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Episode 16: Eye Wizards, Ioun Stones, Planet X Games & Levi Combs
85 Plays1 year ago
Radio Free RPG, your easy listening tabletop rpg podcast is back with season two!
Our first guest of the season is Levi Combs, the creative mind behind Planet X Games! He joins host Alan Bahr to talk about Kickstarters, classic fantasy and pulp fantasy, eye wizards and more!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/planetxgames/closet-of-the-eye-wizard
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Transcript
Introduction to Radio Free RPG
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Alan Barr and this is Radio Free RPG. Hello, I'm Alan Barr and welcome to Radio Free RPG.
Guest Introduction: Levi Combs
00:00:31
Speaker
Today I'm joined by my guest Levi Combs of Planet X Games. Levi, how are you?
00:00:37
Speaker
I'm good, man. How are you? I am doing very well. It's cooled off here and been kind of rainy, which has been nice. I wish it would do that here. Southern Maryland is a hellhole right now. North Dakota will be in three to six months. When they make jokes about hell freezing over, I assume they refer to here.
00:01:03
Speaker
I find, I found North Dakota to be super beautiful, but also a little forlorn, a little desolate in spots. So I get you, I could see it. I was, uh, I was, I was raised in, uh, Bismarck, North Dakota. So for 15 years and then randomly came back from my wife's job to a different town in North Dakota. So yeah, I had a taste of the good life somewhere else and now I'm back.
Planet X Games Overview
00:01:29
Speaker
So now Levi, you,
00:01:33
Speaker
run, operate, head muckety muck at Planet X games. Yes, sir. What is Planet X games all about? Because I was going to ask you a question and I was struggling to define sort of what Planet X is. Well, we make we make games. I mean, but to point in on that, really, it's we make
00:02:00
Speaker
Adventure modules zines and then we've kind of gotten into some other stuff as well We don't have a system of our own and when I say we I mean me, you know, it's it's a it's primarily me with just a cast of of folks that I've worked with more or less from day one, so Yeah, we don't have our own system but I do a lot of stuff for dungeon crawl classics I do stuff for
00:02:27
Speaker
5th edition, or at least I did. I'm kind of phasing out of that as that goes away. And then OSR, OSC, and I've gotten into some other smaller game systems that I just personally enjoy. So, sure. Yeah, doing stuff for those. Okay. So, you know, it sounds like you primarily make supplemental material for the D20 space. Yeah.
00:02:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually, I'm going to steal that actually. Next time somebody asks you that question, I'm 100% asking them. That's great.
Aesthetic and Inspiration
00:03:04
Speaker
But you really specialize in what I would call a 70s and 80s inspired sort of acid science fantasy aesthetic, I think.
00:03:14
Speaker
there's a lot of this sort of surrealist fantasy vibe, at least to the artwork and to the books I have on my shelf from Planet X Games, which is not an inconsiderable number. Yeah, I think that's a fair comparison. I like to go with weird fantasy, but I can see that acid fantasy moniker sticking. It sort of reminds me of those 70s style blacklight posters.
00:03:42
Speaker
No. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. You would see it maybe in an old bowling alley downtown, right? I will take that as a compliment, sir. No, it absolutely is because there is a charm and authenticity to that presentation, especially, you know, 50 years removed from the 70s. Sure. That I think really helps your games come across in a positive light. So definitely a compliment.
Advice on RPG Creation
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, the best piece of advice I ever got in
00:04:12
Speaker
and RPGs, whether it was writing or publishing or whatever was from Jeff Tillanian and he said, just be genuine. No matter what you do, just make it genuine because people who are buying your material, they can smell a fake. Then they'll root you out quickly if you're not putting out stuff that you believe in or that you would enjoy yourself. That's been my mantra since my very first thing was to-
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah. It was to just make genuine stuff and things that I would want to play myself. I mean, I think that's excellent advice and I repeated similar advice to people when I've given panels or seminars. So I certainly can't argue with that. No, that was definitely a great piece of advice. Serve me well. Yeah.
The King Tut Western Project
00:04:59
Speaker
So with that in mind, you know, I have a few Planet X products on my shelf.
00:05:06
Speaker
probably the, we'll call it the weirdest or the strangest one, is your King Tut Western. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's one of my, that's my favorite one I've ever done, actually. Is it? Okay. Well, you've answered my follow up question. So what, what is this, what is, like, what's the name? Where can folks find it? What is it about? Like, what made you sit down? Because I saw it and I went, oh, somebody made Bubba Hotel into a Western adventure.
00:05:32
Speaker
That was immediately my first thought and that is completely not what it is like in any way So if you buy it on that recommendation folks, don't like I am me angry about it. Okay. I it is not of a hotel but a Western No, it's the full title is King Tut's root and tootin weird west extravagananza and then in little tiny letters and Western where It's a
00:05:59
Speaker
You know, I was, I was working as a bartender for, for a lot of years and I had a regular, um, who would come in and, uh, he was a comedian. His name is Colin Nelson. And, uh, he was just talking about root and tootin weird West extravagananza, all this stuff one day. And I said, I just stopped what I was doing. And I was like, whoa, whoa, hold on. Hold up. What did you just say? And he said, Oh yeah. Yeah. Root and tootin weird West extravagananza.
