Why, yes, I believe we shall. All right. So now we're recorded. So everything that any funny things you say could potentially go out on the Internet. We potentially reach the world and change all civilization. The world. Can I do the music for the intro to the podcast? Sure. Yeah, absolutely.
Getting geeky all up in your podcast. It's Shane Plays Geek Talk, a journey into the things we love. I'm your host, Shane Stacks. Thank you for pressing play. This week, we have, you've already, you've heard some of the many talents that he has with the intro music. We've got, joining us for this episode is Ken St. Andre, who is, that name will definitely be known to tabletop role players.
who know their games out there. And he does other stuff, too, that we'll get into in the course of this discussion. But, Ken, welcome to ShanePlays, and feel free to introduce yourself further. Hello, Shane, and hello, world. I'm Ken St. Andre. Way back in 1974, when I was only 27 years old, I started reading about a game that a lot of people were playing on the West Coast and up around Lake Michigan and so forth called That Other Game.
because I've sworn to never say its full name out loud. And I said, this other game looks like exactly the kind of thing I would like to play, but it's not here in Phoenix. Time passed. April of 1975 came along, and I went to a Friday night games club meeting, because we'd been doing those for five years already, and I got there late. Everybody else was playing Risk. Risk was a big game in the 1970s. But one person, whose name I keep having told to me, and his name I continually forget,
brought their freshly acquired first edition white box printed in the Gygax Garage version of that other game. So I asked permission. I sat down and I read it. And the more I read, the more I said, this is insane. This doesn't sound at all like what they were talking about on the internet or in the fanzines if the internet wasn't really going yet in 1975. But you know what? I see what they were trying to do.
And I think I can do it better. I'll make my own game and do away with things that don't make sense, like moving in inches. It was a miniatures game. That other game, which is the most popular role-playing game in the world today, and probably the most popular miniatures game in the world today, was basically a miniatures game based on Napoleonics and other miniatures genres. And Dave Arneson got the idea that squad leaders and other people in his squad could actually speak in voices and talk to their men. And he could do orc noises and stuff from the dungeon hallways. And that began role-playing as we know it. But it was still a miniatures game. I went home. I went to the library the next day and took out every book I could find on medieval weapons and earlier, along with every book I could find on magic and sorcery.
I came home. I started making lists. And then I went back to what I remembered of that other game. And I said, well, I don't know what they did. It makes sense. Having all those characteristics, those attributes, makes sense. It's a good way to rate people on what they can do. So I went through them one by one. Strength. Yeah, that makes sense. And I was following their formula exactly. Roll 3D6.
And strength makes sense. But you know, if you roll triples, then you've got to get something extra for that. So maybe you can roll it again. And constitution. Well, they give you a constitution number between 3 and 18. But then they turn around and say, you know, now roll 1D4 to see how many hit points you have. So you might have 18 constitution and one hit point. Didn't make sense to me. So we're throwing out hit points, and we're bringing in...
as a total amount of damage you can take before you're knocked out of the game. And so it went through all six of those original attributes. The ones that made sense stayed in basically as they were, and the ones that didn't make sense left. The ones that I was particularly proud of getting rid of was wisdom. I said, these guys go into holes in the ground in dungeon basements and try to rob monsters to take their gold, and they claim they have wisdom? They are bloody insane. But wisdom's got to go. When wisdom forsakes you, what's left? Luck.
Luck. When nothing else can save you, what can save you? Luck. Luck. When you need a date on Saturday night and you don't have a best girl, and you just go out cruising the streets to see who you can find, what can save you? I'll let you do the chorus here. I'm going to chime in and say luck. Luck can save you. There you go. Luck can save you when wisdom fails. We don't have comeliness in Tunnels and Trolls, if I remember right, but that could potentially save you if you were looking for a date.
Or it could potentially get you in neck deep trouble. Yeah, so luck. Luck is the answer we're looking for. Luck is the answer. And luck became the major difference there in the first day of game creation between their game and my game. Now, I remember that their game had all sorts of funny-shaped dice, none of which were available in Phoenix, Arizona in 1975. I didn't know where they got them. I, in fact, had never even heard of a D20 at that time. But I learned more as time went on. So I said...
We don't need funny-shaped dice to play this game. Everybody can get D6s. They just take them from the Yachty game or the Monopoly game or lots of other games that use six-sided dice. In fact, up to the time that they told me that there was other-shaped dice, I was unaware of it. So you're telling me that you couldn't go down to your local drugstore and get the platonic solids? Get what? I think they were called platonic solids originally.
Never heard of them. Yeah. I went to lots of drug stores and toy stores and never heard of a botanic scholar. They were, evidently, in the beginning, as it were, I think even the company that made the game that You Shall Not Name was sourcing them from, like, math places or, you know, places that sold, like, math supplies for school or something like that. I'm welcome. If anybody's listening to this and want to fact check me on that, I'm open to that. But I think that was the case. So, yeah, most people didn't even know.
what those were. There was such a thing as platonic solids. Right. We figured Plato was solid. We'd heard of him. But he never spent much time talking about his solids. Which is probably a good thing. I don't really want to hear about other people's solids if I don't have to. So anyway, please go on. I interrupted you to make a bad joke. That's okay. Bad jokes are where I live. See, me too. Me too. That's why I like you so much. Actually, I want to stop here before I go too long. I have a note here that I wanted to mention. Before I forget, I want to offer a special thanks to Matt Barton of Matt Chat. Matt reached out to me.
I said, do you know who Ken St. Andre is? I was like, of course I know who he is. And he had your contact information and said that you were open to interviews. So I just wanted to give a thank you before I forget to Matt Barton and Matt Chat. Thank you, Matt, for putting me in touch with Shane. There you go. And his friend and mentor, Rocky Calavito, I think helped him come up with some interview questions and stuff that I have. So if we have time, we'll get into those. Okay, so can we just use D6s? Everybody can get those. I made a game.
roughly modeled on what I thought I understood about that other game, that I figured everybody could play. And I tried it out on my friends about a week after writing it all down and taking the time to dig a dungeon because I figured it was up to the Game Master to dig the dungeons. We couldn't go out and buy them in kits the way you can now. So I dug a dungeon. So you literally dug it, like you went in your backyard and got a shovel and dug the dungeon?
No, I went into the backyard of my mind and got my mental shovels and wrote a complete description of it down on paper. And then I brought four or five of my friends over and said, now I'm going to teach you a brand new game. It's very popular in other parts of the country, but we won't be playing exactly what they're playing. We're going to play my version of it. Well, my friends in Phoenix had already seen several versions of games that I had made out of nothing, and they liked them for the most part. There was a Star Trek game that was extremely popular for one year.
Just to clarify, you made the Star Trek game. I didn't make Star Trek. I made a Star Trek game. I took a big piece of poster board, and in the center of the poster board, I planted the planet Earth. And on the four corners, I planted the Gorn, who were the first savage, bestial, totally, utterly, without merit, alien race that Star Trek sprung on the world. And then the Klingons, and then the Romulans, and the Webmasters, whatever they were called.
The Tholians. Do you remember seeing the Tholian web? Absolutely. Yeah, that's one of my favorite episodes. It was a good episode. So I figured of the four alien races that we would put up there to contest with you, Tholians would be the fourth. And they all had powers and ships designed after what I could infer from the TV shows.
And they all used D6s to fight. And our ships, I needed something that would be distinctly ship-like. We're not little rocket ships and little models of the Enterprise and so on. I went to a clothing store and bought a huge bottle of old buttons. I believe Federation ships were little blue buttons. Romulan ships were big black buttons and so forth. And we all had a great time. The object of the game was to conquer everybody else. And to do that, you would form alliances between the different groups.
