Things are in the home stretch. I've said much of this before, but I don't want anyone to be surprised by what I'm doing so I want to sum up again. Feel free to skip it if you've heard it already. Or, if you're a masochist, read on!
I've held back most of the Grindhouse Edition material that I expect to be controversial from blog previews. I believe that the early buyers should get to see some things that nobody has yet seen - and I don't want to sell the game on the grotesque. That's part of the package and I want people to be aware but it's not what I want to use to lure people in.
(and with the new webstore's PDF-downloading capacity, it will come instantly. When pre-orders go up, you'll need to wait for the books to come back from the printer before going in the mail but you'll get to see everything right away in electronic format)
The thing's going to have an 18+ warning on it and with it clearly being intended for adults, a lot of the problems disappear. Violence in a role-playing game is a given. Adults complaining about nudity in products for adults are silly. It's a fantasy and a horror game so bizarre and disturbing images are to be expected. So I feel comfortable with most of the stuff to be presented. A bit wicked, a bit naughty, but in the end it's all there to hopefully pass on the joy of vicarious wonder and fear.
And I don't think "vicarious" needs to mean half-assed or with a wink and a smile.
Think about A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was just 12 or 13 when I saw that movie. The scene where Tina is dragged up the walls and slashed to pieces is and was fucked up and it scared the shit out of me.
The scene where she later appears to Nancy in the school hallway in a bodybag? Literally nightmare fuel. But it not only scared the crap out of me, it had me waiting in real anticipation for the sequel because I wanted to feel that way again!
And then a little later came A Nightmare on Elm Street Part III. Even if it wasn't as hardcore a horror film, the building of the mythology was (remember, Freddy was conceived when a nun was locked in a mental asylum and gang-raped, grew up to become a child-killer and was murdered by Main Street USA parents in a vigilante lynching). Add the whole 80s D&D thing where the adults don't trust that the kids know the difference between fantasy and reality (there's even a role-playing game in the movie! Stupid wizard should know not to engage in melee combat!) and experimental drugs and combat happening in two realities at once (John Saxon & Craig Wasson vs stop-motion animation skeleton!) and Nancy falling through the chair was the most awesome thing since awesome was invented (little things count!).
But it had that suspense and the horror in the sense that things were going to hell and people were going to die in unexpected and creative ways... but it was an adventure!
"You stupid bitch! You're killing us!"
"Let's go kick the motherfucker's ass all over dreamland!"
My horror fandom goes deeper and nastier - there's the beautiful butchery found in Argento's work (not so much represented in the Grindhouse edition but there in bits and bobs - when I go Argento you'll know it), the horrid, savage barbarity of Fulci films (it's there), the underground feel of Herschell Gordon Lewis, the wet comedies of Peter Jackson (Bad Taste! Brain Damage!) and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead II, Drag Me to Hell), George Romero and the zombie apocalypse... and exploding head cinema!
It also goes more respectable - the Hammer movies that didn't have so much of the blood but had all the atmosphere and even a touch of class.
... you didn't think I was calling this the Grindhouse Edition because of the Tarentino/Rodriguez project, did you?
I also love heavy metal and its imagery and lyrics. I got into it seriously with the 90s death metal explosion - the lyrics of bands like Carcass and Deicide and Entombed and a hundred more a seared into my brain. Then there's the books and authors. Lovecraft, Barker, Howard, Leiber and the rest, presenting amoral stories depicting gruesome death and sketchy characters, often written by men with serious character flaws of their own.
I've previously told of the story of having the Monster Manual at age 9, scared to let my mother see the inside for fear that all the boobies would cause her to take it away from me. I was also scared to read it at night because of all the creepy undead, but was always poring over it by daylight.
What I release should reflect what I love. A celebration of the macabre that has enriched my imagination. But it should also address what I don't love and how that relates to what I do love.
