I was very pleased to meet Gregor earlier this year at KapCon when he was in town for a friend’s wedding. A little while later I asked if he’d mind answering a few questions and here are his answers.

Can you introduce yourself for those who may not know you?
Oh, yes! I’m a games creator from Scotland. By day I work for a large Scientific Publisher and in my (any?) spare time I design, write and illustrate role-playing games. I got an honours degree in Astronomy but I’m mildly phobic of the night sky and large open spaces, which is a bit of a problem.

What got you into roleplaying games to begin with?
I liked listening to Lord of the Rings on the radio as a kid, and had loved reading my dad’s copy of the Hobbit (he had all the “usual suspects” including Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros). Gaming kicked off for me when we moved to be nearer my father’s work. This gave me a school-friend neighbour who was a wargamer and role-player — so he got me into it.

What games are you playing at the moment?
I’ve been in a campaign set in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay world, but using Conspiracy of Shadows. We’re picking up for part two of the campaign soon. We’re all watchmen in Nuln.

I’ve also been playing (unsurprisingly) a lot of games of 3:16 at conventions too, and they’ve been good fun. I don’t think I will ever tire of that game.

And the latest is AD 316, which is set in late Roman times.

Can you tell us a little bit about your two most well known games; Best Friends and 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars?
Best Friends is a game where you play a group of tightly bound girlfriends with petty hatreds and nonsense between them. Character creation is unusual because you define everyone else’s character (relative to you) rather than your own character. In turn you get your “stats” from what everyone else thinks of you. It’s also a diceless game, without any random element at all.

In 3:16 you play futuristic Troopers sent from Terra to kill everything in the Cosmos. It’s that Starship Troopers, Aliens, Warhammer 40K and 2000AD vibe and taps into a war theme. You have two abilities (Fighting and Non-Fighting) and your weapons don’t have damage, they tell you how many things you kill. It has some very traditional stuff in it too: levelling up and a macho competitive edge. The game is more than just killing things, though, you end up creating characters in play with “Flashbacks” that let you win or lose in return for giving something to the fiction. It can be powerful stuff. It’s a campaign game that’s also very fun to play as a one-off.

They’re pretty different concepts, what inspired you to go down such different thematic paths?
They were written, in their 24-hour form, about a month apart in late-2005 (Best Friends was September and 3:16 in October). The inspirational kick was from the Ronnies competition that ran briefly, and very brightly, at The Forge (indie-rpgs.com) that year. Best Friends was about my sister and her friends – it came together very quickly out of looking at the words “girlfriend” and “hatred” in a positive way. 3:16 was about recreating a very fun period of my gaming life playing SF “marine” game with rules that actually supported it. Each one had its own flavour and the differences between them made it easier to write them.

I then developed Best Friends and released it at GenCon 2006. Unfortunately, I couldn’t work on both 3:16 and Best Friends at the same time – they’re just too different in tone and style. So 3:16 took much longer to develop into its final form. Also because 3:16 had won a High Ronny award there was more pressure and expectation for it to be very good. It took me almost 3 years before everything fell into place and I was convinced the final version was very good and worth releasing.

What plans (if any) do you have for expanding these games?
For Best Friends it’s not going to be developed any more. People really love it (and in some cases really hate it – I know who you are) as it is. It’s currently out of print and I’m putting together a final version of it which will just stay as it is forever.

There are plans afoot for 3:16. I am working on a Roman legion version which will be done soon, a fantasy version called Carnage Amongst The Tribes due in October, and there might possibly be a World War II version. Certainly people have been hacking it to do these things themselves.

What kind of stories do you want to tell?
Oh, all sorts. I never had a “signature” character when role-playing and I’ve come to realise I’m a restless soul who likes flitting from story to story. I like serious stuff but a lot of my gaming has a large part of humour to it. I sometimes get told off by other players not being serious enough. Le sigh.