But actually, Earth was in one of the corners, and the Romulans were in the center because the Romulans were the toughest. And the center was the easiest place to get to. So you made the Romulans tougher than the Klingons? Oh, yeah, definitely tougher than the Klingons. Because of the stealth? Because they could stealth? They could stealth. But more than that, remember the early episodes of Star Trek? Did the Klingons ever impress you as being very bright or good fighters? You know, they're... We only get to see it from Kirk's point of view, but he dispatched most of them with relative ease. Well, now that you mention it, I think that I just...
You know, because Klingons have always been built up to be so tough. So I don't really have a frame of reference anymore for the very first time, you know, like I saw Klingon on the original Star Trek. But I do remember balance. It was a balance of terror where Kirk is up against the Romulan commander and it's almost like a submarine. Yeah, that was a very tense episode. Yes, I think based on that alone, I figured the Romulans were the toughest.
people in our part of the galaxy. The Romulans rebelled against the peaceful ways of Spisak or whatever his name was on the Vulcan planet and took off to be a warlike planet. But in other ways, the Vulcans were obviously superior to Earthlings and almost everybody else they ran into. Luckily for the galaxy, they didn't do much running around and hurting people. Yeah, right. They were kind of seclusionary. What's the word I'm looking for? Where you just kind of tighten up orders and hang out there? Pretty much. They had their own little corner of space and they didn't want anybody else intruding on it.
And neither did the Romulans, who were sort of protecting them from the side. Well, they're our ancestors. We won't conquer them. But it was plain to me from the beginning that the Romulans were the toughest. And the Vulcans didn't even have a planet on the game board. They were pacifists. They would not be involved in a galaxy-wide war for control of the galaxy. Well, I mean, it's illogical to want to rule the galaxy, right?
Yes. I guess. I'm giving them a motivation if they need one. It is illogical to want to rule anything. Right. Well, that sounds... Do you happen... And I know that was a long time ago. I used to make games when I was a kid. It was a long time ago. It was destroyed more than 50 years ago. Okay. Well, that's it. So basically... I don't think I even have the buttons anymore. Well, that was pretty smart to go get buttons. I mean, now you can just run down to the local gaming store or even like Barnes & Noble or Walmart or something these days and find gaming accessories. But back then, you had to improvise where you could. Back then, I improvised where I could.
I made stand-up cardboard figures for my Barsoom game and my Tarzan of the Jungle game. So you made games from two different Edgar Rice Burroughs properties, right? Barsoom was also Burroughs, wasn't it? The Mars? That's right. Yeah. Oh, cool. So you had game designer DNA in you from the beginning, it sounds like. I would like to think so. Yeah, you were making games. When I was six years old, my father taught me to play chess. And on our very first game, I still made it. Oh, wow.
We didn't know what to do. He had to look it up. He didn't know how to play chess very much himself. He just learned from somebody, or maybe remembered from his high school years or something. He was no great chess player, but he was a grown man, and I was a six-year-old kid, so he should have won. Really interesting. Yeah, so it sounds like you had that kind of mind. Then we started playing Monopoly. Back in those days, they had really great Saturday morning cartoons.
And one of the really great Saturday morning cartoons was called The Wacky Racers. I remember The Wacky Racers. I love The Wacky Racers. I love The Wacky Racers, too. What was important to them was winning the race. So I have to ask, who was your favorite Wacky Racer? Dane. Now I've forgotten everybody except the villain and his dog. Was it Snidely Whiplash and Muttley? I think it was Snidely Whiplash and Muttley. Yeah, the dog. You had Penelope Pitstop.
I remember because I grew up in Arkansas. There was the Arkansas Chuggalug with the guy and his bear. You had all these great themed cars. I think you had Dirk the Daring or Dirk. No, that was from Dragon Slayer. But there was this sort of big-chinned, broad-chested hero guy. There might have been. And I think the Wacky Racers were the inspiration for those magnificent men. In their flying machines? In their flying machines. Yeah. No, I loved Wacky Racers. So you see, the first thing I did when Monopoly got boring to me is turn it into a Wacky Race game.
And everything that was a property, you could buy and charge rent to everybody. If they even landed on it, they had to pay a basic cheap rent, $14, whatever it was, without a house or a hotel or anything. We just did away with that. That was unnecessary. We had doubles rolled and added and rolled over like they did in regular Monopoly. And that's where that came from in my game-designing history. And I had been making...
uh, my own, uh, original or semi-original game. Um, when I found out there was such a thing as fairy chess, I think, oh, oh, I want to make a chess game with its own rules. I think I found that out when I read The Chessman of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. After I read that book, I went down and got another big piece of poster board, divided it into a hundred squares and made a Jakeman game. So you single-handedly kept the poster board industry in business in your youth. Well, I don't know about that. I probably bought eight or ten big pieces of it. Anyway, the point is I had some game designing experience under my belt. Nobody had ever risen up and slapped me down and said, yeah, that's stupid. So when I encountered that other game, I figured I could make a version of this game.
We could play and it would be a lot easier to play. And it wouldn't be so slow and awkward with all this moving in inches and using rulers to figure out the line of sights and all the rest of that stuff. I'd never been a big miniature fan, but I did play it in my senior year of high school. And that year, it made sense because we were playing World War II miniatures with rubber soldiers that we bought at the drugstore. Were they the little green ones? They were the little green ones. The little green army ones, yeah.
They were my favorite drugstore toy. I taught my younger brothers how to play a war game with the little green army men. We would get marbles, and we would set the little green army men up in various places on one side of the living room or the other, and then take turns shooting the marbles at the other guy's horses. And if you knock a man down with your marble, he was out. Right. We did a variation on that. Most kids used rubber bands, but yeah, I like the marbles. Marbles were no longer like a big thing, you know, when I was a young lad. But I still had a lot of marbles because they were a tremendously big thing when I was a half. Well, they were, you know, the more I learned about marbles, they were, and some people are going to disagree with me on this, but this is my take.
it was sort of the collectible card game of its day because people would trade the marbles, right? Oh, I like this marble. I want this marble. So it's not just, you know, you were shooting the marbles in the game. A Cleary was better than a Cat's Eye. Right. It was better than a Cleary, you know. A special double-sized shooter was prized, you know, because when you shot something with that marble, you were likely to blast more force through that circle of marbles in the center of the ring and maybe knock something out. I think there was a time...
I missed this time. Like I said, by the time I was a young lad. A lad. So it was marbles. I mean, there were still marbles out there, but I think there was a time where basically a large amount of kids were just walking around with their marbles, right? Right. Yeah. And that's where they're saying he lost his marbles came from. Because he literally lost his marbles. So, I mean, even obviously at a young age and into your teens, you had game designer DNA in you.
And then the game that you shall not name came out and started taking the world by storm, and you immediately came up with a count. As quickly as I understood it, because the other thing I hadn't mentioned was my diplomacy experience in college. So the diplomacy, the game that ends friendships, that diplomacy game? That diplomacy game. Yep. So tell us about that diplomacy game. Well, I roomed with a guy in graduate school named Dick Fedder. I wonder whatever happened to Dick. And he was going for his PhD.
But he was my roommate. He was a bit of a stepshirt and had a hard time keeping roommates. But he had no trouble keeping me because he was showing me new things all the time. The other guys in graduate school were more interested in playing midnight basketball than a good game of diplomacy. So he taught me about diplomacy variants. And I made a Conan variant and a Stormbringer variant. Hyborian Diplomacy and Stormbringer. No, the Young Kingdoms was my diplomacy variant.