I also remember the 80s witch hunts. So many people have problems with make-believe. How many horror movies have been censored to get an R rating? (or further, to PG-13, for marketing reasons)? How ridiculous is that? Especially the teenage chop-em-ups, written about and for teenagers. This continues to this day - take a search around the net for the Hatchet 2 fiasco. There's the PMRC for music, and BADD for our very own hobby. And it never ends - remember the Carcosa fiasco (It's fine that some didn't like it - it was the calls for McKinney's head that drove me to rage, but as these things often do, it caused me to inspect Carcosa more closely, and a few years later I'm going to invest 5 figures in releasing McKinney's books.)?
This isn't corporate lowest-common-denominator stuff, this gaming thing is my prime creative outlet. My work needs to make my stance on this shit clear, you know? The first time around, there was some of that - the cover was a statement to that effect, and some of the stuff inside as well. But that's old news now, and it needs to be reaffirmed. In the grand scheme of things, I know I live a small, unimportant life and when I die nobody's going to give a shit, except my wife if I'm lucky. That's the life I've chosen; if I wanted different, I'd live differently. So sometimes my ideals about bigger, important things are going to come out in the efforts I focus my life on, meaningless to the world at large they may be.
Thing is, I'm not expecting any problems anywhere but in the USA. Hell, in Finland last night there were three full-on horror movies on free TV on different channels beginning anywhere from 9pm to 10:35pm: Scream (what a messed up movie - show graphic murder with the blood and guts... but hide the nudity!), The Ring (US crap version), and My Best Friend's Wedding. And they were all uncut - every swear, every death, everything, all there. Hell, I saw Argento's Inferno for the first time on Finnish broadcast TV a few years back - uncut. My first visit to Finland was an eye-opener: An uncut prime-time showing of The Jackal, with tons of gunfire and death and I think Jack Black getting his arm blown off.
(I haven't been back in five years - is rampant even-worse-than-the-MPAA censorship still happening on US broadcast TV?)
(fun Finland fact: Little House on the Prairie DVDs carry an 18 rating here because the company that released them didn't want to pay the ratings board to rate them. Can you imagine IP holders of family entertainment in the US having so little respect for ratings that slapping an NC-17 on it is considered the easiest thing to do?)
So I will fly the flag proudly for both my Grindhouse Edition and the sources that influenced its final appearance and some of its content. This post up to this point is a celebration of great things, not an excuse for including unseemly elements.
However.
There are three things within this edition which I don't think are covered by that background. And I think I need to let you know about them and offer my excuses.
The Grindhouse Edition is very, very white. On purpose, conscious decision. See, I decided to go for a north/west historical European flavor in the artwork, to the point of using Osprey Books illustrations as references for artists. There are exactly two illustrations with non-white ethnicities in them - the gaming group pic that was in the Deluxe Edition and a "The English meet American Natives" pic that will be in the campaign worldbuilding advice section in the Ref book. Remember that Iri-Khan is not really Asian, he just dresses that way.
It is precisely that wish for a historical feel that cemented the decision. The artwork has a lot of bad things happening to a lot of people. I wanted a late 1500s/early 1600s vibe off the thing. That era was vicious. Religious wars between western Europeans, the English thought the Scottish and Irish were different races, just general insanity all around my "target area." One of the pics is a very clear depiction of the kind of sectarian religious violence common in that era.
Say I decided to put some black characters in this mix - what would those illustrations involve if they remain consistent with the others? I'm not going there. Not here anyway, not unless there's greater commentary or context. The US slave trade started in this timeframe but no way was I going to put a slave train illustration or something near the "Slave" retainer entry. To use a black guy in another context without acknowledging any of that, well, then it would just be a "token" character, put in specifically to fill some sort of diversity quota and that's no good either.
In the end, I could have waived my hand and decided in a game that shows a dwarf, a halfling, and two pics with elves, there could have been a bit more non-white faces without the historical baggage attached to it. I just decided not to.
