How did we begin? Where did E.T.U. and all our adventures come from? I’m gonna start a series of articles on that subject and work through all of our adventures and more, for those who might be interested in such horrific details.
Jerry Blakemore and I have been friends since 1985. We met at Nancon in Houston where we killed each other often with cries of “Commie!” and “Mutie!” in a wild game of Paranoia. I have been playing TTRPGs since about 1978-79 and Jerry since he had joined the army back in the mid 1970s. Like most gamers we often thought, “I could do that,” but also like most gamers, we didn’t do “that.”
Here is a truth about me: I’m a fan boy! And damn proud of it. I idolized Gary Gygax, Marc Miller, and all the early game designers and still do. When 3rd edition dropped and the Open Gaming License became a thing, Jerry and I were working with the Triad of the Bandit Kingdoms for the Living Greyhawk campaign. I had run many games and written an interactive, while Jerry had written several adventures for the Kingdom. It was a blast!
Jerry and I are also avid miniatures gamers and decided early on to create a massive mini’s game for 3rd edition. We wrote the rules (a 200+ page volume) and played many battles with it and by 2002 we thought we were ready to try to publish our monstrosity. (Truth was, it was fun to pick up 50 d20s and roll em!)
As we had never published a gamebook before (I had published on a small scale for a company I had back in the 1990s called Memory Writers, but never on a large scale), we began investigating how to do it. It would take a minimum investment of over 6K and there was no guarantee we would ever make our money back. So we were on the verge of giving up when we met with another one of my best friends, Mark Ramsey. Mark asked us if we had ever thought about publishing PDFs and introduced us to RPGNow.com which later became drivethrurpg.com.
It was the time of the d20 glut but it was also a great time to break into the business. We decided to try to create some adventures to make enough money to publish our game. We studied what was out there at the time and 99% of it was for 3rd Edition D&D. Wizards had also published d20 Modern and we decided to try that with a horror spin, since so few were doing it.
First we needed a name for our company. We went through many ideas until finally settling on 12 to Midnight. I thought it invoked horror with a ticking down effect of running out of time. I also liked the 12224 idea, or 12to24, and all that. We hired a guy to create our alien head design. Jerry, being a CPA, had us form a corporation and we were good to go.
We had many discussions and decided to focus on modern horror and I wrote our first adventure Last Rites of the Black Guard. Later we discussed creating a setting for all of our adventures, and I knew I wanted it set in the East Texas in the piney woods. I grew up there and knew how gothic it really was. To me, it was a perfect setting for modern horror. The city of Pinebox grew from that, then Golan County and later East Texas University.
As we didn’t really know what we were doing, when we met folks with skills we needed, we invited them to join our company. Hence, we would eventually end up with me, Jerry, Mark, Preston DuBose, Craig Largent, Dr. Trey Gorden, Neal Hyde, and Brendan Quinn.
Together we would work on many adventures from 2003 though 2010.