00:06:27
Speaker
in Western wear, and it was just like some drunken rant, but I was like, oh, that's the most genius title I've ever heard in my life. So I added a few things in, but it was like, hey, would you mind if I wrote that down and then use that? I have an idea for something. And then, yeah, then lo and behold, like five years later, I was looking for a title, a proposed title for like a Weird West project that had all these ideas. And I thought, oh my God, I got to call Colin.
00:06:53
Speaker
And yeah, he was very kind to let me, and I thank him on the credits page as well. Sure. Well, that's, I mean, that's a great reason to have a title there. My personal favorite of your work ever released so far, and this is primarily due to, I just adore the cover art, is your Ion Stone King adventure for 5E.
Glimmering Crypt of the Ion King Art and Concept
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, Glimmering Crypt of the Ion King, yeah. Yes. And one, I love it because I think ion stones are disregarded too much. Give me more floating magic rocks and circle my head, please. I would like to be a mini solar system. Yes, absolutely. But the cover art is just wildly evocative. To the point where when I first saw it, I had to stop and I've art directed a lot of books.
00:07:43
Speaker
Because we release anywhere from 30 to 60 things a year. Most of them have at some level of custom art. I am directing dozens of artists. And I had to stop and I had to look at it because I was so just wildly impressed by the quality of that cover piece alone. So first of all, who's the artist? Oh, that's Adrian Landeros, who has done all my covers for 5E7, about half the covers for other things.
00:08:09
Speaker
had tons of interiors. He's a fantastic artist that I've been working with since my very first product. And what, you know, what was the process like for that particular piece? I'm really selfishly interested in how that one came into fruition because it was so striking to me that, you know, I want to know what that looked like for you. Yeah, there's a couple pieces to that. The very first would be it's kind of an homage piece to a cover to Strange Adventures. There's a
00:08:38
Speaker
I don't remember the number. It's like 80, 81, but it's a it's a skeleton in a spacesuit sitting on like a ragged like ejection seat and all these kind of like bug people are worshiping it. And I really like the way that cover looks. I've been one of my favorites forever and a day. I just like skeletons in a spacesuit anyways. That's just it just draws me in. But I like the competition. And I thought, well, what if there's like an undead dwarf wizard sitting on a throne?
00:09:07
Speaker
And instead of like an injection seed, it's just the thrones made up of all these crazy crystals, like that crazy cave in Mexico with all the giant selenite crystals. So yeah, that's where that piece came from. But then the logo was really striking on that as well. And that was designed by a graphic designer named Tracy Steele. She's done a bunch of that. Yeah. I think that's all part of this. Yeah, Tracy's done a bunch of that stuff.
00:09:37
Speaker
Exactly, yeah. It's so, it hangs together as a full composite piece so well that it's
00:09:45
Speaker
Folks, I mean, just go look up glimmering crypts of the Ion King and like look at it because it evokes classic fantasy. It evokes that 70s sort of acid metal aesthetic that I love. It evokes just these bright colors. And yet it's still weird and kind of dark looking, but so bright about it. Right. We don't. And one thing I love about it is it stands out in a field of
00:10:13
Speaker
What are usually really kind of dark, moody covers that have dominated the RPG industry lately? And here you've got an adventure that shares a lot of themes with what those dark and moody games, but you've got the opposite direction with the cover. It is very bright. It is very in your face. Colorful. I mean, it's got the full gambit of glimmering ion crystals. Like there's a frickin rainbow on that cover, basically. You know, and I and I just love that.
00:10:39
Speaker
Visual contrast it really makes it stand out in a great way in my opinion Yeah, there's something to be said I think too for like brightly lit horror or at least horror fantasy Like mid-summer, you know, that's a good example of a movie that did it where like all these terrible things are happening But it's all in broad daylight, you know, so you're getting these terrible evolutions everything gets worse and worse and worse The whole thing just takes place right in the middle of the day and there's nothing dark about it
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's, uh, yeah, I love it.
Creative Processes in RPG Development
00:11:12
Speaker
So, you know, you, you've got a slew of other products. We've touched on this 5d fantasy stuff. You do, you've done some for DCC. So now DCC is a game. I have only played once as a funnel. I have played it and I have a full set of crazy glow that our TCC dice and I have many DCC books on my shelf.