The Duel ends with a Dead Woman. Violence is everywhere in RPGs, and the Grindhouse Edition gets some of its horror by showing some of that violence in a more harsh light than lighter RPGs. I like having a lot of women in the pics as adventurers (ahistorical, but in the early part of this period women dominated the English throne, adventurers are outlaws anyway so what the hell, and Joan of Arc was old news by then, and ya know...). And in the illustrations for my game, adventuring is not a safe profession. So there are dead women here and there in the pics, and I don't consider that a bad or misogynistic thing. You play you pay.
But the duel, a pic in the Deluxe Edition expanded to a 7-piece sequence, ends the way it does because she's a woman, specifically because I was pissy about feminist blogs. I had already commissioned things like the Rules cover and a bunch of other stuff with strong adventuring women and I found myself worried that I didn't have an equal enough ratio of men-to-women adventurers or cocks-to-cunts (or pricks-to-pussies if you like softer language) and I caught myself doing it and got pissed and this is the result. That's not a good reason to do something like that, but it's the honest one. And thing is, the actual death-blow is not the brutal pic in the sequence - it's the guy tugging his sword back out of her head that struck me as just wrong. Amos nailed that one dead on.
Vince Locke. Known to me for his work for Cannibal Corpse... OK, let me show these to you so you get where I'm coming from. Click to enlarge.
This guy's work really left a mark on me, and I wanted that for my release. "Get me arrested" was what I told him when I hired him, but I sabotaged that by also insisting that the pic had to reflect a scene that could happen during a game. That greatly affected the composition, colors, everything. Instead of being a grand celebration with everything that could be absolutely wrong with an image, it was "reduced" to being a very grotesque depiction of dungeon delving gone horribly, horribly wrong. Which was not a mistake as I don't want it to look out of place with the rest of the art! Why this picture is completely out of line and purely the result of taking glee in the distress of others (in a real-life sense, not within the fiction) maybe won't be obvious until you look closer at it, but once seen, it can't be unseen.
So that's about all. I had a good excuse to get a bunch of horror pics together, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. :D
Oh, and for anyone who thinks this is a new thing for me:
I've held back most of the Grindhouse Edition material that I expect to be controversial from blog previews. I believe that the early buyers should get to see some things that nobody has yet seen - and I don't want to sell the game on the grotesque. That's part of the package and I want people to be aware but it's not what I want to use to lure people in.
(and with the new webstore's PDF-downloading capacity, it will come instantly. When pre-orders go up, you'll need to wait for the books to come back from the printer before going in the mail but you'll get to see everything right away in electronic format)
The thing's going to have an 18+ warning on it and with it clearly being intended for adults, a lot of the problems disappear. Violence in a role-playing game is a given. Adults complaining about nudity in products for adults are silly. It's a fantasy and a horror game so bizarre and disturbing images are to be expected. So I feel comfortable with most of the stuff to be presented. A bit wicked, a bit naughty, but in the end it's all there to hopefully pass on the joy of vicarious wonder and fear.
And I don't think "vicarious" needs to mean half-assed or with a wink and a smile.
Think about A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was just 12 or 13 when I saw that movie. The scene where Tina is dragged up the walls and slashed to pieces is and was fucked up and it scared the shit out of me.
The scene where she later appears to Nancy in the school hallway in a bodybag? Literally nightmare fuel. But it not only scared the crap out of me, it had me waiting in real anticipation for the sequel because I wanted to feel that way again!
And then a little later came A Nightmare on Elm Street Part III. Even if it wasn't as hardcore a horror film, the building of the mythology was (remember, Freddy was conceived when a nun was locked in a mental asylum and gang-raped, grew up to become a child-killer and was murdered by Main Street USA parents in a vigilante lynching). Add the whole 80s D&D thing where the adults don't trust that the kids know the difference between fantasy and reality (there's even a role-playing game in the movie! Stupid wizard should know not to engage in melee combat!) and experimental drugs and combat happening in two realities at once (John Saxon & Craig Wasson vs stop-motion animation skeleton!) and Nancy falling through the chair was the most awesome thing since awesome was invented (little things count!).
