Preston
I recently shared my thoughts about Bloodlines over on Substack, but mostly that was about how I was afraid to go back and re-read it. With Ed writing behind the scenes stories about each of our releases, this seems like a good place to talk about how I came to write Bloodlines. In a way, it’s due to Living Greyhawk.
It was back in the heyday of D&D 3.0 and the Living campaign. If you’re not familiar with it, the idea was that you could go to conventions and play in official games in a campaign, leveling the same character throughout. I was relatively new to town and trying to find a gaming group, and this group was involved in Living Greyhawk so I got involved too. For a while it was fun, but before long I got tired of trying to advance a character with a different group of gamers every time. There was no sense of camaraderie and roleplay was hit or miss; players would squabble over loot, and after a while it just became un-fun. In fact, I was so burnt out on the Living Greyhawk scene that I didn’t even want to play a fantasy game at all. I asked my new group if they’d be up for playing a different genre if I ran it, and they agreed. I looked at a few different settings and systems, but settled on a d20 horror ruleset.
From there, I drew from inspiration of the world around me– a well (we used to have an old stone well on our property), lanterns (something my grandmother collected), and Freemasonry (which I’d recently joined). Even “Ravi” was inspired by my love of the cartoon Johnny Quest and the sidekick Haji. The other thing that I loved were in-game handouts. Lots and lots of handouts. So I prepped photos, journal entries, scraps of clues, pretty much whatever I could think of. And because I’m terrible at improv, I made a pretty detailed outline and lots and lots of notes. The adventure lasted roughly 18 hours of game time, then we moved on to other games and settings, but I still hade all those notes.
The next year, I attended our local gaming convention and met some guys who claimed to be publishers with a company called 12 to Midnight. (Little did I know that their first game, Last Rites, was still five months from release.) I got excited at the idea of pitching my game to a real publisher and having a published credit to my name. And that’s how they sucked me in!
Ed
When we met Preston and made him a member of 12 to Midnight he told us that he had run a home mini-campaign of modern horror and he wanted to convert it and use it for one of our adventure releases. First he agreed to run it for us, so I played my character, Jackson Green, Mark played Lance Carson, and Jerry played Glenmac. Craig played a Japanese Sumo Wrestler….lol.
Bloodlines was a blast to play. A great bait and switch, hauntings, plot, story line with great ending and a surprise twist. It was awesome. To this day I believe it’s my favorite 12 to Midnight adventure.
When we began discussing a cover, we decided to go back to Anneth Lagamo, who did the Last Rites cover. Her water colors are amazing and she knocked it out of the park with her version of a ghost over a headstone and putting her finger to her mouth making the “shush” sign.
Again, she charged us $300 and Preston has the original painting at his house. For interior illustrations Preston found Sergio “Obsidian” Villa Isaza who created some great interior black and white illustrations.
Back when we started 12 to Midnight in 2003, we also hired Woody Hearne who created the original iconic characters of Jackson, Lance, and Glenmac who we used to offer sidebars throughout our books starting with Bloodlines.
One of the game aids for this adventure required a picture of some teenagers to represent characters in the book. We were at Aggiecon and I got to meet my favorite author, Joe Lansdale, the voice of East Texas. He wrote the great Hap and Leonard series as well as Bubba Ho-Tep. Many of my gothic East Texas ideas were inspired by his wordcraft.
While I was talking to Joe, Preston was in the main hall of the Student Center and talking to three teenagers who fit his vision of the characters in the book. Turns out one of them was Kasey Lansdale, Joe’s daughter. They agreed to be “actors” and the picture was taken. Kasey has gone on to become an amazing country music singer, an actress, and a writer. I’m a huge fan and I like to think we “found” her first!
We included 26 pages of extras and handouts in the book. Maps, letters, illustrations, and more. We had really began to develop our own style by including plot synopsis on how it could play, used the iconics as your 12 to Midnight Guides for all the sidebars in our adventures, recommended plot hooks to get the characters involved, and a GM checklist to assist the Game Master in running the game. The adventure was really three adventures and had lots of twists and plot changes that made it lots of fun.
Truth is, I always wanted to update this one and put it out with all new SWADE rules. Maybe someday.
Some of my favorite quotes from the adventure:
“Little Marie was dead. They’d…skinned and gutted her like a rabbit.”
“In the chaos that follows, you catch a glimpse of a word written as if with an invisible finger upon the front windshield.”
“Nicole said the book is the key. She said there’s a ritual in there that will help them both cross over. She said right now, the …path from our world is all dark, but the spell will light the way.”
Hope y’all get a chance to play this one.
