My Gaming Career (in Lego)

This morning, my lovely wife was about to depart to see family in London, and gave me a couple of Lego minifigs. Before I get too carried away with this post, I have to say that we're both big fans of Lego, spent Christmas putting together Hogwarts, collect the little minifigs, and I can't wait for the Avengers and Lord of the Rings sets due in the summer.

Anyway, the two minifigs were completely random, but they both represented parts of my roleplaying game writing. One was a grey alien, just like the ones in Conspiracy X, and the other was the tired guy, who can be posed so he's asleep or sleepwalking, very representative of the new game, WILD.

It got me thinking, I think we have Lego minifigs that represent 90% of my game writing career...

Challenge Accepted!

Okay, before the published stuff, I tried my hand at writing RPGs in the past - my first real attempt at getting published was writing (using a typewriter, and posting a manuscript to West End Games) a couple of adventures I concocted for their awesome Ghostbusters RPG. If it wasn't for the positive and encouraging letter I had back from WEG I wouldn't have tried to continue.


It wasn't until I started talking to the amazing guys at Eden that I actually saw my work in print.

While I submitted a supplement for All Flesh Must Be Eaten, my first published stuff was Project Editor on Terra Primate, the "Planet of the Apes" version of AFMBE. And look, there's a mini fig for it!! Terra Primate was a blast, and a surprise too - I was hired to take the settings and plug in the AFMBE rules, converting and adjusting for the new game, and it surprised me the scope of Ape related gaming! Cool stuff!








Terra Primate was cool, but working on Buffy The Vampire Slayer was awesome. I just playtested for the core set, but the future tech and a few additional weapons were mine in the Slayer's Handbook, as well as working as Assistant Editor on the Slayer's Handbook and Monster Smackdown. Real shame the game didn't continue. But, hey! Lego cheerleader! It's Buffy!










While doing that, I also helped with the edits on a few of the AFMBE supplements. Most of the work was on Zombie Smackdown and a Fistful of Zombies, but I also helped out on some of the other supplements, and did some rules help on Army of Darkness (groovy). I was surprised to see that Lego even did a zombie, but it's really cool. Need to buy a whole lot more of them though to get a horde!









After that came the badgering to Eden to convince them to let me change Conspiracy X into Unisystem. Thankfully, they agreed to let me do it, and I spent the next four years working on those books. The little grey alien Lego dude is great... fits in nicely with the Lego alien invasion range with the saucers, the abducted redneck, now all I need are some suited agent Lego minifigs! Conspiracy X 2.0 is having a new lease of life thanks to Kickstarter, and the supplements are starting to hit production right now!








And then, I have to cheat a little. Okay, so it's not Lego, but it's compatible with Lego. While Conspiracy X was on hiatus, I worked with Cubicle 7, pitching the concept of the Doctor Who roleplaying game to the BBC. Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space hit the shelves to critical acclaim in 2009, and the new 11th Doctor edition should be hitting the shelves in the very near future.








Which brings me up to date with my most recent project. At least, until Lego decide to do their Inception sets, with little Lego Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page minifigs, this little sleeping Lego minifig is the best representation of WILD I can imagine... so far. But then, you can dream of anything, so anything is possible in the game...

Which reminds me, I have some time off from the dayjob to get some writing done, and here I am writing about Lego! I'd best get back to writing the game.

Let's see... "It all began with a dream..."