Ed: Preston and I have written together so often that I honestly can’t tell what he wrote and what I have written in the same document. We work very well together and I can’t imagine having a better ttrpg writing partner.
That being said….we do have our disagreements. Preston is much more focused on the outcome. I’m more about making certain everything is consistent and has cause and effect. This means I like to do detailed histories on hauntings and events for consistency, but the truth is (and Preston is right about this), it is usually nothing the players or even the Dean would need to know.
Another thing I do that drives him crazy are tables. I’m an 80s gamer and I love tables. The more the better. So, yeah, lots of tables in ETU: Degrees of Horror, and lots of tables in ETU: Fresh Blood.
In Degrees of Horror, Preston wrote the original plot point adventure and I wrote the Savage Tales. Once the first pass was done, we switched and worked on and added to the work the other had done.
John Goff made certain we pared it all down to workable sizes and got rid of all the extras that really did not fit the genre we had created and truly made the book much, much better. We wanted to finish the long-promised story of Dr. Heimglimmer and Last Rites of the Black Guard. Some of my favorite tales include A Bite to Eat, Bugs, Beautiful Smile, and Darkness Falling.
We included new edges and hindrances, taking tests, Extracurricular Activities, rules for ritual magic and High Strangeness tables along with a detailed random adventure generator.
The plot point included (spoilers)…….chupacabras, a complex history, and project Sweetheart leading to Graduation Day where the heroes fight to prevent Pinebox from being consumed by literally, Hell on Earth.
We even included a Demon Generator and detailed ghosts for hauntings.
We wrote several one sheets and there were many extras as well including music in Trouble in Texas, Archetype Cards, Horrors and Heroes Pawn Set, Classroom Maps, Library Map, Off Campus Housting Map, and Pinebox Business Map, and a Horrors of ETU Figure Flats. We released the University Press kit and a free downloadable map of the Campus.
IMHO….good stuff. But we had more tales in us….
Preston: Since apparently we’re having a love-fest, I’ll start by saying I couldn’t ask for a better writing partner than Ed. We think alike and have the same values; our strengths and weaknesses compliment one another. Even when we argue, it’s not a real argument. We both know we just want it to turn out as good as it can. That being said, yeah, we each have our writing styles. I do care a lot about cause and effect. I just usually don’t start four generations back. 😀
Ed also isn’t giving himself enough credit for the Degrees of Horror plot point campaign. We brainstormed together over the ppc for months, writing and rewriting the outline, before I started the writing. Planning the ppc was truly a joint effort. Unfortunately, the outline did not survive first contact with the enemy and I did find myself needing to change things as I went. Then after we got the feedback from John Goff at Pinnacle, it was back to the drawing board again. A quarter of the plot points (the junior year) had to be rewritten from scratch, while still connecting the dots from the sophomore year to senior year.
I’ve written about this before, so it’s no secret. In the first draft of the ppc, the junior year students were forced to take a semester abroad while back home some of the hot water they’d found themselves in cooled off. Ultimately, I was trying to cram in too much adventure into too small of a space, so that whole plotline got cut. Luckily, it found its way (more or less) into the Study Abroad supplement we released a few years later. Rewriting those plot points felt like squeezing blood from a turnip, but stranger things have happened at ETU. It made me dig deep (Creatively, not graves) and I’m pretty pleased with the results.
When we each finished our sections, Ed and I swapped to polish each other’s work. So when Ed says he can’t tell his writing from mine, it’s because in a very real sense every section was written and polished by both of us. I polished the Savage Tales while he knocked off the rough edges of the plot points. I was also tasked with writing “some kind of conclusion” for what he’d started in Last Rites of the Black Guard. Remember, ETU was going to be our swan song, so it was now or never.
When Ed originally wrote Last Rites, he’d optimistically thought he’d leave it on a cliffhanger and finish it later. Unfortunately, writer’s block hit hard and the ideas just weren’t flowing. It happens to all of us. So I turned Last Rites into a trilogy, with parts 2 and 3 as Savage Tales. I kept asking Ed for feedback while I was writing, asking if such-and-such was okay, but he very kindly put his faith in me and told me to do whatever I wanted. Surprisingly for the number of people who had clamored for follow-up to the original, I never saw a lot of feedback about those adventures. Maybe it was a case of having been built up so much that nothing could have lived up to the anticipation? I’ll admit mine have a different tone than the original, more adventure-y as opposed to straight up spooky like Ed’s. I still think they’re fun, though. No regrets.
