Our first release ever was Last Rites of the Black Guard. I knew I wanted a haunting, a family terrorized by ghosts, a demonic figure, and a cult and thrown in a Nazi Mummy and it was all good.
It took me about a week to write it. When I’m writing an adventure, I create a general outline, then go about filling it in. I wanted a dynamic adventure where things happen regardless of what the characters do. I wanted it to be a timed adventure that happens over no more than 2 days.
The first part of the adventure was a classic ghost hunt, setting up cameras, and having ghostly encounters with questioning the Grey family. The hauntings would increase hourly until it reached a crescendo around midnight. There was a séance that could be done, and lots of clues about the dead Nazi who had lived next door, and several spirits that would reach out to the heroes begging for help.
The last part of the adventure involved breaking into the Nazi’s house and having a showdown with a revenant, and two of the lead cultists who had tried to steal the mummy’s powers for themselves. When they were defeated, the spirit of Dr. Heimglimmer escaped and the mummy was freed.
Preston did the layout and together we created pictures and illustrations for the interior using Adobe photoshop. My son, David, played the son, and other friends served as pictures of various non-player characters. We needed cover art, and we all believe that the cover is the most important thing when getting folks to purchase your pdfs or books. If it looks professional and high quality, more people will buy it. I do believe people judge books by their cover.
We began a search for an artist. We went through weeks of looking through various art sites to find an artist that we thought could do what we were looking for. Finally, Mark found one. Her name was Anneth Lagamo. She had recently graduated from Art school in California and was a native of Hawaii. She is an amazing watercolorist and has gone on to do many great illustrations for various companies and for children’s books.
We hired her for $300 to create a water-colored painting of our Nazi Mummy in the haunted house with a ghost behind him. She asked many direct questions and went through several permutations before we settled on the final version. She even sent us the original painting which now hangs in my office!
I made many mistakes in Last Rites of the Black Guard. I wrote everything in the future tense such as “the heroes will” or “if they do this, they will….” This is not the industry standard, and when I learned this, I went back to readthrough it and was horrified at how terrible it really was. The adventure was good; the writing was terrible.
Then there is the whole Birkhuhn thing. Jerry had spent several years in Germany during his service, and he was certain that the German word for “Black Guard” was “Birkhuhn.” I trusted Jerry, and so that was the word I used in the adventure. Later, after our German speaking fans read it, we started getting corrected. Birkhuhn means “small chicken.” Not exactly a scary thing….yeah…thanks Scary Jerry!
Mark Ramsey and I began recording and manipulating Electronic Voice Phenomenon to go with the Last Rites adventure and we were always looking for more “freebies” to give away on the 12 to Midnight website to hopefully build a community of gamers who supported our games. I am still very proud of the final result of that.
So, we got it done. We put it up for sale and watched the site diligently, hoping it would be well-received.
It was not.
In the first month we had 22 sales. In 30 days….22 sales. We began to realize we would never make the $300 back we had paid Anneth and certainly wouldn’t make enough to continue our foray into publishing. So, next month, we had a meeting to decide if we should continue or quit.
Two emails kept us in it. One was from JD Wiker, a developer for 3rd edition and an amazing game designer and adventure writer. His email said he had purchased and played Last Rites and said he and his friends loved the adventure, but he also said, “if you want to continue in the industry you need to learn the industry standards of writing adventures.” We took that to heart and replied, “would you mind helping us learn the standards.” JD responded with a multi-page email explaining how to write, expectations for adventure designs, and much more.” For the next few years that email became our bible. I wish I still had a copy of it, but it was lost on our 12 to Midnight forums years ago. That said, I will always admire and appreciate JD Wiker for helping us.
The second email was from a guy named Shane Hensley. Shane had been in the industry for years, and I had played some of his early adventures, and was fascinated by The Great Rail Wars and the original Deadlands. Pinnacle Entertainment Group, PEG, had just published the original Savage Worlds game book. Shane told us that he loved Last Rites and wanted to make it one of the first adventures for Savage Worlds. He said he would “Savage” it himself and that we could have all the profits from it. (Yes, Shane is really that AWESOME!)
When Last Rites for Savage Worlds went on sale at RPGNow it blew up. Sales were no longer in the twenties but the hundreds. We were finally making a profit. We decided then to publish for both Modern 20 and for Savage Worlds.
Next we planned to produce Jerry’s adventure of Modern Military Horror, Weekend Warriors.