And they were all the diplomacy variants. You had your country. You could be the Elmerians or you could be the Milnevanians or any of the other Moorcock races. And they all had something that made them different. And they all moved troops around using the big buttons that I had earlier to try to conquer the world. Those buttons were some powerful buttons. They represented a lot of stuff. So just for the – I'm going to imagine that most people that listen to this podcast know.
When he's talking about Stormbringer, and it's Elric, right? You mentioned Warcock, Michael Garcock, Elric. That'll also come up later, because at one point in your career, you worked on a Stormbringer role-playing game. But anyway, yeah. Role-playing game for Chaosium. Yeah, so you've got, so you had a roommate that taught you, I think I heard right, you didn't teach him, he taught you the diplomacy variants? Yep. Yep. So between... But he never made, he talked about the variants of diplomacy, but he only had a regular diplomacy game. I went out, and I think the first thing I made was a Lord of the Rings diplomacy game.
So you could actually play as like Sauron's forces? Yep. Nice. Yep. No dice. It was diplomacy. You had to have allies and people guarding your flanks and so on. And the object of the game, Sauron's forces were more powerful than all the other forces on the board. But you could pick them up strategically. And there were heroes in the game. There was an Aragorn piece. There was a Frodo piece. There was a Gandalf piece.
There was a Balrog piece. I'd had some Balrogs. That's pretty cool. So you were making games before you published your first game. Right, but I wasn't trying to sell them to anybody. I didn't think there would be any interest in my games when everything else was polished slick and plastic. Mine was all cardboard, colored pencil, and improvised pieces. So when you did Tunnels and Trolls, as I understand it, I think you printed...
I don't know, 100 copies. I've taken 100 copies exactly. So is that the first game that you ever attempted to sell? Yes, I guess it was the first game that I ever sold. Because I told my friends in the Phoenix area, I'm going to make 100 copies. You guys have to stop using my one-hand typed copy of the rules for copying each other's copies of my rules. And then I need my rules back because I'm going to make a better one. Because suggestions came pouring in. The time was ripe for fantasy role-playing games.
The Lord of the Rings books had just come out from Valentine and were doing great. And yet the time was right. It was in the air. It was in the air. But unlike, I had already done a couple things that were similar. I had started a fanzine. And I had joined Lee Gold's fanzine, where all he required was a couple pages of fan-ish beam talk every month.
Yeah, League Old is legendary among the fanzine community. So you jumped right in on it. As you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, kind of joking around, you're like you put yourself out on the Internet. The fanzines of the day were the Internet of the day. Were the Internet of the day. That's where the discussions were happening and that people were learning about other things. There were flame wars just like in forums on the Internet. It's fascinating, actually, all the stuff that happened because of fanzines.
So you printed 100 copies. I printed 100 copies. And then I went to, I think, Tuscon in Tucson, where I saw my old friend Rick Loomis, who was the guy's house that I was at the night I read the rules of that other game. I didn't read them all. I only read the more legible ones, the ones that made sense. So I have to interject here. Rick Loomis, of course, is Flying Buffalo, right?
Yes. Right. Okay. And Rick was there trying to sell the Star Wars game by signing people up to play it. Did you say a Star Wars game? It was doing fairly well. No, not a Star Wars game. It was not Star Wars. It was... I can't remember. It's a problem with being old, Shane. But was it like a space combat? Star Web. Star Web. It was Star Web. So it was Spider-Man. It was Spider-Man in space. I'm sorry. That was terrible. That was terrible. Spider-Man hadn't even been invented yet. Poor Spider-Man.
He was there selling subscriptions to Starweb and promoting his play-by-mail gaming company called Flying Buffalo. Let me ask you this. How big did play-by-mail get? I know there's still a little bit out of there, but without people being able to get online or with conventions not being as common as they are, people being able to find opponents, was play-by-mail a pretty big thing for a while? It was mostly unknown. Okay. But the people who did know about it were hardcore fanatics about it and recruiting people all the time. Fair.
So, I mean, play-by-mail allowed you to invest some personality into your characters or into your races if you were playing Game 1 Star Web. So the fact that Rick was already doing that, and Rick was going to game conventions, which I learned about for the first time that first year in 1975 when Rick and I were at the science fiction convention at the same time. And so 1975 was a great year for me.
It does. Yeah, it sounds like a very important year. I learned about gaming conventions and science fiction conventions, and I attended as many as I could get off to. And at tough time, I came up to Rick because of the 100 copies that I had made. I only sold 40 of them in Phoenix. And that was virtually all the gamers I knew in the world. Right. So I said, Rick, I've got this game that I made. How about taking it to your next game convention and trying to sell it for me? It sells for a dollar apiece, you know? And I think it's a pretty good game.
You should try it. If you want, I'll come over and teach you how to play it real quick after the convention closes tonight. And so he got a basic idea of how Tunnel and Trolls was played. And he took it up and he put this stack of Tunnel and Trolls on his counter there. And he was sitting across the aisle from E. Gary Gygax. Oh, interesting. At the Origins game convention in August.
And Gary was sitting there at his own coffee table, flacking his first edition of Vengeance and Dragons for $10 apiece. And a teenager came up to Rick's table and asked, well, what's this Tunnels and Trolls game? And Rick told him about it as well as he could. And the kid said, how much is it? Rick said, it's a dollar. The kid pulled out a dollar and gave it to him on the spot. Walked away, you know, happy as a clam, trying to find someplace where he could buy some dice. Then the kid came back the next day, and he talked to Gary on the other side of the aisle.
I love this story. This is a great story. It should mix the internet glow with anger, probably. Because the kid went over and listened to Gary explain that other game. And the kid said, oh, it's like Pedal Controls. Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm sorry. That's pretty funny. After that, there was never any possibility that Gary and I would be friends. Oh, no.
So did you ever, I mean, I'm assuming at some point in your career that, you know, you crossed paths with him. How did those go? It didn't go. It didn't go at all. I didn't talk to him. He didn't talk to me. Interesting. We were in the same room. We were not on the same panel. I had nothing to say. I had made up my mind not to say anything too heinously evil about that other game. The worst thing I ever did to them was calling that other game. The other game. All right.
So how many did, when Rick Loomis took the remaining copies of your game to origin? He took 60 copies. He sold out. He sold out. Okay. I don't think Gary sold out of his $10 games. Not with a guy across the aisle from him. Selling a dollar. Which seemed like the same thing for a dollar. So, okay. So at that point, they sold, or Rick Loomis, aka Flying Buffalo, sold all your copies that he took. All 50 copies that were left. Okay. So out there. All right. And so what happened next?
So what happened then? Then Rick came back to Phoenix and said, Ken, I want to buy your game. And I said, no. I'll license it to you, Rick. And you give me royalties on all sales. And if you make any foreign sales, you may save me half the money you make from selling it in other countries. Because writers who lose control of their own writings usually do not end well.
So let me ask you this. At this point, were you already a member of the Science Fiction Writers Association, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America? No. Okay. Because that's a pretty savvy thing for you to know, to say to Rick, right? About rights and in different countries and this and that and the other. So how had you picked up that savviness by that point? Well, my goal as a child was to become a professional writer when I grew up. Because...
Those were my heroes in the real world. I did not look up to soldiers or publications or lawyers or doctors or Indian chiefs. I looked up to writers. And so I read quite a bit about writers and what they needed to do to succeed in life. I started reading Writer's Digest, and that talked all about rights and such things. So again, I was several years ahead of the curve. Sounds like it.