00:11:33
Speaker
Because again, and I think they share that sort of appendix and acid fantasy aesthetic in the art, right? There's a visual kind of oozy drippiness to it in the way it's inked in color that I really love. It's just a fantastic style. I think it, I think it sets a fantasy apart from the, what I would call sort of the standard of the 5E digital art. Oh, a thousand percent.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, there's two whole different aesthetics going on between Dungeons and Dragons with Edition and DCC. They're each their own, very much their own thing, and really couldn't be more different when it comes down to differentiating between fantasy types. Yeah, and is that when you were working on this or making these plans or preparing these projects, is that a conscience choice you're making, or is it just a byproduct of the sort of adventure ideas you're coming up with?
00:12:28
Speaker
you know, particular egg, right? What's coming first, the cover art or the adventure idea? This is actually one of my favorite things to talk about when it comes to like, I, when I, when I talk to other creators like yourself, like how do you begin an adventure? Like what's the very first thing that you do? Like some people like, like Matt Finch, he starts with a map, you know, or Casey Christofferson, he starts with an outline, you know? But for me, the very first thing I come up with before I come up with anything else is the name.
00:12:56
Speaker
I want a really evocative name. If I get something that really catches my attention, then I'm like, oh, let me extrapolate off that and dig into the well and see what I have. Okay. I mean, I think that's great. I'm kind of curious. How do you start? With adventures? Yeah. Generally speaking, I've also, sorry listeners, I've just realized that the microphone I thought I was using is in fact not my microphone.
00:13:25
Speaker
And I'm using my webcam microphone, which is why I was having trouble. So we'll adjust that in post, but I'm going to, I'm going to up my volume a little bit to make sure I'm getting picked up. So I generally start by hiring somebody else to write it because I hate writing adventures. That is my first step all the time. Nope. Fair enough. I find them very frustrating from a creative standpoint. And I, I dislike.
00:13:52
Speaker
I should say I don't like writing them, but they have to really be something I feel very strongly about wanting to do because I get to work with so many talented people who love doing it. I feel like I may as well just give them the work if they want to pay them, right? There's no reason to do it if I don't want to do it, kind of.
00:14:10
Speaker
But my creative process is generally, I will come up with mechanics first, because I'm all about rules. I love tinkering with rule sets, changing rule sets, creating new ones, trying to move the needle in how the tactile element of an RPG happens between dice or cards or whatever. Very cool. And so I usually come up with a mechanic idea, and then I'll structure the game around it from there. Oh, right on. OK. That's a good answer. And then I'll generally justify the game
00:14:39
Speaker
And then be like, okay, well, I did this mechanic. So it needs to be, you know, there's a blood dye mechanic. So now it needs to be hyper-violent. So what's a hyper-violent genre I haven't done. You know what? We should do hyper-violent Greek myth. All right. Swords of Meropis is born. Right. Which looks awesome, by the way. Oh, thank you. Yeah. The proofs just shipped today. I'm very excited to be able to get that out and fulfill that Kickstarter. It's taken far longer than it was supposed to, but.
00:15:03
Speaker
Well, if you've been in it for any amount of time, everybody knows that that happens. I feel like it happens with increasing regularity at this juncture too. Welcome to the modern world, right? I know I've been doing this for eight years now and we went from being on time and early our first couple of kickstarters to even no matter how much I plan, I will be cutting it very close if I am on time. It seems like it's getting that way for sure.
00:15:30
Speaker
A lot of drag time on those, you're waiting for things to arrive and pieces and editing, and you've got to get it all back. You've done all your stuff, but you just seem to be waiting on everything else. And in this case, because we're doing a print-on-demand delivery through drive-through, I based that timeline on drive-through. I've ordered hundreds of books from drive-through over the years, hundreds a year from drive-through.
00:15:51
Speaker
And they are pretty consistent. So I was like, I feel pretty comfortable with this timeline. I baked in a couple extra weeks. I knew GenCon was coming, so I added some more time. And still, still, despite adding like an extra two months of time to a finished product that was print on demand delivery, it is going to be late.
00:16:08
Speaker
because just, I don't know. Like I submitted the order when I planned to and like it should have been here three weeks ago and it just shipped today.
Kickstarter and Collaboration
00:16:20
Speaker
So. Oh yeah, man. It's just another stripe on your indie publisher badge, you know? Yeah, it's what it is. But so, you know, you have a Kickstarter running right now that is sort of a collaboration or inspired by a friend of mine, LostDI.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yeah. Walk us through the closet of the eye wizard. Yeah. So, so laws is a, you know, he's a fabulous member of the DCC community just to draw all around good guy. And he had been in contact with all these artists and all these writers, and he had initially reached out to me to write one of the pieces for the book.
00:17:05
Speaker
And I had a really good time writing it. I did kind of a, like a weird sort of like grind housey sort of, uh, entry that kind of fits in with my normal aesthetic, you know? Um, and I was looking at the list of, of contributors. I mean, wow, this is like a murderer's row of just RPG killers. A lot of really, you know, good guys in this, but probably from the DCC community, but from, from other games too, you know? So, uh, you know, I think it was just originally going to be like, uh, you know, it was originally going to be like a,
00:17:34
Speaker
like a PDF or just something he was making for himself. And just through the series of just talking about it and kind of going over it, I ended up as the publisher. And I said, Hey, we should kickstart this thing and just make a ton of copies and we'll send everybody copies and we'll get everybody taken care of. And it just evolved into just a really cool project. 16 artists, 16 writers, like a hybrid between a
00:18:02
Speaker
RPG resource and an art zine. Yeah, you're getting a really unusual book. Some of the pages are black and white. Some of them are color. But every spread that you open up to is a fusion of two artists. You know, it's one person doing the doing the illustration, another person riffing on that illustration, writing their own, their own entries. So it really is a cabinet of curiosities when it comes to
00:18:31
Speaker
the content. It's great stuff. And again, just a real murderer's row of contributors. Yeah, the list is fantastic. It's got some friends of mine, Diogo, LFO SR, who I work with all the time. A lot of really great folks on that list. So by the time this errors, it might or might not still be on Kickstarter folks. But if it's available for pre-order somewhere, I'll drop a link. Otherwise, just keep your eyes out. I think it's going to be really cool. I backed it. I think it looks fun.
00:19:03
Speaker
It'll definitely be open for pre-order and then we'll be on exalted funeral in a couple months after we get it out. It's already done. We're literally just waiting for the proof to come back from the printer. Yes, I know that feeling.
00:19:23
Speaker
this sort of weird fantasy tone all your work has, what drives you to that over something that's more dark fantasy or heroic or light fantasy?
Childhood Influences on Fantasy Creation
00:19:33
Speaker
What inspires this weird fantasy love? Yeah, I'm a child of nostalgia, of the things that I kind of came up on. I came up on Saturday morning cartoons and Star Wars and Indiana Jones and
00:19:48
Speaker
you know, Frank Frazetta paintings and Roger Zelazny and Lovecraft and Howard and all these things that are on my bookshelf, you know. Right. I was a fan of D&D probably since 83 or so. So I've been playing a good 30 plus years. Some additions. Yes. Some additions. No games. All of it. So I'm real again, just I'm a child of those of those influences.
00:20:15
Speaker
You know, I went to the grim and gritty comic era of the eighties, you know, where everything after after 85, everything was dark, you know, there for a good six, seven years. Um, so I tend to shy away from like a grim dark or as Y hand or approach you where everything is very dark and bloody and lethal. You know, I, uh, I, I would try to approach the DCC, um, aesthetic in, I really want to make me make a memorable.
00:20:44
Speaker
I want to have memorable locations, interesting things happening, things that the players will talk about for years to come. And to that, there's a book called How to Write Adventure Modules That Don't Suck. Goodman Games puts it out. I believe it's still in print. But there's a chapter in there written by Joseph Goodman. That's fantastic. It's like everything
00:21:09
Speaker
that it's the best advice ever for writing an adventure module, really. That one paragraph, it's full of good advice, but that one chapter especially really informs how I like to go about doing things. Okay. Yeah, it's good stuff. I think that's great. I read how to write adventure modules that don't suck. And while it is excellent advice to not make me want to write them anymore, they probably suck less, but I certainly don't want to do it anymore than I did.
00:21:37
Speaker
What's the whole thing about like, write what you want to see, you know, like, how many times as a, as a young man, did you go to the, you know, especially like during the nineties and stuff, did you go to, or early 2000s, when he would go to the game store and you were like, all right, well, I want to buy an adventure. I want to buy a game. Let me look around for something that interests me. And you'd pop stuff open and just be like, man, I wish this was better. Or I wish this was different. Or I wish they were putting out this or,
00:22:05
Speaker
I wish they had done this instead of that. So instead of complaining, I just started writing my own stuff. They always tell us to create the media you want to see. I remember, obviously, as you do too, I remember hearing that. So here we are doing it. And unfortunately, my problem is all I want to see are different rule sets.
00:22:25
Speaker
Do what you're good at, but then delegate what you're not good at to other people, or even stuff that you don't enjoy, because a lot of times that you not enjoying it will come through if you try to force it. I'm right with you, man. I'm a firm believer in delegating to people who are
00:22:43
Speaker
uh better at doing certain things in a in a project you know i i will and i i think my biggest frustration has been because i like making different rule sets i find myself writing one particular iteration of an adventure which is always the introductory adventure right always what's in the book with the intro adventure to teach you the game and no matter what system you put those on they are generally sort of the same kind of adventure all the time sure and you're gonna go through the same beads it always follows the same pattern so it feels very tiring to me
00:23:12
Speaker
I
Challenges and Rewards in RPG Writing
00:23:13
Speaker
just gave our tiny Kahulu backers a adventure slash sort of multi-session campaign toolbox called The Illumination of Aldebaran, which is this Yellow King-esque Lovecraftian thing. And it came out to like, I want to say 80, 90 pages. Like it is an adventure that I wrote. Yeah. I loved it. It was great. And I had so much fun with it because it wasn't an intro adventure. I was able to just write something that I would want to play.
