Best-Selling, Award-Winning, Tabletop Game Designer & Poet, "Retired"
The Children of the Elder Sign sourcebookmark for the Bookmark No HP RPG is now live on DriveThruRPG!
The print-and-play PDF contains four pages to choose from: bookmark format in full color or printer-friendly black-and-white, and the same options for playing card format.
Physical bookmark and playing card versions are in production.
(It’s also part of the Compleat Bookmark No HP RPG PDFs bundle at a 50% discount!)
As you may recall, as part of Kickstarter’s “Witchstarter” promotion last October, I launched a role-playing game project titled Children of the Elder Sign.* It’s been a bucket-list idea for more years than I can remember, and this seemed a perfect motivation to tackle it at last.
The idea is basically “What if Hercules, et al., were offspring of Lovecraft’s pantheon instead of the Greek/Roman gods?”
Wilbur Whately is an example from Lovecraft’s fiction, of course. (See “The Dunwich Horror.”) And as the villain of the tale, he has a nefarious goal.
But what if he were recast as the protagonist? Better yet, what if his goal were merely to survive? What would it be like to be a half-monstrous character trying to hide in human society, similarly to My Favorite Martian, Resident Alien, etc.? Or ever on the run ala The Incredible Hulk, The Fugitive, or Poker Face?
(And how is it I just now noticed that Bill Bixby starred in two of those things?)
Further, what if instead of designing the setting for only one of my role-playing game lines, I did it for all four?
I’ve read all of Lovecraft’s fiction and poetry a couple of times over the years, so I set about first working on a D6xD6 setting chapter as a way to summarize it, with plans for full Bookmark No HP, d4ce, and D13 RPG versions by October 2026.
As I recall, there’s a bit in Samurai Cat where he finds the Necronomicon and starts reading it, and its curse won’t let him stop. Page after page he reads, with always another page to turn, until the book grows so heavy that it slips out of his grasp and breaks the spell. Writing the D6xD6 chapter has been something like that. The more I revisited the source material, the more I discovered I had forgotten, and I even stumbled upon public-domain stories in the mythos by 11 other authors concurrent with him or just after, and five preceding him.
I had hoped to finish that D6xD6 draft in February, then boil it down to Bookmark No HP RPG size. But come May, with the D6xD6 draft still growing, I decided that if I wanted to get something to my Kickstarter backers anytime soon, I’d better turn to the Bookmark No HP version first.
Fitting a setting within bookmark format is always a fascinating challenge! It’s like writing a formalist sonnet. Or a magic spell. There has to be something of real substance, but based upon dependable mechanics. Otherwise the sonnet, magic, or game just fizzles. And there are lots of “rules lite” games out there that fall limp, like trying to kick a field goal with a deflated football.
Yesterday, after two months of play-testing, revising, editing, and layout, I posted the print-and-play BNHP version to my backers. I’ll get it up on DriveThruRPG eventually, but if you’d like it on the cheap, along with hefty discounts on related stuff … *
*The Kickstarter is still accepting late pledges; here’s the link.
“Everybody feels that way sometimes,” they say. “Everything’s a spectrum, and everybody’s on it.”
Tell that to the seven-foot-tall woman and the two-foot-tall man.
Yes, there is a range of people between those record-holders and the average 5′ 8″ for men, and the average 5′ 3” for women. Just as there is a range from the average IQ of 100 to YoungHoon Kim’s 276. But to call those ranges “spectrums” is to paltrify the social challenges unique to those outliers. At some point the term “unusual” has to be acknowledged, along with associated difficulties and inconveniences.
The same can be said for autism and ADHD.
Speaking of which, last fall I posted about an initial diagnosis of “too old, successful, and respected by your peers to have autism or ADHD” (Good Enough, Close Enough Isn’t), and the challenges of caring deeply in a compromising world. There’s only so much that behavioral therapy—the only therapy available within our insurance network—can do for someone who perceives the world much differently than his neighbors.
So last month I bypassed those geographical limits, researched adult autism professionals within the US, and had an evaluation at my own expense. “We don’t guarantee a diagnosis as autistic,” they said. “Good,” I thought.
Let me compare the two evaluations, the “too old and successful” clinical psychologist, versus the “we don’t guarantee” one.
The first had me fill out two questionnaires and my wife fill out another, then spent a half an hour interviewing me, followed by another half hour a week later, in which he gave a short oral summary: “You have lots of markers, but I see children who can’t even speak, and others who literally can’t sit still.” He ended with an off-hand comment that he hadn’t even heard of “masking” until two weeks prior. A term I hadn’t at all mentioned.
The second also had me fill out a pair of questionnaires and my wife fill out another. Then she held two one-hour interviews, followed by another hour a week later, in which she walked me through the DSM-5 criteria, point by point. The adult autism diagnosis was undeniable. I’m reevaluating my history of outsidership and rootless shame from that perspective and it fits. It doesn’t fix things, but it lets me let myself off the hook for some and have a better idea of moving forward. And there are support groups and therapy available.
Why bother telling you all of this? Because I’m 70, I come from a time when such things weren’t discussed, and I’ve stubborned my way through a life with too much unnecessary misery.
Maybe you’re stubborning your own way through your own misery. If so, there’s no shame in self-discovery and therapy. And chances are that your example will lead other people in your circle to shed the stigma and find some answers of their own.