Yeah, because that's very savvy to ask for that stuff, especially in mid-1970s. Yeah, that would have been 1975 still. But I said, I'll tell you what, Rick. It's licensed to you, but you're my number one publisher. Okay? And he said, sure. I'll do the publishing and pick up the printing costs where you can and give you royalties on all the sales, which is essentially what you do when you sell a book to a publisher like Macmillan or Random House. So you got a good deal. He got a good deal and you got a good deal.
So we both got a good deal because he never did manage to give me all the royalty. Because Rick's flying buffalo always ran on the verge of chaos. And how he managed to keep it going, for 47 years that he did keep it going, I have no idea. Sheer tenacity and love of it, I would imagine. Yeah, and golden tongue, silver tongue devil. He talked Dave Arneson into buying in and becoming a major stockholder. Did he? He talked Dave into buying a bunch of worthless paper, and he got $100,000 from Dave to keep the business going.
How long did that partnership last? Until Dave died. Okay. So did you ever get to meet Dave or spend much time with Dave? I met Dave many times. Dave was a wonderful fellow. He was easy to talk to. He was fun. He set me up as one of the SMOF, secret masters of fandom.
We never did much with that organization. We probably broke down when we didn't get the fancy robes made for it. The wizard robes? Yes. I've always heard he's just a nice guy who's just always up to play a game. One of my personal regrets is I never had a chance to meet him or talk with him. Tunnels and Trolls, we're spending a lot of time talking about Tunnels and Trolls, which is important because it's an important game for the history of role-playing games.
more carefully around the gaming historians on the internet, you will see many of them claiming that Tunnels and Trolls was the first true role-playing game. And Dungeons, I mean that other game, was a fancy miniatures game with a thin overlay of role-playing. Because there was no miniatures playing in Tunnels and Trolls. We didn't bother with miniature figures and moving around on little maps at all. It was all theater of the mind. Theater of the mind, which is how I played it for the most part growing up.
I've used miniatures later, but at the time we didn't. We didn't have miniatures. If we absolutely needed to figure out positioning, we would use dice. But we didn't really rely on miniatures. But yeah, I mean, it's an absolutely fair statement that a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, or that game, pardon me, that game, at the beginning. You can say that game if you want to. You have to take in a personal vow to consider. Okay. So the game... Gorilla in a bedroom.
Okay, so anyway, that game came out of a War Games DNA. So it's not surprising to me that it had kind of a War Games and miniatures, military war game kind of DNA in it that somewhat continues up to this day, but it could be argued that it's much less dependent on that now. I think when they spun off what was basically that of the game, D&D, into Pathfinder, that's when it turned into a role-playing game. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure. I'd have to go back and look how things changed on each edition, but it has changed a lot. And now they're basically in a sixth edition, even though they're not calling it that. But what I want to do is because we are talking about Tunnels and Trolls a lot, which is very important, but that's not the only games that you've done. So I want to make sure to give them a mention so that we don't forget to mention them. What you need to do is set up a second interview tomorrow or next week or sometime.
When I'm still lying around at home, not feeling so great, but always vanity-driven, egomaniac that I am, willing to talk about the great things I've done in gaming. Right. Maybe we could do that. Yeah, that's definitely a possibility, but just a case. So that way, then you would be the only person up to this time who's bothered to interview me twice. Oh, you've never been interviewed twice? Not by the same guy. They probably figured they'd heard enough of this blatherer on one trip and didn't want any more.
Well, I don't know. I think you're an interesting guy to talk to personally. So you did Tunnels to Trolls, and then in 1976, you created a game or released a game called Starfaring. Is that correct? That's right. Okay. And it turns out, Starfaring was the first science fiction role-playing game. That's right. I had a note here that it's considered the first sci-fi RPG ever published. Now, I've never personally run across Starfaring, so you want to tell us a little about it? You're not trying very hard. Go to...
DriveThruRPG.com. Look up my Troll Godfather press. Give me six bucks and buy a copy of the game. Well, that's good to know. So there's not only is that good to know the star fairings there, but folks, there is a shout out, a promo. A classic game that previewed many other things that later since become cliches in science fiction gaming. Such as? One cliche I never did was, you know, making all your gaming characters into space marines or something like Mark Miller. So that obviously referring to Traveler.
Now, is Traveler a game that you will not mention the name of? No, Mark and I are good friends. Mark and I, I had a lot of respect for Mark, and I realized that Mark had done it right, whereas I'd done it wrong. Because who really wants to play a ship that goes around crashing through Stargates and looking for star crystals and spending a lot of time with... Dice and projectors and maps of the galaxy. I came up with an original system for mapping the galaxy. I might want to use projectors and look for star crystals, personally. But anyway, that sounds kind of fun to me. I mean, if I was 11, 12, 13, and you described that game to me, I'd be like, I want to play it. It was a wacky game. It was an absolutely wacky game. The characters in Starfaring are the starships themselves. And each starship had a living human brain inside it. A concept that I borrowed without a moment's hesitation from Anne McCaffrey's The Shift is saying.
Because you have to realize I was an incredible science fiction fan, too. Have you ever read of any of the culture novels by, I can't believe, Ian Banks? Yes. Yeah, I loved how he did his... I don't think they had human brains, but the ships were basically living entities. That's some good stuff. I love the culture novels, personally. Okay, so you did Starfaring, which can be found on DriveThruRPG. Folks, look forward to it. I started that in January of 1976. By that time, Rick Lewis had already printed the second edition.
of Tunnel Control, which had quite a few changes, but nothing basic. One of the things that changed was we made weapons more powerful with the second edition. Now, why was that change made? Do you remember? Because I realized that it started with the cheapest weapon being a 1D6 dagger. There was no room in there for human weapons, karate masters, and such like things.
So a human, or basically any soft hunt, starts with 1d6 of basic combat. You can do damage with your fist, or your head, or kick somebody in the shins. And it hurts, and people kill each other by actually just hitting them right. So the human being had to be the base of the weapon system, which means if a dagger is likely to do more damage than a human fist or a hand, it has to be a 2d6 weapon. And if a dagger has a 2d6 weapon, then swords have to be 3d6 weapons or bigger if they're bigger. And axes have to be like 4d6 weapons unless they're really small hand hatchets or something. And I got to thinking about it all. I said, nope, weapons need a complete upgrade. So second edition is where weapons were upgraded. Let me ask you this. So you had Starfaring coming out. You had second edition of Tunnels and Trolls coming out. This was 1976-ish. What kind of response at this point were you getting to Tunnels and Trolls? What kind of response was Flying Buffalo getting?
Well, my favorite response came from TSR. They told us to cease and desist from publishing our game, or they would sue us out of existence. And I told Rick, tell them to go piss up a rope, because my game was copyrighted in 1975, and they hadn't figured that out until after I told them about it, when I told the lawyers that I was not going to take up a case against them for violating my copyright. And so is that as far as it went? That was as far as it went. We never heard from the TSR lawyers again. Well, I've heard, and I'm not a lawyer, I don't even play one on TV, but I keep hearing these days it's the received wisdom that you can't copyright mechanics. That rose out of, probably out of that first dispute. Yeah, you can copyright expression of mechanics. You can copyright IP. You can copyright the actual books, the game books, the rule books, the dungeon plans, all the rest of those. But you can't copyright plots if you're writing a novel. If you can copyright plots, about 90% of the novels that are out there would go away.
I don't think so. Well, I'm just saying there's only so many original plots, right? You don't need an original plot to sell a thing. What you need is a lot of people paying you money to use their plot. Much better. It is better. So you had TSR came back and said, hey, stop. And you went, no. And then that went away. But what kind of response were you getting from, I don't know. It was doing fairly well at the time in 1975, 76. There weren't a lot of other role-playing games out there. Which is why when Chaosium published their game of RuneQuest.
