Early on, Jackson Green became one of my favorite characters (he was my character in our original games). He was a mix of Agent Mulder, hippy, and modern ghost hunter who believed everything he heard. We wanted to truly explore ghosts, spirits, and demonic entities and decided to do it as if the game were made up of various files that Green had put together to help in his ghost hunting ventures, so the layout Preston came up with was making it look like a file.
I really liked the phone message attached to it that stated Lisa Gray was very upset and was being haunted as a throwback to Last Rites of the Black Guard. But if you read carefully, you can see it still refers to her as being from Rosetta, Texas. It was released in 2005, and we still hadn’t fully developed Pinebox as our true base of all our adventures though it was coming quickly with this release.
Preston came up with the following blurb that I still love:
So you think strapping a nuclear reactor to your back and waving a proton-thingamahoochie around makes you a ghost hunter? Think again! My name is Jackson Green, and I’m a professional ghost hunter. I’ve seen some stuff that would make your hair curl if it’s straight or straighten it out if it’s curly. Ghost hunting is a job that requires preparation. Walking into a supernatural situation without the right instruments and knowledge is like trying to fix a ’56 Chevy without a toolbox.
This guide is your toolbox. It’s a collection of notes from my close brushes with the supernatural, and hopefully this book can help you avoid some of the bumps and bruises I earned by learning things the hard way. You may be familiar with some of these techniques as published in Last Rites and Bloodlines, but most parts have never seen the light of day before now.
The guide had a lot in it, such as how to conduct a modern ghost hunt (as a player and a Game Master), equipment, detailed information on ghosts for d20 and Savage Worlds, a random Séance Table, three ghost adventures, 46 adventure seeds, the full paranormal lexicon and chapters on mystics and ritualism.
While the d20 version is no longer for sale, the Savage Worlds version is and one customer who ran the ETU: Degrees of Horror campaign said it “was a great resource as I ran the Degrees of Horror plot point campaign (and many side adventures) for ETU. I would recommend getting all of the 12 to Midnight adventures. This, like all of the 12 to Midnight material, is well thought out and well written. I think that any others that plan to write adventures would use their works as an example of how to write good adventures and gaming material.”
We were really starting to hit our stride with this one and you can see how we were developing as a publisher in just two years. I had a lot of fun writing my part of it, while Preston provided a few of the adventures (such as the Ghost Train). [Preston – I wanted three very thematically different adventures. I loved the idea of the ghost train, so much that I revisited the idea in Fresh Blood. I also recall spending way too much time down a research rabbit hole on the one that involved a “psychic” talking to ghosts.]
The biggest knock on it was that it was not a player guide with no real “classes and feats” for the d20 crowd.
This was our first release that suffered a “Black edit,” as Clint Black helped edit the product with his “you should completely rewrite this section because….” LOL. He was right. Remember, Clint is always right! I also think this may have been the first attempt at Rituals for the Savage Worlds system (I might be wrong).
My original idea was to put out a series of monster releases, but Preston talked me out of it and came up with the Guide that would include a lot of what I had done or planned to do. It was this project that made us realize that together we are incapable of doing anything half-way. Preston wrote in his afterward, “Every project gets all the creativity and labor we have to offer, no matter how humble its beginnings.”
If you want to check it out, here is the link on Drivethru: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/3168/12tm-green-s-guide-to-ghosts-savaged-edition
