Sunday, April 5, 2015

Glowing After Glow

WEB's Design's
The Amazing Bill Bricker
Well now, GLOW is finally capsulized into a manageable RPG setting without some 200 plus pages I had surrounding the ideas that spawned this creation.  While I am not happy with my own work, I am very proud of the folks, like Bill Bricker, Lindsey McCollough, and Michael Hartlieb, that I got to work with me.

I have so enjoyed running Glow scenarios over the past five years, but I have so dreaded the past four versions of the rules system that I have written for the setting. I have been a bit giddy since I released Red Bat to get me over that little demon.

A little controversial thank you here. Shippy, James L. Shipman, was pretty much the inspiration for me writing anything post-apocalyptic. He and I spent hours coming up with this or that rule for a T&T "after the bomb" setting back in '98-'o1. He later put out his own version somewhere around 'o6, luckily not using any of my ideas or forwarded work, before his rather ungracious fall from esteem. This note of appreciation is important to me, regardless of the scores of lost sales it will cause. The reasoning follows:
When I put out New Khazan, around 'o9-'10, he sent me an email suggesting that he deserved some credit in the product's formulation. You see, some ten years after I sent him a massive article for space and T&T entitled "New Khazan" he took that text and had someone re-write about 35% of it, leaving my other material untouched and unedited, to publish a space-fantasy setting for our mutual favorite entitled New Khazan. Well then Shippy's fall from grace occurred. He was called out for using artwork as well as other people's work without permission. During that dramatic period, in an email to me,  he rescinded his claim to all of my works (though he still presumedly sells two, something called "Flow World" and his take on New Khazan). So I reinserted my original material into an official  9KW release, which you know as New Khazan. A planetoid called "New Khazan" is a part of my "9,000 Worlds" space-fantasy campaign). I could not oblige Jim with a thank you back then.

I can oblige him with a thank you now. My "Post-Poc" notes have been cluttering up my desks and files since 1998. There has been so much of them, that it really feels good to get the better parts out there. Jim, if you're reading this, thank you for the discussion. The ideas are all mine, but at the beginning the interest in the subject wasn't.

So with that out of the way, I'd especially like to thank Jack Kirby, Pierre Boulle,William F. Nolan, and the creators of the Gamma World RPG. While I acknowledge popular tastes for the movie Mad Max, I think that my setting is bit more well read on dystopian visions of the future than most post-apocalyptic RPGs.

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