The dedication says, this game is dedicated to Gygax and Arneson, who first opened Pandora's Box, and to Ken St. Andre, who showed that it could always be opened again. Nice. That's a nice dedication. It was a nice dedication. I had already met Greg and Steve and Perrin and a few others of the Chaosium crowd at gaming conventions in California. Now, I got to meet Steve Perrin once, and he was a genuinely nice guy. He actually was sitting next to me at a gaming convention. We were in the same game. I think it was a D&D game being run by Jeff D, actually. And I didn't realize that it was Steve Perrin until about halfway through the game, and then we got to chat afterwards. So that was really nice. So you had...
You were a busy beaver at this time because in 1976, you also had Monsters, Monsters, which has an exclamation point after each Monsters that came out from metagaming concepts and then later was published by Flying Buffalo. So that was supposedly in 1976. And then later it was published by me and Steve Crompton by Total Hall of Press. So tell us a little bit about Monsters, Monsters. Well, I was a busy beaver at the time. And I got a letter from Howard Thompson, who was running a small gaming company called Metagaming in Texas.
And the letter basically said, Ken, would you be willing to design a role-playing game for me? Oh, so you got, he was looking for somebody to, so you were just like, hey, I had this idea for a game, like somebody wanted to you like anything. He came to me, and I said, well, yeah, I think I could do that. I have this idea for a game that turns that other game on its head, and turns my own game on its head, but it should be lots and lots of fun. And he said, oh, what is it? I said, what if you play the monsters instead of the good guys?
in the role-playing game. And the object of the game was to create as much destruction, havoc, and terror as you possibly could. And you got rewarded for doing all the evil things that monsters do. I mean, I'm in. I'm in. I said, I'm in. I'm sold. And I said, I could turn Tunnel Controls on its head and make a completely different game out of it. And we would call it Monsters, Monsters because that's what that terrified villagers scream as they're running away from the monsters advancing on the village. So how was that received? How did that go over?
It went over quite well. But something weird happened with Howard Thompson, and he decided to get out of the gaming business. And when he decided to do that and not to publish my game anymore, I asked him if I could have the rights back for a reasonable price. He said, yeah, you can come back for $300, which is probably all he made from selling it. Even though I had Moose Danforth artwork all the way through, and it was beautifully illustrated. It was much better illustrated than the first version of Tunnel Controls.
And it came back and then I licensed it to Rick. I said, Rick, how would you like to go on publishing Monsters, Monsters at the reduced level at which you work, which is, you know, you don't have the glossy covers and acid-free paper and the rest of that stuff. And Rick says, well, give us another role-playing game. It's got your name on it. So, yeah. So Rick published it for a while. It's nice to have those relationships, isn't it, where you don't have to wrangle and it's not a huge, you know, life or death business. You just, yeah, it sounds good. Let's do it. It's very nice to have him. You know.
If I was going to give advice to any young game writers and so on, there would only be two pieces to it. Do your own thing. Do what you think is right and would make a good game and make friends. Yes, definitely. The internet is great. I love the internet. I've built relationships on the internet, but there's a different level of relationship building when I go to game conventions.
And, you know, if I wanted to, I'm not really that fired up to do it, but if I wanted to suddenly get into writing games and selling them, I now have the relationships I think that would let me do that from an informed position. What you need to do is ask them to help you as a friend. You know, you're the, I at least was the big name in any relationships with internet friends. I was the big name except for people like Greg Stafford and Steve Jackson. And when I asked anybody who was not Steve Jackson or Greg Stafford if they would help me design or sell a game, mostly they were only too happy to help. And so what I paid them with was publisher's credit. You know, you will be mentioned on the back of the title page as a person who came up with the idea of having all cats be black at night and so on. And I got a lot of help and a lot of great game design ideas from my friends. If I hadn't had Jim Peters and Greg...
Brown, and Steve McAllister as friends when that first came out, Tunnel Controls would have been probably much more like the original D&D because the first edition had just humans going down into that dungeon that I dug and hiring a bunch of dwarves and digging their own way out, hotly pursued by a Balrog. Very Tolkien-ish. Yeah, you haven't learned how fast you can run until you're being chased by a Balrog. That's right. And that flaming whip is curling through your hair and stuff. So what we did on that escape from the dungeon, one of the places we found, or they found, because I was very into all the popular media at the time, was Sauron's Shopping Center. And Sauron's Shopping Center had an employment agency for dwarves. So my crew had found a room whose floor was entirely covered with diamonds relatively early in the adventure. And they packed up all the diamonds they could carry.
And then when they got to the employment agency, they hired like 10 dwarves just in case they wanted to do any digging or something. The dwarves were, I hope, I hope. Right. Those industrious dwarves. Except that not too long after leaving the shopping center, we ran into the Balrog. The Balrog didn't want anything particular from us, just our flesh and our bones. Right. Yeah. He just wanted to obliterate you. He just wanted to obliterate us. And we said, listen, there's only one way we can beat this guy and get out of here alive.
We can't reconstruct the path we came by. And we don't know any other ways out. So you guys are good at digging. We're going to find a nice empty spot here in a dungeon wall complete and start digging upward at a 45 degree angle. And you don't have to worry about what you're going to do with the rubble because we'll just leave it behind us blocking the tunnel. And if the Balrog does break through, those of us who are fighters and magicians will stay back in the back and protect you. So dig us to the surface, dwarves. Did it work?
Yes, he did. Unfortunately, the dwarves got a little frightened in places. The Balrog was almost upon us, and they were digging their hearts out. They died of overwork on the way up. So we worked those dwarves to death. Didn't have to pay them. That's an extra bonus. Got away from all the Balrog. Got away from the Balrog. We never did kill the Balrog. We just got away from him. I mean, okay. Because he couldn't come out and face the light of day.
I mean, by most game standards, now I understand that there are games that have statted out the Balrog or another game, they might call it a Belor, but your average adventuring party is not going to take out a Balrog. It's more of a force of nature than an opponent. No, but we can slow it down because Tunnel Control was already doing things, right there in the very first game, that later came to be called stunting. Do you know what stunting is? Yeah, where you pull stunts that aren't necessarily in the rules, right?
Well, they're not necessarily covered per se in the rules, but they're not forbidden by the rules. Right, exactly. For example, you used to see stunning all the time. How do you keep a giant from chasing you very far? I don't know. How do you keep a giant from chasing you very far? Tie his shoes together. You know, I almost answered him. I was like, no, that's the joke answer. Tie his shoes together, and then you'll get up on an elevation where you go, you can't catch us, and then you'll run away. Well, the giants aren't too bright in Monsters, Monsters, or other games usually, and they try to catch you. They don't even look at their shoes.
because they're 30 feet tall or something, or maybe 100 feet tall in TNT. And they get mad, and they take one long step to go after you and fall flat on their face. Right. I mean, so it just scales. What works at a normal size ratio will work at a larger ratio. It all scales. So one other thing I wanted to ask you about, I do want to talk about Stormbringer as one of your RPGs, but a few years ago...
I encountered an app for my phone. I can't remember off the name of my head what it was. It was something arcade. And it had Tunnels and Trolls Adventures. David Reed came to see us in Phoenix and gained a license to do a telephone app based on Tunnels and Trolls. And it was very good. He paid us a hefty upfront fee, but he would not listen to any advice. He was very personable. He was a great guy.
