You may have noticed I removed the links to RPGBomb.com and the RPGBomb store. This was done after the site had been down for a few days and it was confirmed via Facebook that their site has been discontinued. I’d like to find out more and if I do I’ll post here, but for now we bid fairwell to one of the best RPG communities online.

So there we are, my world discussed in 5 posts, for better or worse. I hope those of you reading these pages have found it useful and if you have any questions or would like me to expand on anything I mentioned, by all means please feel free to comment on the related posts, here or send me an email via the submission page.

So what’s next for Morbidgames? Well I still have ideas for the world of Ave Molech, but nothing I’ve felt is solid enough to be a standalone project or even enough to really add to the game short of adding to the errata page. You have seen or heard of some of the other projects I started working on and then shut down, primarily Alice Wonderland and Dijinitech (actual spelling keeps changing in my mind and on paper, and, uh, online text).

After Ave Molech I started writing these silly little journals from the point of view of Alice, though my Alice had more in common with American McGee’s Alice than Lewis Carroll’s Alice. It started as a joke, then evolved into an InDesign Template and then got to the point where I seriously considered building a world around this. But that’s not what I wanted.

I ended up scratching this idea because I didn’t want to rehash any previous Wonderland items. So I began writing a story about a lady for hire named Alice who’s Sister Mabel, a stripper, is killed by a man known as the White Rabbit. The story was designed to loosely mirror the original story, so that when Alice comes out of the first room in the rabbit whole and is greeted by the Dodo and other animals, instead she comes out of a nightclub recovering from a binge into the middle of a Gay Pride parade. However, I ended up scrapping this as well because of four things.

The first was Looking Glass Wars began to get popular, or at least it was showing up in my Google Alerts more often. The second was that American McGee mentioned in a game magazine that he wanted to make another Alice game in the next couple years. Then the Sci-Fi channel did an Alice remake as well as Tim Burton did a remake. If you haven’t noticed I’m not a fan of doing what everyone else is doing or what the popular thing is. So I shelved everything.

You might think I’d go back to Dijinitech, which my idea for was to be a political space opera. The idea, and again you’ll see many of my common magic and tech mixing themes with this was to create a faction based role playing game. The galaxy was super high tech, and the main story based around the idea that this one planet with an immortal supernatural ruler (I termed him the Phoenix King) who pretty much ruled his world in peace due to annihilating any opposition comes into contact with a friendly democratic and very advanced alien race.

At this point magic and technology are essentially equal, because it wouldn’t matter if you use nanobots to shoot fire out of your arms or if you use a spell, the result is the same. That said, these high tech aliens share their technology with these supernatural beings and welcome them into this federation of planets type of group and everything is copasetic.

However, two unrelated planets begin a resource war with each other that escalates and one of the Phoenix Kings ships are caught in a cross fire and destroyed. As a result the Phoenix King annihilates both planets involved in the war, as well as sends out assassins to commit genocide on any living members of either race.

While this coupe-de-grace ultimately creates a stable universe again, the democratic groups then begin come to the defense and harbor the two races in danger as they see this as completely unnecessary and overly brutal and eventually turn against the Phoenix King and his followers. The result is you have those who side with the Phoenix King, those who side with the Federation and then those caught in the middle.

I still like my story outline and at some point I might flesh it out more, but I’m not that big of a science fiction guy. Sure I love my movies, but when it comes to books, I’d much rather read and write about fantasy related things. Of course, I don’t want to convert the story to a fantasy world instead of a high-tech world since I already have a fantasy series.

So what about Gaslight Demons?

A while back, to generate more interest in all things Morbidgames, I started looking for other writers to work with as far as either writing stories based on Ave Molech or new worlds that my existing user base might like to check out. The result was hundreds of submissions to my email, all of which I read, though few I responded too.

Eventually I came across Gaslight Demons by Gloria Weber, and I was amazed. She was a great writer, with a fantastic story and I loved it. I knew from the moment I finished reading it that I had to get it out to other people. Unfortunately it hasn’t had the results I had hoped, and I’m honestly not sure why.

