Episode 25: How I Spent My Scottish Vacation: A Tale of Root Canals, Food Poisoning, Templars and Irish Terrorism

I stepped off the plane with a stomach full of Advil and a mouth full of fire. It never fails. My last two root canals took place on the eve of a convention and on December 31st. It only made sense that my last cracked tooth - the one I've put off fixing for so long - would start acting up on the plane flight out to Scotland, on our way to Conpulsion 2000. It didn't hurt that somewhere along the line - on the first or second day - I contracted a mild case of food poisoning. And so, on my very first night in Scotland, just down the block from that Emerald Isle where my grandfather was born, Mr. David Donachie is on the phone, looking for a late night dentist while I'm running for the loo every ten minutes.

Not exactly how Jennifer and I planned on spending our Scottish vacation.

Fortunately, David's dentist took me in for an emergency visit the next morning. Unfortunately, he told me I needed root canal surgery - immediately. And so, I started my vacation with the most painful oral operation known to man. You know, the one where they remove the nerve? Fortunately, the operation was almost painless (the first time in the recorded history of man) and I spent ten minutes thanking him. It was my third root canal and the first one that didn't have me screaming and squirming in the chair. From now on, I'm getting all my dentistry done in Scotland.

Unfortunately, the food poisoning problem didn't clear up so easily. But you really don't need to know anything more about that, do you? I didn't think so.

Jenny and I spent the rest of the trip acting like Americans: we took pictures, got lost, asked for directions, went on tours, visited historical sites, got lost some more, walked and walked and walked.

(Did I mention that Scotland is made of stairs?)

And then, on Saturday, Conpulsion started. I ran Orkworld for about forty people and was pretty convinced I could have sold at least half of them copies on the spot. Now, I should state that this has nothing to do with the quality of the game (or game mastering), but that the way to sell your roleplaying game is with demos. People are reluctant to buy a game unless they've had a chance to play it. So, it necessarily follows that you should run demos. All the time. As often as you can. Demo, demo, demo.

One of the people who played in one of the demos was none other than the World Famous James Wallis (of Hogshead Publishing; author of the incredible Adventures of Baron Munchausen game - which I am certain I've misspelled). We talked about it afterwards and James admitted that while he liked the game design, he was a little disappointed. He expected the orks to be a whole lot meaner than they were - a bit more like the Warhammer Orks he works with everyday, no doubt. Also, before we actually played the game, James and I were talking about systems and he expressed his love for "systemless systems" like the one in Munchausen. "No rules! No numbers!" was James' battlecry. Of course, this is coming from the guy who helped design Once Upon a Time in addition to The Baron's Game, so we can't spend too much time pondering this little revelation. And as I explained the game system for Orkworld to him, I started to notice how complicated it was. I mean, I wanted the game system to be SIMPLE, and here, James was scratching his head and looking at me with the Why Do You Need That Rule? face.

Right then and there, I decided to make things easier. You'll see what I mean next week, but rest assured you can pretty much forget about the whole "keeping the die that rolls high but under your Virtue" business. That's for starters.

James also enlightened me to another fact. He asked me how big the book was going to be and I told him, "'Round 300 pages."

"Why?" he asked.

"Well, that's the way I've always seen it."

"Does it need to be that big?" he asked.

"Um. No. But that's…"

"Then why make it that big? Let it be as big as it needs to be."

(The above conversation was edited for brevity.)

And he's right. If it turns out to be 124 pages, it turns out to be 124 pages. I won't write Orkworld to expectations, I'll write it the way it needs to be written.

So, I'm looking at the information I've already written and the stuff that needs to be written and I'm wondering… I'm wondering…

Does it need to be three hundred pages?

No, it does not.

And so, this screws up all my printing quotes. I'm gonna have to see how big this book is gonna be and get new quotes.

All of that in the span of a fifteen minute conversation. Sheesh.

On Sunday, James and I held a small discussion with the very charming Phil Masters about game design. We had about twenty people show up (pretty good for a 200 person convention) and we talked about… well, game design. Three different points-of-view were there for people to pick from and I learned a lot just talking about designing games.