But he listened to his programmers instead of to me. So what advice would you wish he would have listened to? Do you remember? Give the gamers a place to spend their gold. The things that they win in the dungeons, they should be able to use. If they won a sword, that was a vorpal sword that would get twice as die roll. That was easy enough to program in. But those lazy Spokaner's Seattle game designer programmers didn't want to create a dungeon where you did nothing but just go in and spend your gold. And yet it would have saved the game from going broke.
because it's only so long you can go around coping with dungeon monsters and simple combat situations before you want to use some of the loot you want. Never got that done. It's too hard. I'm going, how hard can it be? I can imagine ways to do it. Well, you're not a programmer. You don't know how hard it is to program. I know how easy it is. I can program in BASIC. Oh, we're offended. Nobody programs in BASIC anymore. And he never took my advice, or the advice of probably several other people who told him to.
Get a place where you can go in the app to spend your goal and buy better weapons, buy better equipment. Go on to discover adventures. And eventually, the novelty of killing monsters on your telephone wore off. And sales went down. And Reed never did find big money to stand behind him to make it a super giant app, like how many of the Apple apps are and things like that. And he sold it back to Steve and me. So I will say that I played.
It was called Meta Arcade, if I remember right. It was called Meta Arcade. Meta Arcade, and it had, it basically converted old Tunnels and Trolls. Old Tunnels and Trolls adventures into old adventures. And it did that very well, right? So I felt like I was playing, you know, Tunnels and Trolls adventure. But you're right. I mean, you know, after you played those, however many scenarios there were. After you played Naked Doom and the Death Trap Equalizer and Flying Buffalo or Buffalo Castle and a couple others that they came up with.
The novelty wore off for most people. They didn't want to play the same adventure over and over again. Right. But for what it was, it did it well, right? But it could have, like I said, the replay value or the bring me back to the game wasn't there. But I was impressed with what they did. We loved it at the beginning. Yeah. So are there any officially licensed electronic or video game versions of Tunnels and Trolls out there now? I had read something that they were going to convert the concept over to Monsters Monsters, but that was from like three years ago.
I never read that. Okay. You did read it, so it's probably okay. Yeah. Because one of the things I did that was smart in the long run was when Ring of Spear bought Flying Buffalo after Rick's death. They wanted two games that Rick had. One was Nuclear War, which was a light, easy-to-play, easy-to-understand card game. Then one was Time of Controls, which was a well-renowned role-playing game.
By this time, however, there were 100 well-renowned role-playing games. Because once people found that Pandora's box could be opened again, lots of them started opening again. Shane Hensley in Arizona did Weird Weird West. And God knows how many others, you know. John Wick was designing card games and role-playing games. Legend of the Five Rings. And so on and so forth. And some of the takes were very clever.
on role-playing games. The ones that were very clever are still around today. The ones that weren't very clever came and went in a game convention or two because standards had gone up since 1975. In 1980, making a good role-playing game was a whole lot more expensive than it was in 1975. So do you think that if we graphed that, do you think that's been a steadily upward trend?
In sheer number of games that are out there, I keep running into things I've never heard of before. Go to Reddit and enter a role-playing game forum and see how many of the role-playing games you've ever heard of. Yeah, you've ever heard of it. What's that thing in the fossil record they call the Precambrian explosion or whatever? There's been a Precambrian explosion of role-playing games over the past however many decades and more and more keep getting made.
But I guess I was talking about like the price and the production values and all that. Do you think that that's kind of steadily climbed upwards? Like if I want to make a role-playing game that's competitive in the market today, is that price, has that price ever leveled off or does it just keep going up and up and up? It keeps going up and up and up. And the price is related directly to two things, cost of materials and the cost of talent. Now the price may start going down and down and down because, I hate to say it, but AI is going to take out the price of talent for artists and is already doing so.
Yeah, I mean, that's got a lot of people upset, but I think... They have a lot of people upset. Mostly they're the artists because the players don't care. They're the purists care. Well, so... It's not the purists that keep the gaming industry in business. It's the people who are caught by a flashy commercial. Right. Well, and, you know, let's be honest. So here's the thing. I'm not advocating for AI to replace artists. That's not what I'm saying here. You know, a lot of people, they'll pick up a game and look and say, hey, this looks pretty good. And they're not thinking to themselves, should I check to see if this was AI-created art, right? And, you know, they're just like, oh, this looks pretty good. Okay, so... Yeah, and so they buy it, and they're not necessarily trying to help the AI overlords eradicate humanity. They just say, hey, this looks pretty good, right? So...
And I think there's a lot more people like that out there than there are people that have put themselves on vigil of saying, I'm not going to buy anything that has AI art in it. You know, so I think that the inertia for good or bad, I'm not advocating for it. I'm just saying reality being reality and companies trying to save money. I think the inertia is going to trend towards there being AI art in role-playing games as a common thing. I think so, too. Go out. Well, I'm trying to get you to spend your money, Shane. Shamelessly on my part. Go to DriveThruRPG.com. Yeah, I'm going to go to DriveThruRPG. I'm doing it right now. You're going to hear my keys clacking. I'm going to DriveThruRPG.com right now. Right now. Yep, here I am. Look up Troll.FatherPress. Troll. God. Father. One word. Yep, I've got it.
Okay, I should have brought up a page with a couple of lines of games on it. Yes, I'm looking at it. The very first one is Mata Hari, Mission for Cthulhu. That is my latest game. It's my latest game. I believe it is the best one I've ever written. Wow. I believe I have improved steadily through the years. If I see a good idea that somebody else is using, I'll steal it just like that. They're stealing mine.
Buy that. Play through it. All you need to understand is how to make saving rolls. That's it. If you wanted to know how to make saving rolls, you could buy the Humans-Humans game design booklet. Yeah, I was saying that. I was kind of laughing when I saw Humans-Humans because that's obviously a reversal of monsters-monsters. Yep. Yeah. But it includes humans that become monsters instead of monsters that become humans. Are there any were-cows? What's a were-cow? It's a person that turns into a cow and hungers for human blood, I suppose.
What's a cow? You're not saying cow, are you? Yeah, cow, like moo cow. Like moo cow. Yeah. It could be if anybody really wanted them. We call them minotaurs, you know, and they're half cow and half person to begin with. Okay. Amazing. See what I did there? Amazing. Sorry. I'll let you tell the jokes. Well, you've kept me of use.
But the reason I want you to buy that one is it's relatively expensive, and I priced it higher than most of my other games because I thought it was the best. Are we talking about Mata Hari? Mata Hari. Okay. Mata Hari, Mission for Cthulhu. Mata Hari, Mission for Cthulhu. In this game, I'm going to ask you to play the part of Mata Hari. And Mata Hari was a famous spy who was also... She was a famous... She was thought to be a famous seductress spy, but they never had any hard evidence against her. They just decided they were out to get her.
And they got her. So she claimed she was a spy. She did claim. She denied it to the end. They claimed she was a spy. They claimed. The French authorities claimed that she was a spy. And they claimed it on the evidence that she spent a lot of time with Kaiser's son. Well, she was also a famous courtesan. Right. By that time, she was less known for dancing than for her seductive skills. Her courtesan-ness. And she had a reputation. So it's like being a Hollywood movie star now. If you were...
given the chance to go back in time and date Marilyn Monroe or date some up-and-coming young starlet like Rita Haywards or something, who would you date? Is that rhetorical or am I actually answering it? Well, it's rhetorical, but I thought the obvious answer was Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe. Well, here's the thing. Marilyn Monroe was super attractive, but I also feel like she was a hot mess.
Well, that has nothing to do with it. It's only going to be a one-time date, and you can brag about it for the rest of your life. It's a one-time date? Yeah, probably. I'd go out with Marilyn Monroe, sure.