You’re involved in the Collective Endeavour, how has being part of that group helped your writing and game design? [Sophie edit: Collective Endeavour is a group set up to help small press roleplaying publishers in the UK. Check them out.]
I’m not sure it has. Hmm, that’s a tough question. I hope I’ve helped other people with my time there, though.

What advice would you have for fledgling indie game designers?
Design games you want to play. Have fun. Don’t be too disheartened if you fail to wow anyone else. Be enthusiastic, but also be critical of yourself and take criticism in a positive spirit and with open eyes. Don’t hold things too tightly and don’t get too hung up on theory. What’s the “reward cycle” in a game of tag? Sure is fun, though.

What else is on the agenda for you?
Oh, I’ll be at GenCon Indy on the Design Matters booth again this year (Booth #1834).

Thanks for your time Gregor and I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with next!

So a couple of years ago I bought a t-shirt from Threadless called “Derby of the Damned”. A few months later I went to my first KapCon and came away flush with ideas and concepts for new adventures using many and varied different game systems. One of those ideas was based on the t-shirt, partly because I thought it would be cool to play a Roller Derby girl and partly because I thought Derby of the Damned would be a great name for a scenario.

This idea bounced around in my head for months, every now and then I would try to make it work with an existing system. I tired All Flesh Must Be Eaten (the Unisystem zombie game from Eden Studios), Savage Worlds, True 20 and even Best Friends. But none of them quite seemed to fit with my idea with how this should play out.

It was around about this time that I was introduced to shared narrative games, most specifically 3: 16 Carnage Amongst the Stars. Something about the extremely quick character creation, low-fi stat/ability system and free for all nature of the game totally clicked with my idea of what I wanted Derby of the Damned to be. This minor epiphany also made me think that Derby didn’t need to just be a one off scenario, but possibly a shared narrative game in it’s own right.

I worked pretty hard on it after this change in direction, getting a set of rules I thought I could work with together with the intention of Derby making its debut at Kapcon 18.  However I totally chickened out at the play test stage and decided against it in the end. Since then I’ve pretty much shelved the project, and I think it might be time to pull it back off the shelf.

So I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts on the different elements that I’ve thought about during this design process to try and kick start it again. They will be around:

• Character creation
• How the dice roll
• Creating stories

Hopefully by the end I’ll be back in the head space to finish this off and actually get a game going.

The first post will show up sometime next week, so check back soon if you’re interested to see my somewhat bunny hopping creative process unfold.

We sat down and started to talk through what type of game we wanted to play. A few ideas were put on the table from Vestal Virgins to students at a Sith Academy to a group of women haggling over a fortune. In the end it was decided that they were:

Heather (Paul) – the first ex-wife
Chastity (Nasis) – the ex-trophy wife
Kitten (Nick) – the bimbo mistress
Katrina (Curtis) – illegitimate daughter
of Nigel, a millionaire who made his money from inventing the post-it-note clue. He’s dying and they have to prove to the lawyer that Katrina is part of the family or she gets the full $50 million.

The highlight of the game for me was Paul’s increadable bitchiness as Heather. With out a doubt he took the whole idea of the catty and mildly bitter ex-wife to a new level.

The lines of the afternoon go to Paul and Curtis:
Heather replying to Chastity about the length of their respective marriages: “Yes, well, give or take 10 years”.
Katrina commenting on Nigel’s 24 hour nursing care: “The happy ending nursing team”.

After Heather “got rid” off Kitten’s handbag dog in a up market New York club, Kitten seduced Heather’s new husband (for which Heather vowed to kill her), Chastity got the seduction on camera and provided the evidence to the lawyer, Katrina tried to get more money by suggesting that daddy liked her more than he should and Kitten ran off to Mexico with all the spare cash and jewlery she could find, the end result had the full $50 mill being split evenly between Katrina, Heather and Chastity.

I had a blast, thanks to the quick wit and utter bitchiness of the players!