Part of me wonders if it’s due to not enough interest in Gaslight fiction, or if the marketing channels I use, albeit RPG heavy, may not have enough interest in this. In either case I’m still trying to work out some marketing tactics that will hopefully increase the sales on this.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I’m a big fan of helping other writers and I don’t’ take a commission of my own for putting the book out there. I like to think that if enough people come and by the book that they’d be interested in the other writings under the Morbidgames Publishing flag and check out Ave Molech.

GM Stuff

In the first edition of Ave Molech, this section was really just six pages, but in the second edition I ended up including the Journal series here. I could have probably meshed the stories from the Journals into the History and World portions, and then just broken out the items and creatures into their respective places, but Journals have always been intended as GM resources and as such I felt them best added in their entirety here.

The goal of this section was to give GM’s some insight into the type of GM/DM I am and a few things that have worked well for me. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they will work well for you. If it hasn’t been obvious from my writings or from my recent blog posts, I’m not a stats guy, especially when it comes to games. Because of this I do things in my own game sessions like, not paying attention to XP. I’m a bigger fan of when my players complete a task, take part in a major accomplishment, or do something extraordinary, they get to level. I don’t want to have to keep track of each creatures CR they killed and overall, my opinion is that the more math I have to do in any game, the less I and my friends enjoy it.

Heritage Traits were something I had actually thought of using prior to including races in the game. This goes back to my idea that with the majority of inhabitants living under ground in close proximity to each other that pure races just wouldn’t really exist and as a result I wanted a way to create my own races. Ultimately I ended up including races, but this I felt would work best for my own campaigns and GM’s who thought like me, might find this useful.

I also wanted to through in some ideas and stories that players wouldn’t know, but could discover in their adventures, and some ideas that could help GM’s who were interested in building out campaigns in my world have some more information to go off of. It’s things like this that eventually led me to put out Ave Molech History and World where I strip out all of the game mechanics and equipment and just focus solely on the main story and people within the world.

Journals and Lore

So after Ave Molech was out, I kept writing and rewriting a lot of the notes I had and ended up expanding a lot of them. I eventually came to a place where I had to decide if I wanted to start creating campaigns for my game world or if I just wanted to give outlines for campaigns and let players and GM’s take over. I opted for the latter as my way of hoping to develop some UGC (User Generated Content) for the game and hopefully create a following fan base of the game that would be actively growing it.

This still hasn’t quite gotten to where I had hoped it would be, however, Lore: Forgotten Mythos is completely written by fans of Ave Molech, which is a great collection of stories and I hope that more like that book will come about from players, bloggers or the like. If anyone wants to be involved in a project like that, please feel free to contact me.

I still like my first Journal the best, The Journal, though it’s been criticized the most. The second one, The Bounty Hunter, is by far the most popular though the least favorite of mine. The Red and the Black and The Dreamer never really seemed to gather much attention one way or the other. I suppose this was another of the reasons why I opted to include them into the second edition publication.

Three Storms, the last Journal I released wasn’t included in the second edition and it’s had more popularity than its previous two predecessors.

The First Level Campaign

This was part of a campaign I had had my players take part in prior to the game coming out and it’s never been as good as I wanted it to be. The first problem is that my maps aren’t very good, I’m just not that great of a map maker, though I suppose I should try using a map program rather than drawing things out in Illustrator. The second aspect of this is that while there are some balance issues, it goes back to my idea that characters in my world should be a little strong, in either gear or species than typical fantasy settings.

I don’t think I’ll talk too much about equipment, other than to say that I feel that adventuring equipment is very situational to the story you have created for your players, and as a result you can easily spend the better part of a day preparing gear for characters. What I tend to do is ask my players about their characters and what gear they would like and then create something appropriate for them.

This is why I had clockwork in my game. Well, there are plenty of good reasons why I have clockwork in my game, but when I was first looking at how to add them to the game, it was really based on a player who wanted a robot dog he could interact with. Think of the personality of “dogmeat” from A Boy and His Dog (1969), but then make him a robot, or much cooler version of an AIBO.

As I flip through the pages on clockwork in Ave Molech, I just realized I didn’t mention anything about the PMMT (Post Master Message Terminal) system I mention throughout the game. To go on a brief tangent, if you thought the PMMT sounded like an old school internet bulletin board system, you nailed it. I basically wanted to create a rudimentary internet communications service that would exist in this world, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t turn into any type of alternate Snow Crash type world.

The main monsters in the game were always intended to be the Hybrude, and they still are, but a level one character can’t fight them, so I needed to add in a bit of the standard chicken broth to the soup mix. The Witiku and Blood Hounds were things I worked on for a while before I felt like I had gotten them right. With the Witiku I really wanted something that I could use to control why people don’t go rushing into Storms to bring the dead back to life, as well as I wanted a creature that would make any level 20 player hesitate. The Blood Hounds on the other hand were my take on the hounds from Resident Evil (the movies).

Now what’s common in my world is probably not common place in many other worlds. I really wanted my world to feel like it was in turmoil, people were strong, and had to be, because there is a bunch of crazy shit outside. This is why I use shape changers like Doppelgangers, Aranea and Barghest, as well as a lot of the weird Phasm and Chaos Beast stuff. Pseudonatural  elements and the template just seemed to make the most sense for creatures in my world.

Before I get onto the next topics in my book I wanted to go back to the Major Players again.

Religion is something that has always fascinated me. While an Atheist and something I clearly try to promote in my work I felt that desire to play with deities much like I would any supernatural character. I can’t quite remember clearly where the inspiration came from, but I had this idea that Gods as a general rule of thumb must gain their power from the worship of people. If people don’t worship them, their power fades. Not so much to the point of death, but more like an eternal slumber.

With this in mind, I did want to have some “gods” in the world who would at least appear mortal, and for the most part I don’t think I gave it away in any of my books yet, but here they are: SPOILER ALERT (sort of)

The three heads of the Vaudevillian Guild and Eclias Onica I always imagined as former gods. Though no longer worshipped they still retain greater powers than any other magical wielder, and while ageless are by no means the ultimate powers in the world. As a result they live amongst their creations much like their creations.

Another topic I wanted to mention before in my last post, but forgot, was that I did want my stories to have gay characters, or rather bi-sexual characters. It’s another personal belief of mine I try to include in my writings, that all of us are bi-sexual to some degree, while many have a genetic design which drives them in one or the other direction, the act of sex itself, be it with whichever gender is pleasurable regardless of preference. To be completely blunt, getting my dick sucked by a guy feels just as good as getting my dick sucked by a girl, though I prefer to be with women.

This was partly what I tried to hint at with the Sec’Toda race and hermaphrodites. I again continue this theme with Sharess, and dragons in general being hermaphrodites, which in Lore: Sharess & Talon, Rendor has relations with both Sharess and Amari and thinks nothing of the contrast, short of the whole dragon thing. However, I didn’t really talk much about dragons being hermaphrodites in Ave Molech. In fact I didn’t I mention it at all, though it was a critical part to my original story and something I should have focused on more in the 2^nd Edition. I had placed up the correction to their description on the Projects & Errata page on my blog, but how many people really read that?

Classes

While I give plenty of suggestions for classes I think could work in the lands of Ave Molech, I, as any creator would, wanted to have my own unique ones included. The Red & Black Hand initiates were fun to work with, though the last ones to add into the game. They came about when I was thinking of how to really be sneaky with killing my players with shapeshifters and the like, which ultimately required me to create a class to deal specifically with these types of threats. The whole yin and yang balance of things ya’ know.

The Dark hunter was my take on a ranger class and pretty straight forward in my opinion. As mentioned before some ideas stemmed from Final Fantasy, and my favorite characters in any game of the series were always the Lancer/Dragoon types. Because of this I wanted to pay homage to the series and so I tossed in my Dragonne class. The Bounty Hunter, while not a completely original class, was another one of my takes of this role.

The Dreamer and Fearasitic Mage were the two classes I actually created first and by far my two favorites. I originally had created the Fearasitic Mage as a way to stat out former God characters, but I really liked the utility of it. It could be considered a little overpowered compared to the other classes, but it takes a very long time of play before you get that power. For most characters it will take about fifteen levels of having their skills spread out and comparatively not as focused as their other team mates, but then they unlock this class and the next five levels, especially the last one, just make them crazy strong. I imagine it to be like the Magikarp in Pokemon, which doesn’t really do anything or have anything special about it, except that it evolves into Gyarados.

The Dreamer, while not included until I used it in Journal Volume 5 was me trying to include narcotics into the game, but also as a way of paying homage to an old favorite, but arguably not one of the best anime, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.

So I talked about what got me started with Ave Molech, I guess now would be a good time to talk through the primary book…

About the Introduction

From the beginning I always wanted to blend magic and technology in a way similar to Final Fantasy, but in a post apocalyptic way similar to Fallout. Please note I’m probably going to be making both video game and movie references, if you haven’t played or seen them I highly recommend you do so.

Defining this was a challenge to me at the time, and I had started writing out a few introductions that were going in very different writing styles. These would later become the “historical documents” after the main introduction to the game. The timeline following was actually something I added in very last along with the Ramblings section as I wanted to explain what had been going on over the last while with the game and myself.

I feel my ideas in this world were definitely new at the time, to the point that I needed to define terms that would be unique to the game’s citizens as if they were real people struggling through a horrible ordeal I created for them and as a result I wrote up sections defining how things in my world actually worked.

I still feel I could go back and expand more on some of the introduction parts, but I didn’t want to be a stat junky or go all out in defining a world in such detail that it lost its plug and play factor. I always wanted GMs/DMs to be able to pick up my book and plug in parts of my world into theirs or have their players take a stroll along Southern Hus. I’m sure many people are baffled by this idea as why wouldn’t I want someone to play in my world and my world only, and while that is grand and my friends and I could do it, I guess it’s just the open source junky in me that wants people to use my game in the way that works best for them.

About the Races

Races were the easiest part of the game for me. I knew from the beginning I wanted Tieflings and Goblins, but I wanted them to be different than past games had done. My personal love of body art made me think of Tiefling as something sensual and ultimately I chose to make them charismatic. Just as an aside, in early 2005 I posted on the WotC forums asking about peoples thoughts on charismatic Tiefling and got shot down by most, so I thought it very interesting when they announced the 4^th edition would have Tiefling as charismatic characters. Just an odd coincidence I’m sure.

Originally I hadn’t planned on having any pure races, like Humans, since in my head with so many races living underground it just made more sense to me that everyone would be some type of mutt, or at least a Half-something. This made for some great campaign ideas using the Savage Species book. Ultimately I gave into peer pressure and added in Humans and Halflings. The Sec’Toda came last as I wanted a race of my own that was unique to the game and I originally thought of them being like a cross between Jadzia Dax and Odo from Deep Space Nine.  The name came from a mangling of the word Cestoda (tapeworm).

The Lands and Maps

The lands were written much like the parts on how things worked in the introduction. I wanted to fill in the primary lands types so that fans could build out and create places on the outskirts or in the middle of these areas easily, and I wanted each area to be unique in what would commonly dwell or lurk there. The population and size is something I still don’t feel comfortable with having as again this falls into my I don’t want to see so many stats issue, but again it’s something I added based on peer pressure and feedback.

The maps I drew myself, in Illustrator. I’m the world’s best artist by any means, but I’ve been very happy with them. I’ve actually had some response on them as far as that I put too many maps in the game this time, as opposed to previous responses that I didn’t have any map information last time. The fact is the first game had two maps included, I now include thirteen, if you don’t like them, and there are 158 other pages to look at.

About the Major Players

Since I started writing ideas for this game certain character names had always been used in my writings. Aarden and Rendor were always main characters; Diamondgreyus and Greymond were names I used often for online games and forums. Typically I have used Greymond when on forums or playing a male character and Diamondgreyus (or a variation of) when playing a female character in a game.

The whole Sharess and Talon thing was really where I wanted the main focus of the world to be and I think I’ve accomplished that, though going back to my plug and play theme I needed to make sure there was “more to do” than just chase down dragon slayers or kill off people with black crystals in their chest.

Each person mentioned in Organizations & Important people actually get introduced in Lore: Sharess & Talon, with exception to the Tempered bank, Goblinwerks, Order of the Red & Black and the Valisna – though those appear in the Journal series.

I recently sat down to contemplate the current state of Morbidgames Publishing and think about what got me in to this and where I go from here.

When I started it was with a lot of high hopes and expectations of myself mostly. Originally the a game played with friends it grew and became a collection of stories, or rather one story that had many parts to it I have tried to expand upon.

Now many of the ideas I had for Ave Molech go back to my Junior High and High School years where I would attempt to write very baroque poetry for the most part centered around these creatures I called the Hybrude. I always imagined them like space locusts, and if you’ve ever seen the third series of Robotech where the Invid come and white out everything so that the Humans and the Zentradi begin to live and work together…well, that was kind of the idea.

Years later after playing with friends was when I first began to write the story of Ave Molech, or Ave’Molech as it was originally called, I had this story of an apathetic character who along with another group of individuals has won the Hork Lottery. Hork was still an underground city during this time and lottery winners were assigned to fix the collapsed portions of the city or retrieve important items from ruined areas.  The adventurers go out to retrieve some equipment, when they run into an unseen force that overwhelms them and are rescued by an Ogre and a Half-Fiend in thrall of a Ancient Black Dragon, Sharess.

That was pretty much as far as things got for a long time.

When I first talked my friends into playing D&D again in our mid 20’s we had just completed a campaign another of my friends, Joe Bond, had wrote himself as well. I didn’t like the D&D rules though and while I have played the game for some time I had recently gotten into D20 Modern. I loved the way the classes worked in D20 Modern, as well as the generalized nature of the class names, but it lacked the Final Fantasy elements that I loved such as medieval worlds with airships, magic and guns.

So I ended up tricking them into trying out this new concept and it seemed to take. My original mesh of 3.5 Edition and D20 Modern favored more towards 3.5 Edition, but since then has changed to favor D20 Modern rules.

As we played I managed to weave them in a round a bout way along my main story path, as I figured the best way for me to finish my own story was to see what the characters themselves would do. I treated as it as if I was watching my own creation take on a life of its own. Eventually this lead me to create Talon’s character and the conspiracy to kill Sharess.

It was shortly after the characters arrived on the surface that we all got busy with our lives, careers, girl friends turned wives and even some kids.

This was actually beneficial to me as it gave me the time and ideas I needed to continue writing the story of Ave Molech, but once the story was done, I realized I still had a long way to go.

I remember many nights, lunches and hangouts with Joe Bond where we talked over my story, ideas and what new portion of the world I had just written out or outlined and then Joe would go through and tell me all the many things I missed, which was always more than I ever imagined.

After about a year of this I was finally ready to release this great piece of role playing literature, with hardly any artwork, a rushed layout and not a lot of commentary from anyone who I had shown it too.

It didn’t do well.

While I sought for as much feedback, especially from a negative review I had and some solicitation of various gaming boards and portions of my work, I also began to have a lot of other ideas for the world. Eventually they got to be too much for my head, and so I began to write them down and they became the Journal Series. Which I tried my best to keep to a monthly, then bi-monthly pace, but health and work would eventually see to that ending.

I learned a lot from the feedback and negative review I received, and after a month I started looking for artists to work with and soliciting local college kids, majoring in English, to edit my writings. Within three months I had Brom, Aimee Pepper and Kim Feigenbaum artwork, in addition to many other talented artists, and a bunch of my manuscripts with red text scribbled on every page. It was fantastic and the result, Ave Molech Second Edition.

It did much better.

The initial reception seemed to do well, and I made the venture into print. In the last two years I’ve sold several hundred copies of my book, but only 6 printed copies. Not worth the couple hundred dollars it cost me to get into that, though I suppose something could be said about the marketing value of being on places like Amazon and Barnes & Nobles.

So here I am four years later talking to myself, writing down what I say and about to post on my blog because I haven’t had any worthwhile content in far too long and I’m thinking. What the fuck do I do now?