This is where Bada Hari was by this time in World War II. And in order to make it profitable, she had to be dating high society. And high society was mostly in military forces and stuff. So if she dated a general one night and she dated a German officer another night or something, it all began to look very suspicious too. So more than likely, she was just trying to keep herself in the lifestyle that she wanted, but they thought she was a spy. Right. Got it.
So what game system, like what system, or is this a self-contained game, or does it use another system's rules? Like, what is the Mata Hari mission for Cthulhu game? She has to steal a crystal skull. She has to steal it from the head of the Rosicrucian order in Paris in 1915. Okay. Just another night out. I did the historical research. Actually, I did. I had my AI do the historical research and find out who was the head of the Rosicrucians in 1915. It was Baron de Beaumont. Or René de Beaumont, that's it. It was René de Beaumont.
A French Baron at the time. Mostly an honorary title by that time in French history. So let's... If your ancestors had it, you know. Right. Well, let me point this to you. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. You want to point something out? Yeah, it's a solitaire module or a solitaire game, which one of the things I was going to bring up during this discussion anyway, is I feel like that Tunnels and Trolls was a pioneer in the solitaire adventure. It was. And I think that's really... You were a pioneer before anybody else. I think that's really important because here's why. Not everybody that wants to play a role-playing game...
has a group of friends. Right. And these days, I guess you could argue that it's easier because you can find people online or something, but that's not always the point. You know, it may not even always be able to get people together online when you feel like playing a game. So these solitaire adventures, solo modules, as other games call them, I think is a really important concept. So I just wanted to, you know, kind of say thank you, because when I was really good into role-playing games...
like, you know, eighth grade and onwards is where I really went nuts for it. You know, my friends would play D&D or whatever, you know, Traveler's the first role-playing game I ever played, actually. Traveler's a pretty solid game, you know. I like it when I first saw it, too. Yeah, Traveler's fun. You know, I played a lot of just other stuff. You know, I played a lot of different games. But out of all my friends, I was usually the one that was just like bonkers for role-playing games.
So I was always up for it, right? And so the idea of these solitaire modules I think is really important. So I think that's a cool thing that you did from the very beginning. And then this Mata Hari game that we're talking about under Troll Godfather Games on Troll Godfather Press on DriveThruRPG is a solitaire module. So we're at an hour and a half almost already. I think I'm going to take you up on your offer to do a second interview because there's a lot of other ground I'd like to cover. Are you open for that to do a part two? Of course. Okay, so let's do this.
I want to cover one or two more things here for this. I'll try to stay on the answer to your question. Oh, no, that's fine. I mean, we can come back to... Like I said, it's not a formal Q&A. It's a discussion. So I've been tickled pink as we followed our nose here. Next interview, I have a series of questions that I just want to kind of give you the opportunity to share your wisdom with people out there. And I also want to get into your video game stuff on the next interview, like Wasteland and Wasteland 2. And I know that you were big into the adventure construction set at one time.
So the last thing I want to cover here is I wanted to give you, because one of the last, now you've done other games since then, you know, you got Troll Godfather Press and all that, but one of the last like earlier games you did to help form what the RPG hobby was, was in 1981, as we mentioned with Chaosium, you did Stormbringer. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Right. I'm quite proud of Stormbringer. When I finished it, I thought it was actually a better game than Tunnels and Souls. I had a few more years of experience by then.
Greg Shepard was saying, well, we'll just use the D20 system for everything. I said, Greg, why? There's no reason that we have to block everything off in 5% groups. Let's use D100. So I believe Stormbringer was the first D100 role-playing game. Oh, let me make a note of that. I wasn't aware of that. Now, wasn't RuneQuest and it ended up being a D100? Or am I getting confused here? You're getting confused. RuneQuest is definitely not D100.
Well, what I pitched to Greg for Stormbringer after I heard what Rudy Craft had pitched to him, I went, yeah. He went, bleh. All right, anyway. Greg just sent me a note. He said, well, I'm thinking of giving it to Rudy Craft. He's the only one who seems really interested. I said, don't do that, Greg, please. You know, Rudy will turn it into a second-rate invitation of that other game. I have studied everything Moorcock has ever written. I will give you a game that's authentic in its details.
The Lorberians act like Lorberians. They have purple-sailed ships, and they are a bunch of greedy merchant types. The nomads of the crying wastes are a ravenous horde that just pour across the land, destroying everything in sight, very much like the Mongols, and so forth. I said, yeah. we will use something that hasn't been done by any other role-playing game up to this point. We will use the same magic that the creators of the novels that the game is based on use. The Mildivanaeans had great magic because the sorcerer kings over thousands of years had made texts with elemental rulers, with demonic kings, with lords of chaos. And when you wanted to do magic, you had to call one of these supernatural forces to do it.
That's old Greg. And then Stormbringer, there were a lot of Moorcock fans out there by the end, when they saw that the game was actually based on Moorcock's writings, it took off. And when they tried playing it, they did demon summoning on their own, and we were well past, I don't know, the fact that you could summon demons and imprison them in your sword, you know, like Mornblade or Stormbringer itself, impressed gamers. They'd never been able to actually control demons before. So they had fun with that.
So they had fun with that. In fact, there was no right or wrong associated with any of the player nations. That's just the way they were. Chaotic priests of Pantang wanted to conquer the world. They wanted to be another Melnibonéan empire. But they didn't have nearly the talent that Melniboné had. So real quick, you're obviously probably the closest thing to an Elric expert that I personally talked with. Is it Elric of Melniboné? Is that how you say it? Melniboné?
That's how I say it. That makes more sense than calling it Meldibone. Yeah, Meldibone. Yeah, you feel like it would have that flourish, that kind of almost exotic flourish. The empire was supposed to be decadent and sophisticated and above all others. And what do we associate with sophisticated, decadent peoples? I don't know. Sophisticated, decadent language. The French are probably the worst example of that.
Yeah, it's, the Elric books are, I mean, I haven't read them all. I've read several. Did you get in, you know, I confess, I haven't played Stormbringer, even though I know that it's, you know, kind of one of the... It's hard to find anybody to play it with. It's marbled over and drooled on. It's like, yeah, if you played Stormbringer, you probably also played Tecumill.
Now, TechML is, over the years, recent years, I've learned more about TechML. In fact, I think my next interview that I have lined up to talk about the books of John M. Ford is with Victor Raymond, who's currently with the TechML Foundation. So TechML is some fascinating world building. Did you play TechML much?
No, but I had a copy of the first edition, and I eventually sold it to John Witt. Now, did you get into, what I was going to say, like I haven't played Stormbringer, did you get into this idea of the Eternal Champion, isn't Elric, doesn't he repeat across the multiverse? Yeah, but I wasn't writing an Eternal Champion game. Right, okay, so that doesn't come into the Stormbringer game. No, it does not come into Stormbringer at all. When I wrote Stormbringer, there were only two Elric books. One was called Stormbringer, and the other was called Sealer of Souls. I think Sealer of Souls came first, and Stormbringer came second.
