Burn, Baby, Burn
So there I was. Almost two hundred fifty pages of roleplaying game out the window. More than a year's worth of planning, drafting, and revising kaput. And only six months to build something new from the ground up.
What could I say, but: Dy-no-mite! Sure, a lot of work had to be trashed, but I knew that a much stronger game was hiding between the lines of my first draft. Coaxing it out would be a blast.
Fortunately, I realized I could salvage a lot more than I expected. In the original draft, most of the bad guys had started putting their hooks into human society in the 1970s, and were largely in charge of the world by the time the players came on the scene thirty years later. So it would be easy enough to retrofit the villains for the new version—the players would simply be dealing with them at the start of their plans instead of the finish. But first I had to decide on a tone.
As I mentioned in the previous journal entry, the first version of the game tried for a balance between the Foxy New World style of Logan's Run and the seamier, almost noir, approach of Rollerball. For instance, the population at large was supposed to be just as narcotized and blank-eyed as the drones in Logan's Run—tunics, jewels, Orgasmatrons, the whole bit. The players, on the other hand, had been radicalized by some event in their past and were now as fierce and focused as James Caan. The idea of dropping Cleopatra Jones and Popeye Doyle into the middle of a naïf utopia was funny at first but just didn't work in practice. The new setting gave the heroes a much more natural context.
Still, placing the game in the 1970s had its risks. Namely, camp. Even those of us of a certain age tend to remember the decade in terms of its goofy artifacts and attitudes—the high-pimp wardrobe, aggressively mellow music, and big-mustached libertinism; all the stuff that gets played up in Starsky & Hutch remakes. I didn't want to ditch the kitsch entirely (I wasn't writing An Unmarried Woman: The Role-Playing Game, after all), but I wanted to get across just how terrifying and strange a time it actually was. The trappings could be funny, but the menace had to be genuine.
Think about it. Millions of people were being massacred, or forced into exile, in purges and proxy wars. Some of the best minds of the time thought the world's population was growing too fast, the environment was poisoned beyond repair and our resources were dwindling to a trickle. In the U.S., the biggest cities were bankrupt and crime-ridden, gas lines stretched for miles, and society seemed ready to fissure on a thousand issues, from Nixon v. McGovern to Roe v. Wade.
For a microcosm, look at pop culture, which spent the decade leading us through an eschatological freak show. Along with the sci-fi flicks that inspired this game, creative types were turning their attention to goofball mysticism (Nostradamus! The Crystal Skull! Atlantis!), religious curios (The Shroud of Turin! Noah's Ark!), and the apocalypse of the week (Meteor strikes! Roving glaciers! Killer bees!).
In short, it felt like something very big had gone very wrong. As the novelist Walker Percy put it at the time:
Undoubtedly something is about to happen.
Or is it that something has stopped happening?
Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who had blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
That was the seventies I wanted people to remember.
There's Got to Be a Morning After
Todd, my editor, helped give all of those ideas a much firmer structure. First, he said, we needed a starting point. In the original draft, the turmoil of the sixties just got worse and worse until people handed the keys to the corporate bosses. Todd thought there had to be a single dramatic event that conclusively split the game world's time line from our own. Then, for instance, all of the bad guys' origin stories could trace back to the same moment, simplifying things considerably.
I combed through the original draft and found a Big Secret that would serve perfectly as the opening salvo. And the date was an easy choice—August 9th, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned and unofficially shut the books on the 1960s. (As a colleague once said, "I can't believe it's not a national holiday.")
As the story goes, the game world's history roughly paralleled our own until that fateful day. Then things took a sharp turn. Just as the president was about to resign, an earthquake of incalculable strength struck the West Coast, rending the edge of the continent and sending it into the ocean. The aftershocks hurled tidal waves thousands of miles to the west, swallowing archipelagoes and swamping coastlines. Seconds later, scientists picked up huge spikes in the ambient temperature world-wide. Within hours, the polar ice caps began to shear apart and the oceans rose. This played havoc with weather systems, plunging tropical areas into permanent monsoon seasons and reducing huge swaths of northern farmland to dust.
The players enter the picture two years later—and things have gone far downhill in the meantime. Three enemy empires have gobbled up most of the free world, and they're hungry for more. Inexplicable creatures have woken in the wild corners of the world: prehistoric ape-men, fearsome sea beasts, deranged UFO pilots, demons from the depths of history. The much-hated president is still in office—in fact, he's running for a third term, and in the process reopening the wounds of the previous decade. Meanwhile, after seeing millions of deaths and untold devastation, society has sunk into a deep funk, with people losing themselves in drugs, blood sports, and latter-day mystery religions.
All of which leaves some big mysteries to solve. What caused the cataclysm in the first place? Who's taking advantage of it? And how much time do the players have to find out?
Todd had definite opinions on that last one. To ratchet up the tension, he thought, the game should have a doomsday clock ticking in the background. If the players didn't act, the Earth would be destroyed on such-and-such date. This was another easy choice: the stroke of midnight on December 31st, 1979. The end of the damnation decade.
To make the apocalyptic countdown work, the structure of the game had to change. The first draft had been a very traditional world book: a history of the setting, a guide to everyday life (Where do I get my shirts? What do they call money here? Are we at war with East Asia?), and a bunch of monsters and malefactors with big secrets. The unwritten idea behind the book was equally traditional. The GM would mine the source material for ideas, and then take her campaign wherever she wanted. Ultimately, the players were looking to overthrow the big bad corporate bosses, but that goal was something like toppling the Outer Gods in Call of Cthulhu. Great if you can manage it, but in the meantime just run around bumping off the middlemen.
The final version of the game still works as a traditional campaign setting—but it also lays out the groundwork for an entire campaign. Just to be clear, there are no fixed events or encounters that you have to roleplay, and there's no set order in which things have to happen. But the game gives you all the tools you need to take the disparate villains and weave them into one big storyline.
At the very start of the book, for instance, the players get their motivation for joining the fight to save the world, as well as a reason for sticking together as a team. A long-dead mystic named Abednego Trestle, whose doom-and-gloom predictions have turned out to be uncomfortably accurate lately, has seen terrible things looming on December 31st, 1979. A host of otherworldly powers are gearing up their plans, all of which will culminate at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve—and end life as we know it. Fortuitously enough, his writings also describe a team of heroes who might—just might!—stop the malefactors and send them howling back to the abyss.
Then, in the GM's section of the book, each faction of bad guys gets a much more extensive write-up than usual. Along with the crunch, the villains get a detailed back story, explaining how they fit into the broader game world, how their plans were set in motion by the events of August 9th, and where those dark designs stand right now. After that comes a number of adventure hooks for bringing the bad guys into your campaign, and an "endgame" section that describes numerous ways the players can wreck the villains' designs and stop the doomsday clock (at least temporarily—there are always more bad guys to fight!).
Just to be perfectly clear once again: There is no pre-fashioned storyline here, as in a traditional module. All we're supplying is extensive suggestions for how to set up each villain's "arc," from their introduction, to what evil schemes they implement, to their eventual downfall. Indeed, if you wanted, you could even ditch the doomsday clock, and just pluck out monsters and plotlines as you see fit. The game works just fine as a backdrop for one-shots or short-term campaigns. Likewise, the players don't necessarily have to be fighting to beat back Trestle's prophecy. They could simply be, say, a group of tourists who crash-landed in Sasquatch country and have to fight their way back to civilization.
In the Desert, You Can Remember Your Name
The last big decision I had to make about the descriptive side of the book (or the "fluff," for all you cynics out there) was the names. In the first draft, all of the big landmarks in the country had been renamed, to show just how much the nation had changed under the corporate overlords. Overseas, most of the world had gotten the same treatment from three enemy superpowers: the collectivist empires of the Bloc and Sphere, and the oil-dealing Consortium.
When I took the game back to the 1970s, I decided to stick with the made-up designations. The U.S.A. became Americo; Europe was Esperanto; the Middle East, Maddamar. Likewise, all the major figures on the world stage got new handles. Richard Nixon slithered into the role of Stanton Spobeck, Mao Tse-Tung morphed into Dao Hong. Even good old Leonard Nimoy got a facelift and became Herman Purvis, host of TV's Beyond the Barrier.
Obviously, this gives the players a bit of a learning curve. (As my Freeport co-writer Bill Simoni keeps quipping, "What's Nixon's name again?") So why do it?
First, the game world isn't precisely our world with supernatural stuff layered on top. In a lot of areas, I painted with a very broad brush to make the conflicts as big and bold as possible. Some seventies notables ended up as icons of apocalyptic evil, whether they deserved a wholehearted tarring or not. It would feel strange, if not downright libelous, to use their real names.
On top of that, I condensed or outright eliminated lots of people, places, and events to keep the game coherent and playable (not to mention bringing it in under seventy zillion words). Take Fedo Malese, a key villain in the game. Malese, a messianic strongman, has overthrown a kingdom in Maddamar, grabbed the reins of the Consortium oil empire and turned it into a quasi-mystical political confederation. Certainly, there's a bit of Qadaffi in him, with a good measure of Khomeni. But he doesn't exactly parallel any actual historical figure, and it would take some serious contortions to get a real-life person to fit the role. "Maybe Qadaffi signed a secret treaty with such-and-such, who let him pass through his territory, and then so-and-so back-stabbed what's-his-name and so on and so on."
You get the idea. Believe me, you'd want to read that even less than I'd want to write it. And there are countless other cases in the book where the same holds true—from the secret history of President Spobeck to the secret plans of collectivist dictator Gogol Yobar. (For that matter, the made-up version of OPEC only has members in the Middle East—another simplifying step that's not historically accurate.)
My guide in all this was the geography of Warhammer. It's obviously modeled on Europe, as you can tell from a glance at the map, but there are enough changes to make it tricky for a newcomer. Once you start playing, though, you forget about everything you "have to learn" and get caught up in the adventure. Then, as the sessions go on, you pick up the details you need without realizing it. Before you know it, you're calling Italy "Tillea" in mixed company.
In short, you don't need to know every single new person and place to play Damnation Decade. Just start adventuring, and the small points will take care of themselves.
In the next installment, we get down to the nuts and bolts: an overview of what the new rules have to offer.
In the meantime, to give you a taste of the world, here's the game's glossary. (The rulebook also includes a travel brochure that takes you around the world and introduces you to some of the big-name locations.)
Who's Who
Aboriginal Nations: The first inhabitants of Americo. After August 9th, 1974, facing endless sieges by nocturnal horrors, they abandoned their government reservations and moved into Howe's Chasm, a vast canyon in the Southwest.
Agaland: An island nation near the South Pole and former colony of Hardcastle. Agaland lost touch with the outside world after the disasters of August 9th, 1974, and by now has largely descended into savagery.
Ahitken I: A god-emperor of ancient Taza. An exhibition of treasures from his burial obelisk is currently touring Americo to great acclaim.
Alamo: A prosperous Southwestern state and oil-industry capital that "went dark" on August 9th, 1974, cutting off all communications and traffic with the outside world. Currently, president Stanton Spobeck has imposed martial law there and cordoned off its borders.
Aleph: A small nation in the vast desert region of Maddamar. Its people have a tangled cultural and religious history with the other nations in the region. Aleph's capital is Tasmadar, an ancient city with profound spiritual importance to many factions of Old God worshippers.
Americo: Your home base. A troubled but still powerful republic in the Western hemisphere. To the north is the nation of Standard, now reduced to a vast post-Arctic marshland; to the south, Suramerico.
Arcitan: A tiny Southern Esperantan city-state that is home to the Earthly Father, spiritual leader of a huge faction of Old God worshippers.
Arpad: The first nation to fall to the Bloc after the great war against the fascists three decades ago. Known for its spices and crafty inhabitants.
Bando, Mackey: Captain of the championship Fun City Skyliners Omegaball team. A swaggering sensualist.
Barrier Mountains: The huge chain that divides the continent of Americo.
Basta: A collectivist island off the southeastern coast of Americo. Lost to tidal waves and rising oceans on August 9th, 1974.
Bedfellows: The notorious men's magazine founded by Humboldt Suede. Its icon is the Bedfellow of the Month; its slogan, "Up for Anything!"
Biscuit, Quantrill: The major-party challenger to Stanton Spobeck in the presidential race. A soft-spoken, Old-God-fearing man, he is the governor of the prosperous Southern state of Dixon.
Blatt, Mandrake: A Middle Western senator and Quantrill Biscuit's running mate.
Bloc: A collectivist empire centered on the eastern Esperantan nation of Kronstadt. Its ruler is a strongman named Gogol Yobar. On August 9th, 1974, the Bloc undertook a massive invasion of its neighbors in Esperanto and Sina, and has even greater ambitions.
BootyDome: A chain of towering, terraced dancehalls operated by the Sound & Vision Corporation. The most famous outlet: the trés chic BootyDome 57 in Fun City.
Cartagh: Capital of the Consortium. An ancient desert city the northern shores of Swelt.
Consortium: A league of oil-producing nations in the vast desert region of Maddamar. On August 9th, 1974, a revolutionary strongman named Fedo Malese took control of the group and turned it into a political empire as well as a commercial one.
Council of Nations: A diplomatic collective, based in Fun City, dedicated to maintaining world order.
Cozy Cola: A tremendously popular soft drink. Get that Cozy feeling—today!
Custer, Bunkham: Shipping magnate and owner of the champion Fun City Skyliners Omegaball squad.
Daijong: A stubbornly independent nation that was overrun by the Sphere after August 9th, 1974.
Dao Hong: Leader of the Sphere, a collectivist empire on the Far Eastern continent of Sina. A quasi-intellectual thug.
Deja You: A psychotherapeutic collective that promises to cure your neuroses by putting you in touch with your past lives.
District One: The capital of Americo.
Dixon: A prosperous Southern state. Quantrill Biscuit is its governor. It is also home to the Hunkerdome.
Earthly Father: Spiritual leader of a huge faction of Old God worshippers.
Eden Atoll: An archipelago that inspired Theramin Hunker's landmark exploration of primitive sexuality, Coming of Age in Eden Atoll. It is currently home to Escobar Savarin's popular fantasy-vacation resort.
Ekumen Games: World-class amateur athletic contests, held every four years.
Elatic Ocean: The vast, pacific Western ocean that separates the continents.
Esperanto: A huge continent in the Eastern hemisphere that is the cradle of Western Civilization. Currently under siege by Gogol Yobar and the Bloc.
Fascists: The opposition forces in the last great global war, centered in the nations of Faust and Hiko. Many war criminals escaped to Suramerico at the close of the conflict.
Fat, Horselover: Cult science-fiction author. Presumed lost in the great quake of 1974.
Faust: A huge nation in Esperanto, and a center of the fascist movement during the last great global war. Currently occupied by Gogol Yobar's forces.
Feta, Bellow: Stanton Spobeck's original vice president, a seething loudmouth who was forced to resign after a bribery scandal.
Fitzgerald, Edmund: Stanardian singer-songwriter, best known for his paean to the lost cargo vessel The Gordon Lightfoot.
Fleur: A cultural hub in Esperanto and most likely the next target of Gogol Yobar's forces as they push west across the continent.
Fontana: The state at the southeastern tip of Americo, currently reduced to a vast acid swamp by flooding and pounding hurricanes.
Fun City: A northeastern metropolis in Americo, capital of the nation's art, culture and business. Home to Humboldt Suede and his Sound & Vision media empire.
El Gordo: A former gambling haven in the desert Southwest of Americo. Now the nexus of relief efforts on the West Coast.
Gordon Lightfoot: A cargo vessel lost under mysterious circumstances in the Great Inland Oceans. Memorialized in a hit song by Stanardian folk singer Edmund Fitzgerald.
Gort, Fulton: An automobile titan and long-lived curmudgeon. His Gort Motor Corporation is one of the largest employers in Motor City.
Gort, LeHigh: Stanton Spobeck's vice president. An amiable goof and former college football star. No relation to the auto tycoon.
Gort, Miranda: A granddaughter of the auto titan. Kidnapped by a radical group called the Kaveat Vendor Alliance in the spring of 1974 and brainwashed into taking part in robberies and terror attacks.
Great Inland Oceans: Five massive lakes on Americo's northern border. After the melting of the ice caps and flooding of Standard, the lakes have spread to link the Elatic and Lemuric oceans.
Guess My Name: An immensely popular game show and a haunt for decrepit mainstream celebrities who survived the great quake of 1974.
Halfway to a Threeway: "Jiggle" comedy involving a single man who pretends to be blind so he can share an apartment with two female lip-readers.
Hardcastle: A plucky democracy off the coast of Esperanto and Americo's closest ally in the Cold War.
HARM: A wildly popular glam-rock band that performs in elaborate makeup.
Hewland: A Middle Western city on the edge of the Great Inland Oceans. Notable for the fire that has been raging on its lake since August 9th, 1974.
Hiko: A commercial-powerhouse island nation that was overrun by the Sphere shortly after August 9th, 1974. Hiko fought on the side of the fascists in the last great world war and was decisively walloped for its efforts.
Howe's Chasm: A mammoth canyon in southwestern Americo, currently home to the Aboriginal Nations and the scene of a standoff between the natives and government forces.
Hunker, Theramin: Legendary social theorist and founder of the Hunker Obliterative Processing (HOP) self-help seminars.
Hunker Obliterative Processing (HOP): A series of self-help seminars designed by social guru Theramin Hunker. The courses teach radical selfishness and emphasize that there is a "Nil" at the core of human life.
Hunkerdome: The headquarters of Theramin Hunker's Hunker Obliterative Processing (HOP) seminars. Located in Dixon, this glassed-over compound encloses thousands of acres and provides a hermetic environment for Hunker's social experiments.
Jencia: An ancient tribe of wanderers, concentrated in Eastern Esperanto.
Kaveat Vendor Alliance: A radical criminal group dedicated to smashing the honky capitalist establishment. They came to national prominence by kidnapping and brainwashing Miranda Gort.
Kirbograd: A port city in Northern Esperanto that has attracted attention for wildcat strikes against its masters in the Bloc. The strikes are led by the city's upstart labor union, the Lobstermen.
Kish: A former colony of Hardcastle, and currently a hugely populated democracy in Sina.
Kontan: A former colony of Hardcastle, this island nation and commercial hub was overrun by the Sphere shortly after August 9th, 1974.
Lomack, H.D.: Bank robber who became a folk hero following his mysterious disappearance on August 9th, 1974. Lomack parachuted out of a plane with a suitcase full of loot and vanished into the wilds of the Southwest.
Lemuric Ocean: The stormy Eastern ocean that separates the continents.
Leng: The capital of Tang and seat of power of the Sphere.
Lime Cordial: An immensely popular dance band. Authors of the chart-topper Love to Baby My Baby.
Lobstermen: A union of dockworkers in Kirbograd, a port city in the Bloc. They take their name from amphibious heroes of Esperantan folklore.
Maddamar: A vast, oil-rich desert region in the Eastern hemisphere. The home base of the Consortium.
Malese, Fedo: Leader of the Consortium. Visionary strongman with millennial pretensions.
Man Last: An environmental group that agitates to save wildlife and stop development and pollution.
Mango: A peninsular nation on the southeastern tip of Sina. The site of a bloody ten-year Cold War battle between Americo and the Sphere and Bloc. The disasters of August 9th, 1974, revealed deep oil fields off Mango's coast—possibly leading to a new struggle for control of the tiny nation.
Maxi, Richard: Former glam rocker, currently electronic-music pioneer specializing in menacing atonal sounds.
Middle West: The vast interior of Americo, which has been tormented by unearthly forces since August 9th, 1974.
Motor City: An industrial city in the northern Middle West of Americo, home to the nation's top auto manufacturers.
Mudack: Capital of Kronstadt, seat of power of the Bloc.
Muswife, Maurice T.: Former baseball impresario and founder of the sport of Omegaball.
Obelisks of the Elders: Towering burial monuments to the pharaohs of ancient Taza.
Obstat, T. Nestor: Long-serving chief of Americo's internal intelligence services. He passed away shortly after the tragedies of August 9th, 1974.
Old God: The immortal being that created the universe. His stock is on the wane lately.
Omegaball: A brutal blood sport that is fast becoming the most popular pastime in the world.
Pratt, Ethel Ambrose: Secretary and confidant to Stanton Spobeck. A key figure in his impeachment hearings.
Purity Wall: A black-steel barrier, moving on tank treads, that entirely surrounds Gogol Yobar's territory.
Purvis, Herman: A cult television star and lately host of the news-of-the-weird program Beyond the Barrier With Herman Purvis.
Savarin, Escobar: A mysterious adventurer who runs a fantasy resort at Eden Atoll.
Seawall Peaks: The northern and southern mountain ranges that now form the Western edge of Americo.
Seed of Sirius: A crank UFO cult that promises to put its members in touch with the "ancient astronauts" that seeded human culture.
Shel's Rock Pile: A hit music-and-dance show filmed on location at BootyDome 57 in Fun City.
Simoni: A city in southern Esperanto that was buried in volcanic ash centuries ago. Excavation efforts are attracting lots of publicity.
Sina: A Far Eastern continent that is home to the Sphere.
Skyliners: The reigning champions on the Omegaball circuit. The team is based in Fun City; its stadium is the Custerdome.
Sphere: A collectivist empire on the Far Eastern continent of Sina, centered on the sprawling nation of Tang. Its leader, lunatic dictator Dao Hong, launched a wave of invasions against his neighbors after August 9th, 1974.
Sound & Vision Corporation: Humboldt Suede's media empire, comprising book publishers, movie and music studios, and the new chain of BootyDome dancehalls.
Sound & Vision's Wild Americo: Hit nature program featuring by wildlife expert Anders Cobleskill and his long-suffering man in the field, Mitch Falconer.
Southwest: A desert region of Americo, beset by mysterious nocturnal armies and largely cordoned off by military forces.
Spobeck, Stanton: President of Americo. On August 9th, 1974, he was poised to resign but stuck around to shepherd the country through the crisis. He is currently running for a law-bending third term in office.
Stanard: A former colony of Hardcastle, this nation north of Americo has been reduced to a vast post-Arctic marshland by melting ice caps.
Stillson & Fink: A pair of rascally lyricists known for their cryptic jazz-rock. Their most recent album is the multiplatinum Pyramid Scam.
Suede, Humboldt: Founder of the men's magazine Bedfellows, head of the mammoth Sound & Vision conglomerate and lately third-party candidate for president.
Suet, Nero: King of rock-and-roll, movie star, bloated recluse—and, most recently, corpse. Suet died in undignified circumstances shortly after August 9th, 1974.
Suramerico: A vast southern continent in the Western hemisphere, dominated by dwindling rainforests and brutal dictators.
Swelt: A vast southern continent in the Eastern hemisphere, with deserts at its northern end, jungles below and repressive regimes throughout.
Tang: A sprawling nation on the continent of Sina, and the home base of the Sphere. Its leader is Dao Hong.
Tasmadar: The ancient holy city that is capital of Aleph.
Taza: The Consortium's capital of arts and culture, in the heart of Maddamar.
Trestle, Abednego: A 16th-century visionary who left behind a trove of prophetic writings.
V-8s: An up-and-coming Omegaball franchise in Motor City.
Vole, Ampersand IV: Oil tycoon and head of the Vigorous Petroleum Corporation. He was among the millions lost when Alamo went dark on August 9th, 1974. His widow, Terrapin, now runs the business out of their vacation home on the Gulf of Suramerico.
Vyking Funeral: An immensely popular artsy-bombastic rock band that specializes in eight-minute songs about hippie wizards and dark lords.
What's in My Pocket?: A famously raunchy game show involving contestants wearing strange costumes.
Yobar, Gogol: Leader of the collectivist empire known as the Bloc. A paranoid strongman.
Zassat: Gogol Yobar's brutal secret-police force.
Zerbe, Zoltan: A war hero serving as Humboldt Suede's running mate.