00:23:41
Speaker
And that was a lot more freeing for me. And so, you know, maybe after talking to you, I might sit down and be like, I'm going to write an adventure. And then I'll get like halfway in and be like, no, I'm out. The minute there's friction, I'm done. No. In that same book we were talking about, like there's whole templates they lay out, like little tricks and things you can do to do that. I just found that as just like a common man's resource. It was just a really good builder's kit for that.
00:24:11
Speaker
It's like that with like tone of adventure design is another one that I don't immediately find like I don't pop it open to learn how to craft an adventure. But when I get stuck, I need five rooms, man, or I need to know like what the motivations for these five things, you know, whatever I pop that bad boy open and in like five minutes I have everything I need because it's so well laid out.
00:24:31
Speaker
Right. I'm a big fan of the five room adventure style that has sort of become popular over the last few years that I think is really, really elegant at distilling what makes an adventure tick down to the bare basics. Right. Do you like narrative driven or like location based or how do you, what's, what's your favorite? Well, so that's a loaded question for me. I play five different games a week. We have five weekly RPGs.
00:24:56
Speaker
And they range from one's a play test group for my stuff. One is my Star Wars, Pendragon hack that I've already. Yeah. I wrote a, just like a hundred page Pendragon hack of star for Star Wars. I'm a really Pendragon fan. Like it's my favorite RPG. I consider it the most perfectly crafted RPG of all time. It's pretty good. Um, and so I was like, you know, it'd be fun nights in space. And I have some Star Wars fans in my Friday group and I was like, Hey guys, here's my pitch. And they're like, we're on board.
00:25:24
Speaker
And so I was like, cool, I'm not going to change any rules. I just kind of want to, we'll just, you know, narratively re-flavor it. And then I wrote like a hundred page document that's like Alan's house rules. Because I couldn't help myself. And then on one of my groups, we play Soulbound, the age of Sigmar RPG from cubicle seven, actually, which is a mix of sort of investigative, dungeon crawly,
00:25:47
Speaker
uh like kind of a team but fantasy vibe to it you just go on missions for god king sigmar and do what needs to be done sure and then i uh i also play one solo rpg a week and then uh generally speaking my other group rotates between some sort of crunchier sci-fi game i play very crunchy games for somebody who writes very not crunchy games but yeah i actually don't play a lot of fantasy anymore it has a sort of
00:26:17
Speaker
After 25 years of D&D, I've sort of fallen into, I feel like I've done everything I want to do at the moment with it. So I'm doing other stuff. Fair enough. Do what you're enjoying to do. What stuff do you want to do? I do want to make a dungeon. That's my dream.
00:26:36
Speaker
Well, and I've got Dyson from Dyson Logos working on some maps for me now. So I finally was like, you know what? I keep saying I want to do this, but I haven't been doing it. So I am going to pull the trigger and we're going to do it. So.
00:26:52
Speaker
Well, he's one of the best for sure. It's hard to want to do a map and not have, you know, Dyson or Alyssa Faden or a few other people tackle it because they're all just, there's map makers and then they're up here, you know, at the top of the level, top of their game doing stuff in ways that nobody else is really thinking about. That's what I feel about Skull Fungus, Carl Sternberg.
00:27:15
Speaker
His stuff, he's probably my favorite. I mean, I love Alyssa and Dyson's work as well. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not putting that down. But just for my particular sort of like weird aesthetic, I find that I match up really well with Carl. His stuff, all of his solo stuff too is great. I follow his Patreon, like I'm a true diet and the wolf fan, man. I was unaware that Carl had a Patreon, so I will be finding that now. It's awesome.
00:27:45
Speaker
and cheap and accessible. Ix is one of the greatest sort of like adventure site written in recent memory. Like we had a long space where there were classics and there were classics for 10 years and there wasn't a lot that to me felt like it was really moving the needle. And then the last couple of years, there's just been like a slew of these adventures and I'm like, oh, okay, now we're moving the needle. Now we're redefining what this looks like.
00:28:11
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Right. And that's been really exciting to be able to to see and kind of. You know, experience and look at so. Oh, there's a there's a bunch of guys like that out there now, man, they're just these killers are swimming through the water, man, like Jacob Hirsch is another guy does is just doing ridiculously cool stuff. Charles Ferguson Avery, he's done a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Into the into the weird and wild or, you know,
00:28:39
Speaker
All of those, but those Into the Weird and Wild and Into the Sess and Citadel. And I imagine they're going to go on with other versions of those kind of exploratory titles. But I'm here for every single one of them. Every Into the Weird and Wild was the best book I picked up that year. And then this year, when I picked up Into the Sess and Citadel, still the best book I've read this year. Like they're just so top notch. Everything about them, it's just a 10 out of 10 across the board. Yeah, it's.
00:29:09
Speaker
There's a lot of great, and I was having this conversation at GenCon this year with somebody who was an RPG developer for what we would probably term as a major studio.
Innovation in Indie RPG Space
00:29:19
Speaker
And they asked me something and I said, oh, we'll look at these. And I rattled off a bunch of small press indie RPGs. And they were like, I've never even heard of these. And I'm like, you need to be plugged into what's happening because this is where the good ideas are.
00:29:32
Speaker
As much as I love you, love you bud, this innovative stuff isn't really happening at your level because you're working with IPs where you're limited. You're adaptations of material, you're stuck on 5E and you can only do so much. The stuff you want to be looking at is the stuff that's popping out every week and hitting that $2,000, $5,000 funding level on Kickstarter or whatever because that's where people are taking risks and they're making cool ideas really happen. Oh yeah.
00:29:59
Speaker
Some of the best material for 5E, in fact, most of the best material for 5E is not made by Wizards of the Coast or Hasbro or anybody involved. It's made by third party publishers. Some of it doesn't even like barely even funds and you barely even see it's gone there for a minute and it's gone. So you really have to be discerning and follow this stuff at a level if you really want to get the best adventures.
00:30:28
Speaker
There's so much great stuff out there that folks are sleeping on. I spend a lot of my time and effort researching that stuff because I want to know what I'm looking for. That's what's exciting to get. Yeah, it's nice to get the cool spell jammer box set because I love spell jammer. I'm a sucker for spell jammer. I'll never be unhappy when somebody's giving me more spell jammer stuff.
00:30:50
Speaker
No matter how bad it is, if you put spell jammer on it and there's a gift with the gun, I'm in. That's my thing. Give me my Napoleonic hippo soldiers. But spell jammer was innovative when it came out and now it's a nostalgia trip.
00:31:08
Speaker
You know, and it's exciting to see what people are doing that's similar to spell jammer, like plainer compass where they're taking ideas and reiterating and moving them in different directions and different ways. And that's just fantastic. And, you know, so folks, if you're listening, you know, I think I speak for Levi when I say this, but we encourage you to check out the small presses and see what they're doing.
00:31:27
Speaker
You know, not every small press is out there changing the game, but a lot of them are making these sort of passion projects happen in a way that you don't get to see in other places. And they deserve both the financial renomination, but also just your support and passion back because they love games as much as you do and they're making this stuff happen.
00:31:48
Speaker
There are a couple of the larger publishers that are really, really generous with their IP. Absolutely. Goodman Games being one of them, man. I was on a podcast last night on Joey Royal's Pizza Party and Joey was talking about how a third of the Goodman booth was all third-party publishers. This is somebody who went to Gen Con in
00:32:11
Speaker
I mean, they paid a lot of money to be at Gen Con with a big booth, you know, a lot of tables and then took a third of that and dedicated it to third party publishing. That's somebody who put their money where their mouth is, covers the spread. Yeah.
00:32:26
Speaker
No, I always, I love walking by their booth at GenCon because there's so much cool stuff sitting there. And one of the things I've always been proud of is when Gallant goes to GenCon, we take up about half to 60% of our booth and the other 40%, 50% is other publishers who might work with us or friends from international places who can't come to GenCon. We'll stock their books for them to make sure they're getting out there and we're talking about them with people. And I've always felt very strongly that
00:32:54
Speaker
gaming should be a more community focused, especially at the level we're operating at, sort of cycle than, you know, a profit driven top down cycle. Totally. And so, well, you've, you've ruined my day because I just picked up some stuff off Goodman site while we were talking.
Goodman Games and Third-Party Support
00:33:14
Speaker
So thank you for that.
00:33:16
Speaker
I'm sure my wife will be thrilled to get another big package at the door. Yeah, Goodman alone was talking about adventure modules. They have some of the most inventive adventure modules in the last 10 years.
00:33:28
Speaker
Some of their stuff is really, really well written. Really, really good. Very interesting and evocative. There's a lot of great funnels for DCC that really showcase what you can do within a venture. And some of them are, and some of them, and I'll be frank, some of them are misses, but they showcase what you can try, right? And that's in and of itself really impressive, right?
00:33:54
Speaker
Sometimes things don't work in RPGs. I've released games where certain things are, you know, looking back bad, I would say bad or garbage, you know, would be maybe the other word I'd use. But, you know, I learned from those, right? I learned what to do, what not to do, how to improve them. And those ideas have reappeared in my later work. And I'm sure you're much the same. Absolutely. I just had to say that that kind of goes for everybody, man. So a lot of us get into this and we're fans or we're, um,
00:34:23
Speaker
You know, we've been reading the books for a long time, but we don't have it down just yet. So it takes a couple projects for us to get the rhythm and get the, get us rolling. Like I look back at some of my earliest stuff, man, I want to just throw it into the river, you know, it just makes me, it makes me almost upset at how, how basic some of it can get. But then I did learn and I did, I did move on and I did go through the process to, to improve.