And in Stealer of Souls, you have, I don't know, four, five, seven maybe, relatively short novelettes of Elric in different adventures. Okay, right. So it wasn't just one long story. And no, it wasn't. And in Stormbringer, it became one long story because Elric, the priest of Pentang, started trying to rule the world, and they were trying to do it by mastering the Lords of Chaos and making deals with them. Furthermore, Elric's evil cousin, Yirkoon,
was in cahoots with him. Or maybe he was already dead, but I forget. Stormbringer ended with Stormbringer killing Elric and absorbing his soul and laughing demonically at him because I was always far more evil than you. Yeah, and Stormbringer is the template for a famous sword in that game, which will not be named, which a lot of people probably don't realize that. So, which of those first two Elric books was it where he made a deal to get some kind of magic boat that could go across land, but the god who, I don't know, owned the boat or something didn't really like Elric, so it was always kind of working against him? Do you remember that? I remember the boat that could sail on land and sea. Yeah, that's it. But it seems to me that that was first introduced as a vessel for Jaria Conal. I could be getting confused, but I thought it was in one of the first two books. I believe it was in one of the first...
What is it? Moon? Moon River. Sorry. No, not even Moon Glimmer. Moon Glum was the Elric character, but the British Empire, against the last remnants of freedom in Europe, had Hawk Moon. That's the guy. The Hawk Moon series, I think, introduced both the Eternal Champion and the boat that sailed on Land and Sea.
Okay, I guess maybe I'm getting confused then. Easy enough. He wrote, what, five different series, all of whom were supposedly the same character, and he wrote one that was an Elric novel, per se, but where he goes on his boat and he sails between the planes and he meets his other incarnations. And all of this had to have happened before Stonebringer. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's not confusing or anything. I've got an Elric book that I haven't read yet. It's actually sitting here on my shelf. I can't get to it, but it's almost like it's set like in...
Like with Native Americans or something like that, I could be wrong. I picked it up, you know, like at a used something and I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. If you get a Michael Warthog book, you should put that on top of your reading list. I'm sorry, I will. And don't read anything else until you finish it. Yes, sir. I will do that as soon as this interview is over. And I will say that Ken St. Andre told me that that's how it needs to happen. For those that are curious, the book in question is The Scrailing Tree, subtitled The Albino in America, which is part of the Eternal Champions series.
I do want to kind of, we're in almost an hour and 40 minutes. I do want to wrap this up for this part one. We will definitely do a part two. I can't thank you enough for your time. My last question is, I noticed that you were a librarian. And then I think you retired from being a librarian. So Ed Greenwood is also a librarian, evidently.
And I think he's still, like, because when I would talk to him before about doing interviews, he'd be like, oh, I need to schedule time off work. I've got to get time off work to go to this convention or whatever. Have you ever run into Ed Greenwood? And if so, did y'all swap old librarian stories? That's the question. We never swapped any old librarian stories, that's for sure. I'm not sure I've ever even met him, although the name is familiar.
Isn't he more associated with that other game? He is associated with that other game. He created that other game's Forgotten Realms. Yeah. But I just noticed... And that is why I would never associate with him or many of the other notables who are big in that other game. So there's not like a librarian brotherhood that would transcend that? Oh, no. Okay. I mean, we could call upon it, but... There is a National Library Association, you know, and I haven't gone to one of those conventions for...
35 years. He's a Canadian librarian. So you're not even, yeah. Wow. Yeah. So anyway, I just noticed that. I thought that was, I was wondering if you guys ever swap librarian stories. Librarians don't have that many great stories to swap. Do you ever just, when you're a librarian, did you ever just go grab a book and hide somewhere and read or was it too busy? Oh, well, I never did that while I was at work. That's for sure. Well, you're, you are, you're a diligent worker with a good work ethic. I was a public librarian, not an academic librarian. When I was at work, I was expected to be on the job all the time.
And we salute you for that. So I love libraries. I still think libraries are very relevant. And I love going to the library. It's one of my favorites. There was a movie called City of Angels that had like Meg Ryan and I think Nicolas Cage in it.
And it was literally about angels. And you couldn't see them, but they hung out at libraries. So if you went to a library, there were just angels. And I loved that. I just loved that idea that they just hung out at the... You never saw that movie. Yeah, they just hung out at the library. So I thought that was neat. Well, that would explain why you met a better class of people in libraries than out on the streets in general. I love libraries. I can still remember the first time my dad took me to the Lehman Library in North York, Arkansas, and I got my library card. And as a provisional, young, new library member, I could only check out two books.
And I checked out two dinosaur books. One of them, I was pretty young. I mean, I might've been like six, five or six, I don't know. And I got home and I was so disappointed because it was the same book, but one of them had a different cover on it. I can remember that plain as day, but man, I love libraries. Well, Ken, this has been amazing. I appreciate it so much. We will do a part two. Thank you for offering that. And in that, we'll get into some more of your game stuff, including, I want to talk about Wasteland, Wasteland 2. And I'm fascinated.
because I can remember playing this back in the eighties, the adventure construction set where I guess you're an editor for a fan club for that. And I want to, I want to hear your stories about you cutting your teeth on the, on the adventure construction set and how it may have played into your wasteland experience in 1988, but we'll save that. We'll save that for the sequel. So, and then we got a lot of questions too that Matt Barton and his men. Now invite your, your listeners to send their own questions. I will. Yeah, we'll do that. So we'll see if we can get some more questions. I always participation.
I love audience participation. So one thing I always do, I'm glad to hear that you like bad jokes because one thing I always do is I end my episodes with a bad joke of the week. And these are bad. They're bad. Yeah, they're not good. So you mentioned the French earlier. So here we go. Here's a bad joke. I once stayed at a French bed and breakfast but ended up having to leave. The place was giving me the crepes.
Oh, that's a bad joke and it's not even dirty. Okay, so why aren't vampires very self-aware? Because they have no reflection. Yeah, they can't reflect. Yeah, you're ahead of the game here, so they can't reflect. Okay, so why does the chicken not cross the road? Why does the chicken not cross the road? Because it lives its entire life in a cage in an egg factory. Close, but the actual answer is because it's chicken.
Ha ha ha. Why would a chicken be afraid to cross the road? It doesn't mean anything to him. It's chicken. It's just a big chat. It's just a big chicken. I see lots of other birds that have no difficulty with road crossing. But chickens are chicken. They're afraid. Chickens are chicken. You have to have something to be afraid of to be chicken. Well, that's just how scared they are. He's just chicken of being, he's just scared for his scared sake. One of my favorite chicken crossing the road jokes came from, they did the remake of Lost in Space. They did the Lost in Space movie in the 90s and the robot was telling a joke.
And he said, why did the robot cross the road? And the answer was because it was carbon bonded to the chicken, which makes absolutely no sense, but it's still cracking up. So, yeah. All right. Well, Kent, again, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to us doing part two. So we'll definitely stay in touch and schedule. It was my pleasure. And if you'd like to see other nonsense from me and you have a Facebook account, look up Ken Standry, F-T-A-N-D-R-E.
Okay. So the name on Facebook is S-T-A-N-D-R-E and not Saint Space Andre? No, it's both. Oh, okay. Because, you know, I've never been able to stop myself from doing something just because it was redundant. It has been, yeah. I'm a big fan of doing things just really for causing confusion and because it's there. And a lot of people don't understand that, but I'm a big fan of that. All right, well, any final words before we end this particular episode? I've got final words. Go to DriveThruRPG.
and go to Troll Godfather Press, right? That's all, folks. They're perfect. All right. And everybody else, we will catch you next time on Shane Plays.
Thanks so much for listening to Shane Plays Geek Talk. I certainly hope you enjoyed this journey into the things we love. For your convenience, show notes with helpful links for each episode can always be found at ShanePlays.com. You can catch the podcast in several places, including on the blog at ShanePlays.com, iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher, Podbean, Amazon Music, Verbal, YouTube, and more. If you like what you hear and would like to support Shane Plays Geek Talk, you can do so for as little as $1 per episode on Patreon at patreon.com slash ShanePlays. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time. Stay geeky, my friends.