Today I turn 30 years old! According to my wife and daughter, that makes me ancient.

It’s a strange feeling for me. I’m no longer a young punk. You might even say that I’m getting middle-aged…whatever that means. I’d say that maybe I should start acting like it, but as a husband of ten years and a father of five children, I think that I’ve already got a leg up on acting my age. Hmm.

Enough introspection. Where’s my cake?

Today is the one-year anniversary of our moving to Orange Street. God willing, we will be here for many more.

This Wednesday I’ll be interviewed by Matt Snyder of Chimera Creative for his podcast The Score. It will be Episode 3, in case you go looking for it later.

We just placed the order for Legends of Alyria and Dirty Secrets books for GenCon. That makes it official; we’re done.

With book stuff, that is. Now we have to prep for GenCon….

This is an excerpt from a discussion I’ve been having with someone about Dirty Secrets. It seemed like it had broader ramifications for roleplaying, so I figured that I’d post it. The context for the discussion is the pre-game customizing of different areas like Humor, Violence, and the like.

I actually don’t [like pre-game customizing]. To explain my first reason, I’m going to tell you a tale of two board game designers.

On the one hand, you have Reiner Knizia. He is famous for laser-focused designs that constantly partake of difficult decisions but with a relatively simple ruleset. He designed games like Tigris and Euphrates, Tower of Babel, Blue Moon, and Ra.

On the other hand, you have Wolfgang Kramer. He is famous for his diversity of design, often with the cleverness of the game built into the game components, not simply the ruleset. He also does a lot of collaboration, having worked on games like El Grande, Princes of Florence, Tikal, Torres, and Java.

Many Kramer games include game variants that radically change the nature of the game. Torres is a poster child for this; you can play three different ways which are almost three different games.

In theory, this is interesting to me, but I prefer Knizia games. When I sit down to play a game, I don’t want to be doing game design. I just want to play. The same is true for me and storygames/roleplaying games/whatever we’re going to call them. I don’t want to have to design the game at the table. I just want to play.

The second reason is that most players don’t actually have a practical knowledge of their lines until they are close to being violated. This is especially true of delicate subject material (Ron Edwards’ “Lines and Veils”), but it can also be true of things like humor. When should a Dirty Secrets game be funny? I’ve read a bunch of the original material, and I’ll tell you that the stories can be really funny without losing their fundamental seriousness. Sometimes, the humor is a direct coping mechanism by the investigator to deal with what he is seeing and discovering. How can a group dictate that at the beginning? They can’t. Rather, they need to be willing to police themselves and to say, in the moment, “No, that doesn’t really belong here.”

All of this goes back to the fundamental reason for playing Dirty Secrets: group creation of the story. I make no bones about it in the book; this is exactly why you play the game. As a result, the emerging story will not be anything that any one of you could have created, but it will be the result of your working together in harmony to create a story that all of you can enjoy together.

Gerald Cameron writes about Dirty Secrets and has some very good things to say. Yes, he did edit the book, but, as he notes, he did it freely because he believed in the project. That alone is a significant endorsement.

excerpted from Dirty Secrets from Dark Omen Games

I blame John Tynes. It’s all his fault. I was reading his list of inspirations for his Unknown Armies roleplaying game, and he talked about James Ellroy. In it, he says, “If you want to read the best in new horror fiction, avoid the ‘horror’ book rack — Ellroy is fighting on the front lines of the human nightmare, and has handily left the sad remnants of the horror field in his wake. “ I read this, blinked, and went off to locate The Black Dahlia. Over the course of several years, I finished Ellroy’s Los Angeles quartet. It was very hard going and horribly brutal, but I understood what Tynes was talking about. The most horrifying thing in the world is other people.

All this helped me as I played Unknown Armies. But, somewhere in the back of my mind, lodged the idea that I needed to explore this genre more. There was more potential here that wasn’t being tapped.

Time passed. About four years, to be exact.

In August 2006, I pulled this idea out and dusted it off. The time had come to make this game. So I sat down and wrote my first draft. It wasn’t very good. The only thing that really survived from this first draft is the title. Originally, Dirty Secrets was just a working title until I came up with something better. Nothing better came along.

But, the more significant thing that happened at that time was an email exchange with Ron Edwards. I knew from reading Sorcerer’s Soul that he was an aficionado of this type of literature, so I went to him for recommendations. He told me to read Ross MacDonald. He was so very right.

In September 2006, when we had that exchange, I owned no Ross MacDonald novels. As of this writing (july 2007), I own eleven and am working on gathering them all. MacDonald manages to pack more story into a 200-page novel then many novelists pack into an entire trilogy.

I also had the joy of being introduced to the joys of Raymond Chandler. While I think that MacDonald writes a deeper story, Chandler takes such a delight in the English language that he has earned a spot in my heart as well.

The turning point in my design of the game was in January 2007. Crystal and I were taking a day trip to Champaign, Illinois, which is about 90 minutes away from Peoria, where we live. Throughout the day, we discussed the design of this game. It was on this trip that we came up with the idea of organizing the Character cards around the Conflict track in order to show the social inequities of the Characters. That night, I realized what this game is about.

Dirty Secrets is about injustice. The powerful oppress the weak, using their money and influence to control them. In response, the weak rise up in violence against their oppressors. We are a divided people, and therefore, our society will not stand. But we hide from this reality. So long as we are safe, we do not care to look around us. But the oppression is real, and the violence is already with us. Is it already too late for us to be saved?

As of 8:00 p.m. on Friday, we wrapped up Dirty Secrets and got it to the printer.

“The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.”— Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

Voting is now open for the ENnies, so you can vote for Dark Omen Games, if you’re so inclined. One vote per IP address, though, to make it harder for people to vote Chicago-style.

…but at least it’s a friendly one. Legends of Alyria is reviewed here.

Crystal has been feverishly working on layout out Dirty Secrets, so I wanted to show off some of her work. This file is a preview of what we’re working on. Some of the images still have watermarks, since we’re going to buy everything in bulk and get a discount. Hooray for stock photography!

I’m really excited with how well this is coming together, and I wanted to brag on my wife for a bit. So, I figured that I’d share.

My company, Dark Omen Games, was nominated for an ENnie Award for Fan Choice: Publisher. Now, honestly, this simply means that two people (not myself) nominated me for the award. But still…. I have a soft, warm glow about it.

When I have voting details, I’ll post them up. In case anyone wants to vote for me….

“Life hangs together in one piece. Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections.”– The Far Side of the Dollar, Ross MacDonald

“[M]urder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with softly graying hair.”—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”