But it had that suspense and the horror in the sense that things were going to hell and people were going to die in unexpected and creative ways... but it was an adventure!
"You stupid bitch! You're killing us!"
"Let's go kick the motherfucker's ass all over dreamland!"
My horror fandom goes deeper and nastier - there's the beautiful butchery found in Argento's work (not so much represented in the Grindhouse edition but there in bits and bobs - when I go Argento you'll know it), the horrid, savage barbarity of Fulci films (it's there), the underground feel of Herschell Gordon Lewis, the wet comedies of Peter Jackson (Bad Taste! Brain Damage!) and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead II, Drag Me to Hell), George Romero and the zombie apocalypse... and exploding head cinema!
It also goes more respectable - the Hammer movies that didn't have so much of the blood but had all the atmosphere and even a touch of class.
... you didn't think I was calling this the Grindhouse Edition because of the Tarentino/Rodriguez project, did you?
I also love heavy metal and its imagery and lyrics. I got into it seriously with the 90s death metal explosion - the lyrics of bands like Carcass and Deicide and Entombed and a hundred more a seared into my brain. Then there's the books and authors. Lovecraft, Barker, Howard, Leiber and the rest, presenting amoral stories depicting gruesome death and sketchy characters, often written by men with serious character flaws of their own.
I've previously told of the story of having the Monster Manual at age 9, scared to let my mother see the inside for fear that all the boobies would cause her to take it away from me. I was also scared to read it at night because of all the creepy undead, but was always poring over it by daylight.
What I release should reflect what I love. A celebration of the macabre that has enriched my imagination. But it should also address what I don't love and how that relates to what I do love.
I also remember the 80s witch hunts. So many people have problems with make-believe. How many horror movies have been censored to get an R rating? (or further, to PG-13, for marketing reasons)? How ridiculous is that? Especially the teenage chop-em-ups, written about and for teenagers. This continues to this day - take a search around the net for the Hatchet 2 fiasco. There's the PMRC for music, and BADD for our very own hobby. And it never ends - remember the Carcosa fiasco (It's fine that some didn't like it - it was the calls for McKinney's head that drove me to rage, but as these things often do, it caused me to inspect Carcosa more closely, and a few years later I'm going to invest 5 figures in releasing McKinney's books.)?
This isn't corporate lowest-common-denominator stuff, this gaming thing is my prime creative outlet. My work needs to make my stance on this shit clear, you know? The first time around, there was some of that - the cover was a statement to that effect, and some of the stuff inside as well. But that's old news now, and it needs to be reaffirmed. In the grand scheme of things, I know I live a small, unimportant life and when I die nobody's going to give a shit, except my wife if I'm lucky. That's the life I've chosen; if I wanted different, I'd live differently. So sometimes my ideals about bigger, important things are going to come out in the efforts I focus my life on, meaningless to the world at large they may be.
Thing is, I'm not expecting any problems anywhere but in the USA. Hell, in Finland last night there were three full-on horror movies on free TV on different channels beginning anywhere from 9pm to 10:35pm: Scream (what a messed up movie - show graphic murder with the blood and guts... but hide the nudity!), The Ring (US crap version), and My Best Friend's Wedding. And they were all uncut - every swear, every death, everything, all there. Hell, I saw Argento's Inferno for the first time on Finnish broadcast TV a few years back - uncut. My first visit to Finland was an eye-opener: An uncut prime-time showing of The Jackal, with tons of gunfire and death and I think Jack Black getting his arm blown off.
(I haven't been back in five years - is rampant even-worse-than-the-MPAA censorship still happening on US broadcast TV?)
(fun Finland fact: Little House on the Prairie DVDs carry an 18 rating here because the company that released them didn't want to pay the ratings board to rate them. Can you imagine IP holders of family entertainment in the US having so little respect for ratings that slapping an NC-17 on it is considered the easiest thing to do?)
