Here are the answers to some questions I often get. This is a work in progress, so if you have a question you don’t see answered here, feel free to use the link on the main page to e-mail me.
Personal
Q: What’s it like to be a game designer?
A: I wrote an essay about this once. You can find it on the Downloads page. It’s called “What Was I Thinking?”
Q: How fast do you write?
A: When I’m cooking, it’s about 1,000 words an hour. I’m much slower than that when doing basic rules work or crunching numbers for a roleplaying game hero’s stats. I set a goal of 5,000 words per day. Some days I hit that. Other times I don’t. On great days, I blow straight past it for parts unknown.
Q: Then why isn’t [insert unfinished pet project] done yet?
A: It’s a matter of priorities. I don’t have much spare time these days, so I tend to concentrate on taking care of the gigs that pay the best.
Q: What can keep you that busy?
A: Kids. Lots of them. We have five, including quadruplets born in June of 2002. Taking care of my family is the most important thing for me. To do that, I write novels and design games. It’s a good life.
Brave New World
Q: What’s this about a Brave New World movie?
A: Believe it or not, it’s in the works from the fine people at Reactor 88 Studios.
Q: Does this have anything to do with Aldous Huxley’s novel?
A: No, although I took my title from the same place he took his: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It’s from the line Miranda speaks when she first sees a man other than her father, the wizard Prospero: “O brave new world that has such people in’t.”
Q: What happened to the game?
A: It’s a long story. In a nutshell, I took BNW with me when I left Pinnacle at the end of 1999. In early 2000, I sold the game to AEG. After publishing it for a year and a half or so, AEG decided to cancel the line.
Q: What about the storyline?
A: I finally got around to posting on this site all the little secrets from the backstory that were squirreled away in the back of my brain.
WildStorms
Q: What happened to this game?
A: The guys at WildStorm let the game go out of print after a while. It made them a lot of money, but sales eventually trailed off, and they moved on.
Q: Do you have a copy of the rules for the game?
A: No. For those, you’d have to contact the people at WildStorm. I don’t know if they have anything available any more, but the game belongs to them, so I don’t have the rights to distribute any material I might have.
ShadowKnight
Q: What’s ShadowKnight?
A: It’s an original setting I’m developing for use with the d20 System. I licensed it to Mongoose, but I sadly haven’t gotten much done on that front. For more about why that is, see the “Personal” section above.