00:34:49
Speaker
the writing process and the art direction process and everything involved. So. Yeah. So you said at the beginning here that the King Tut's root in Tutin, West, weird, Western extravagan, Bonanza. I feel like the Swedish chef near the end of that there. What's your favorite thing you've written? Yes, sir. I have a lot of thing in writing that. Yeah. Why? Like what makes it your favorite?
00:35:17
Speaker
Well, um, a couple of reasons that the, the, the first one that comes that just jumps to mind is that I was stretching into it. Like I was stretching my, my skills or abilities or my, I was, I was going into a new direction. I had never written anything that was of the Western genre before, much less the weird Western genre. And I'm, I'm such a fan of weird Western in general, because of the comic books that I grew up reading, you know, Jonah hex and a house of mystery and weird Western tale, all this stuff, you know,
00:35:47
Speaker
that I really wanted to go in that direction. I was very fortunate to team up with the artist Ray Frenden. He's just a super skilled, massively talented artist. He did so many great things with the art in that. And he just took it on and said, listen, I'll draw like 95% of this. I had a couple other friends come in, draw a few pieces that they
00:36:13
Speaker
where, you know, they read the descriptions like, oh man, I gotta illustrate this. So just had a lot of really good, I had a good team, it's laid out well, it's illustrated well, and it really gets across that monster kid that's laying down deep inside of me, the kid who grew up reading Fangoria and Star Wars. He's always reading comic books and watching monster movies, and it really gets all that across.
00:36:44
Speaker
Uh, awesome. I mean, I think those are great reasons. Um, and it's, it's great to hear, you know, uh, one that you sort of have that insight into what you're making. Sometimes I can feel like, I don't know, man, I just wrote it. Like, I, some, I don't know. Sometimes I don't have the answer, right? Like, why did you make this? Cause I sat down and this is what came out guys. There's not like some science to it sometimes. No, for sure. And listen, that zine has an adventure where.
00:37:11
Speaker
There is a, you know, you have an adventure where you run across basically Twinkie the Kid in a desolate town on the frontier and you got to duke it out with him and his fruit pie minions. And that's a, you know, if you had told me that I was going to ride a miniature adventure called the town that dreaded cream filling. You've told me that five years ago, I told you that you were insane and that there's no way that was ever going to happen.
00:37:38
Speaker
When I started chugging all this together, that is what came through and came out the other side. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things I always like to ask folks on this podcast is to help us understand kind of where they came from and how they got where they are and where they might be going is, uh, what some of the most influential games on them might be.
Influential Games on Levi
00:37:57
Speaker
So, you know, and I, and I told you, I was going to ask this and you had some answers prepared. So, uh, what, what three games are the most influential on you?
00:38:06
Speaker
Well, one that is probably is on the lips of everybody that comes on the show or at least should be because it's the giant upon which we all kind of stand on its shoulders is Dungeons and Dragons. In particular for me, it was a D&D rather than the basic D&D. I didn't play basic for too long before I got into a D&D. And I played the first and second edition for a really long time. So that was hugely influential on me. Okay.
00:38:33
Speaker
Yeah. And a lot of, and there are a lot of the satellite products for AD&D too, like with role aids and, you know, all this weird little like fantasy hero, you know, that kind of its own system, but really it's just, you know, so there's a lot of that growing up. Okay. Then, then kind of alongside that. And at the time I really didn't know that there was a difference. Not until I really got into the rules of it all and started trying to run games my own, but
00:39:03
Speaker
Dave Hargrave's, uh, Arduin, Arduin grimoire, the Arduin trilogy, all that, all those little Brown books. Which I, I mean, I think they're fantastic. Now you were the first person this season to bring them up. So, I mean, they were, they were kind of like with the, with the group that I started out with, they were just, you know, they were right there alongside the player's handbook and the deities and demigods. They were just another one of the books that came that was in the crate of books that we could all kind of
00:39:31
Speaker
I reach in and grab and read. But the thing that's really special about Arduin, and especially that Hargrave era. Now, listen, when you try to read them now, it's a mess. The typeset is like 8.7, something like that, 7 or 8. They're really, really tiny. It's all typed out. It's full of spelling errors.
00:39:56
Speaker
One minute you're talking about like rules for a class. The next minute you're talking about critical hits, two pages over, there's going to be like five pages on prismatic walls. It's all just. I'd like just a grinder, like just gobbledygook, you know, kind of thrown in. But the thing that sets them apart is that it is so lush and full of ideas and plot hooks and interesting things that you can kind of like, Oh, I can get inspired by that.