So I will fly the flag proudly for both my Grindhouse Edition and the sources that influenced its final appearance and some of its content. This post up to this point is a celebration of great things, not an excuse for including unseemly elements.
However.
There are three things within this edition which I don't think are covered by that background. And I think I need to let you know about them and offer my excuses.
The Grindhouse Edition is very, very white. On purpose, conscious decision. See, I decided to go for a north/west historical European flavor in the artwork, to the point of using Osprey Books illustrations as references for artists. There are exactly two illustrations with non-white ethnicities in them - the gaming group pic that was in the Deluxe Edition and a "The English meet American Natives" pic that will be in the campaign worldbuilding advice section in the Ref book. Remember that Iri-Khan is not really Asian, he just dresses that way.
It is precisely that wish for a historical feel that cemented the decision. The artwork has a lot of bad things happening to a lot of people. I wanted a late 1500s/early 1600s vibe off the thing. That era was vicious. Religious wars between western Europeans, the English thought the Scottish and Irish were different races, just general insanity all around my "target area." One of the pics is a very clear depiction of the kind of sectarian religious violence common in that era.
Say I decided to put some black characters in this mix - what would those illustrations involve if they remain consistent with the others? I'm not going there. Not here anyway, not unless there's greater commentary or context. The US slave trade started in this timeframe but no way was I going to put a slave train illustration or something near the "Slave" retainer entry. To use a black guy in another context without acknowledging any of that, well, then it would just be a "token" character, put in specifically to fill some sort of diversity quota and that's no good either.
In the end, I could have waived my hand and decided in a game that shows a dwarf, a halfling, and two pics with elves, there could have been a bit more non-white faces without the historical baggage attached to it. I just decided not to.
The Duel ends with a Dead Woman. Violence is everywhere in RPGs, and the Grindhouse Edition gets some of its horror by showing some of that violence in a more harsh light than lighter RPGs. I like having a lot of women in the pics as adventurers (ahistorical, but in the early part of this period women dominated the English throne, adventurers are outlaws anyway so what the hell, and Joan of Arc was old news by then, and ya know...). And in the illustrations for my game, adventuring is not a safe profession. So there are dead women here and there in the pics, and I don't consider that a bad or misogynistic thing. You play you pay.
But the duel, a pic in the Deluxe Edition expanded to a 7-piece sequence, ends the way it does because she's a woman, specifically because I was pissy about feminist blogs. I had already commissioned things like the Rules cover and a bunch of other stuff with strong adventuring women and I found myself worried that I didn't have an equal enough ratio of men-to-women adventurers or cocks-to-cunts (or pricks-to-pussies if you like softer language) and I caught myself doing it and got pissed and this is the result. That's not a good reason to do something like that, but it's the honest one. And thing is, the actual death-blow is not the brutal pic in the sequence - it's the guy tugging his sword back out of her head that struck me as just wrong. Amos nailed that one dead on.
Vince Locke. Known to me for his work for Cannibal Corpse... OK, let me show these to you so you get where I'm coming from. Click to enlarge.
This guy's work really left a mark on me, and I wanted that for my release. "Get me arrested" was what I told him when I hired him, but I sabotaged that by also insisting that the pic had to reflect a scene that could happen during a game. That greatly affected the composition, colors, everything. Instead of being a grand celebration with everything that could be absolutely wrong with an image, it was "reduced" to being a very grotesque depiction of dungeon delving gone horribly, horribly wrong. Which was not a mistake as I don't want it to look out of place with the rest of the art! Why this picture is completely out of line and purely the result of taking glee in the distress of others (in a real-life sense, not within the fiction) maybe won't be obvious until you look closer at it, but once seen, it can't be unseen.
So that's about all. I had a good excuse to get a bunch of horror pics together, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. :D
Oh, and for anyone who thinks this is a new thing for me:
