Among a number of games that we played (and often created) back in the 1990s, one in particular stands out, and that's Garry Robson's creation, Faerie Wood. It's not the only thing he wrote; there was also the godly ‘The Big I Am’ and the unnamed modern-day game that blended Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality universe with the symbolic magic system from Dungeon Master... but Faerie Wood was a home grown marvel. A skunkworks project. A journey back to simpler times when real roleplaying involved being unsure of yourself and picking your way with care, not referring to a heap of monster manuals and always knowing the best way to dispatch everything from from Aardvark to Zuglon.

I think it was a damn fine game. As you will discover, in this blog, getting it out of Garry's head and into the real world was a difficult, but very rewarding process. It’s a story that a couple of people have asked about, so here it is. (Or at least, here it will be... beginning in the next installment.)