00:40:23
Speaker
I could, oh, here's an NPC. I could write a whole adventure around. Like it's full of things like that through all the books that it was invaluable to me just as, uh, on the creative space. So yeah, argument, I have a big debt of gratitude too. Yeah. I mean that, I think there are a lot of, uh, gamers and game designers of a certain era that feel that way about that series in particular. Um, you said three. Yeah. Okay. The third would be, uh, would be the,
00:40:53
Speaker
the game that I'm really playing the most now, which is that Dungeon Crawl Classics. And not just DCC, but like I like Mutant Crawl Classics. I like Weird Frontiers. These are all hacks of the main, you know, Dungeon Crawl Classics engine. And the thing that I like best about Dungeon Crawl Classics is when I play it, I have a nostalgic feeling like I'm playing. It's 1983 again. I've got that red box. I've got
00:41:19
Speaker
the first glimmers of the monster manual and I'm paging through it all again for the first time, the way that they handle magic, the mighty deeds for dwarves and warriors and so on, the luck mechanic, the way that things can go truly sideways in just a blink of an eye, it really reminds me of my favorite games growing up, you know, and as a young man.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yeah, those are my three. DCC, Arduin, and D&D. What's your recommended funnel if people were starting with DCC, if they wanted to get their feet under them? Sailors, for sure. Sailors? Yeah, yeah. It's most definitely the... I think if you're just playing it for the first time, that's really the best introductory adventure. I mean, it gets the whole purpose of the funnel across. It's pretty...
00:42:17
Speaker
Daniel Bishop's Arwich grinder as well, which is in the, I think like crawl issue six. Okay. It's like amongst non DCC enthusiasts. It's not well known, but if you're in the DCC, uh, kind of zeitgeist, you know about it. Like it's like, Oh, yeah, that's a good one. You know? Okay. And there are lots of other adventures that aren't funnels that are great too. Yeah, absolutely.
Recommended Starting Adventure for DCC
00:42:42
Speaker
But a funnel is sort of, at least in my understanding, presented as the classic way to enter the DCNC space, right? Totally. Like the idea of the funnel is sort of their hallmark for session zero. Oh yeah, and you know, if you start out with four characters and one of them survives, there's something
00:43:03
Speaker
that you're carrying into that next game and you're like, hey, this guy survived. He went through the grinder, man. He went through all that trouble and came out the other side of the hero. And so you start out at first level with a little shine on your character. And that's just genius by design. Yeah, it's great. All right. Well, this has been a really fun conversation. And I want to thank you for coming on. And I appreciate it.
00:43:31
Speaker
Yeah, man. I've been wanting to connect for a long time. So I'm glad we got to do this. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big fan of your work and have been for years. So I'm excited to be able to pick your brain and, you know, find out kind of what makes you tick. Yeah. The coin and blood is just, I really, really like those books. They're beautifully illustrated. The rules are so tight and it's just a ton of fun. So they were, they were a lot of fun to write and I think they represent my sort of most
00:43:57
Speaker
I don't wanna say sincere, but my most committed effort in sort of the OSR space, as it were, directly. And I have a fond affection for them. Yeah, dude, those are tight. No, good. My friend, Alex, Black Oath Entertainment keeps telling me I need to do more with it, and I keep telling him I'm out of ideas. That's why I did a rendition with all my ideas in it. Fair enough. But he's hounding me for more, so maybe one day we'll see more.
00:44:26
Speaker
Do you have any questions for me? Oh, only about a billion. Fireweight? No, I mean, I'm just saying now, I guess it'd be really nice to connect with you. I guess I'm a fan of your stuff. And I'm hoping to run into you at a con one of these days. I have sort of reduced my con presence over the years lately. It's been... Well, and you know,
00:44:56
Speaker
Gallant is my full-time job and every week I'm away, I'm spending money traveling to a con or doing something out of con and I either have to be working and selling or I need to be comped to be there because it's just time away from the office where I'm working. And so, yeah, I have unlimited PTO and I control my own schedule, but the drawback is, you know, I'm not making any money if I'm not doing it, right?
00:45:24
Speaker
So I have to be real judicious and unfortunately that has kind of put a cramp on quite a few convention appearances though. I did get invited to one out in Vermont later this year, I think. No, sweet. I don't know if I, I don't remember if I accepted it or not. I'll have to check, but I, I generally don't get out to the East coast very much because it's very far away from Fargo, North Dakota. So.
00:45:54
Speaker
But everything is. All right. Well, Levi, if folks want to support you or find your work or engage with you online, what is the best places for them to do so? So you can find all of my stuff that's in print and the PDFs for the stuff that's not. You can find all of that on Exalted General. They're really good about getting this stuff out fast. You can have bundles all the time, deals, summer sale, all kinds of stuff. If you want to find me on social media, I'm on Facebook at Planet X Games.
00:46:24
Speaker
I'm on Twitter at Planet X Games Co, like CO on the end of that. Not hard to find. And then on Instagram at, it came from beyond Planet X. So where I talk about not just games, but all kinds of movies and, you know, comics and horror and sci-fi and all kinds of groovy nerd, nerd geekery. So. Awesome. Well, again, thank you so much for coming on. It's been great to have you and I really appreciate you making the time.
00:46:53
Speaker
Yeah, dude, this is a good hang. It absolutely was. Folks, I'm Alan Barr and this has been Radio Free RPG.