(The best question of the morning: "Why do you hate rpg.net?" The answer I gave was very simple: I don't hate rpg.net. I like rpg.net [especially since they added that Oracle thing]. I just stay far away from the reviews. It's better for everyone that way.)

After the con, Jenny and I made plans to take a train to London to visit James and his wife and check out that keen Jack the Ripper tour (I just got a copy of the completed From Hell graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell and was eager to visit the spots), but it turned out the trains were just too expensive for us, so we had to back out. Sorry James! Catch you next time!

We spent the rest of the time checking out Rosslyn Chapel which was full of Templar and R&C symbols. I went nuts and took about two rolls of film. For the first time, I think Jenny understood my fascination with the Templars and their mythological descendants. Just looking at the deliberate architecture of the place was enough. It was breathtaking.

We also checked out the underbelly of Edinburgh on two "come see the city that lies under the city" tours and heard a ton of ghost stories about the plague and murder and all kinds of nastiness. We took a ton of pictures and spent the rest of the night talking about how cool that city-under-a-city thing is and how it would be neat to make a setting in that kind of place and fill it with…

Wait. Do Orkworld first. Then, The Flux. Then, Champions of Ur. After all that's done, we can talk about the City-Under-the-City. Besides, isn't that other Irish guy over at rpg.net doing that game?

Come Wednesday, we were bushed. We spent our last night in a very nice hotel and relaxed. As I was waiting in the airport, I realized that I had read through Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters, Reverté's The Fencing Master (which I had started long ago, but never got a chance to finish), From Hell (which I own six of seventeen issues of, so it was the first time I got to read the thing from start to finish), Brontë's Wuthering Heights (something Jennifer's been after me to read since we first met), The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ by Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince (Mary Magdalene was the messiah, not that nice Jewish kid they hung up on the tree) and the screenplay for Reservoir Dogs.

In short, I didn't have anything to read on the flight home. That twelve hour flight. But Jennifer saved me (as usual) when she found 25 Years of Terror: The IRA's War against the British by Martin Dillon. I was set. The flight was great, but since I was so tired, I didn't get to finish the book.

Sitting in the airport, waiting for our ride to arrive, on the third paragraph of page 242, a man stepped up to me and greeted me with the glad hand. He represented a group that I've never seen in airports before. I'm keeping the group to myself for private reasons we don't need to go into. To make a long story short, he wanted money. So, with my book firmly in hand (flashing the letters "IRA" as well as I good), I dropped into my best Irish brogue and we had the following conversation:

GLAD HAND: Hello there.

ME: 'allo!

GH: Would you like to contribute to our cause?

ME: Tell ya what, lad. Ya contribute a dollah to muy cause, and I'll contribute a dollah to yours. How's that?

GH: Our people have been subjugated by (insert racial group here) for two hundred years.

ME: Yeah? Well muy people ha' been subjugated by the English for twelve hundred years. How 'bout I give ya a dollah and you give me twelve grand?

Discouraged, he walked away without his dollar.

* * *

With all that out of the way, Jenny and I would like to thank David and Victoria for letting us crash at their place for a little more than a week and proving that the old notion of Celtic hospitality is alive and well in Scotland (well, at least in their flat).

Thanks also to everyone who was in on The Big Secret. Sorry I lost it at the end, but some stories are heavy and hard to carry.

Thanks to Kay for watching the Wick booth while I was off running Orkworld.

Thanks to James Wallis and Phil Masters for joining me in the Great Game Talk 2000.

Double thanks to James for the "simplify, simplify, simplify" talk.

Thanks to Thanks to The Other John for putting up with Jenny and me - and for taking the Money Misunderstanding so well: you're a Class Act, John.

We'd also like to thank everyone else at the convention for treating us like family. We had a wonderful time and I can only recommend that if you can, go head out to Conpulsion 2001 next year. We certainly are.

Cheers!

* * *

(Expect another GDJ on Friday for full revelation of The Big Changes in the game system. See you then!)