Keep Going, Milestones Matter

In recent busy days, we have celebrated the one year anniversary of launching A.C.: After Collapse.  For more than twenty five years, this abstract thing was just an idea.  There were days when I would leaf through a pile of dirty waterlogged notebooks and ask myself, "what in the Hell am I doing?"  Even after we got most of the accumulated data transferred to electronic format, I still had doubts.  I'm pleased to tell you that some of my misgivings no longer exist.

Two or three anxious days ago, we activated a web site just for the game, which you can find here.  It's a starting point that includes more than a dozen free downloads for your role playing pleasure. 
I wanted to make some mention of it here, it's easy for this kind of thing to get lost in the shuffle.  Especially when there is still so much more to do.  From my point of view, the fact that we are here now is just a little more proof that I am not wasting my time, or yours.

Chase Your Dream

It's an open secret just now that I'm getting ready for Arctic Comic Con.  You might say I that have made the most of being anonymous, I worked on A.C.: After Collapse for many years be-fore I was able to showcase it at this year's convention in Anchorage, Alaska.  As I write this, I've still got some of that anonymity, by this time tomorrow thousands of people will know my name and what I did.  I've already said a lot in recent blog posts about what had to happen before I could get just this far.  Here and now, in the moment, I want to take a few seconds to record my thoughts and share with you some of what I learned.

When I was a kid, many people told me in many different ways: make the future you want to live in.  What in the Hell does that really mean, anyway?  Well, Okay.  Everything we need for the convention is packed and there's no one around to interrupt me, so here it is: Understand who you are, what you are, and what you are good at.  Then, do all three of them at the same time.  No, I am n-not kidding.  Pull that off and certain things become a little more obvious.  You'll start to notice what you can do.  Some of those things will be so small that you won't give them a second thought.  Others wil lbe so freakishly huge that--trust me--you will be scared.

Anyone who says they aren't afraid of doing the bigger things in life has truly lied to themselves before they ever think about deceiving you.  So, here I am.  The house is quiet and everything is done that needs to be.  It's not a glamorous start, nor is anything guaranteed.  All I can say is that this is my best effort.  Nothing I can influence has been left alone.  Lot of things fell through before we got to this point.  Doesn't do any good to be bitter about it, we are here now.  I chased this dream far longer than I wanted to, but I did catch it.  The cost has been high and I will always regret that.  Even so, we are ready to show our stuff at this convention.  Let the chips fall where they may.

The Backstory behind A.C.: After Collapse

A.C.: After Collapse is a post-apocalyptic RPG with a backstory that is  a collapse of many causes.  As a young man in the 1980's, me and my fellow gamers were bombarded by themes of nuclear war.  Turn on a TV, pick up any newspaper, or even just try to read a book--you couldn't get away from it!  As luridly gruesome as it sounded, I couldn't escape the feeling that any catastrophe that was capable of somehow devouring human civilization would be...more.

The older I got, the more I began to see that the world was full of wars, famine, and stupid politics that could boil over in a way that would kill us all.  Yes, the whole nuclear war thing was big and it did dominate the headlines--but--it was just one of many risk factors that threatened to snuff out the world like a spent birthday candle.

Two things happened at roughly the same time. I began to indulge my interest in history, and I was introduced to role-playing games.  One thing lead to another, I went from being a not-so-humble player to one of those much-feared DM's we've all heard so much about.  It was a slow and gradual transformation, the evolution of decades.  Problem was, I never did give up my taste for history.  Every time we started a post-apocalyptic RPG of some kind, players asked questions about the world their characters lived in--and--it was my job to give them an answer.

You'd be right to think that should have been hard, but it wasn't.  Me and my trusted typewriter turned out pages of simulated news print, book extracts, and faked-up government documents that were all made to look yellow with age...after half an hour in an oven at three hundred degrees (F).  Once upon a time, I shocked everyone at the game table by describing a brief case filled with folders labelled "top secret."  They wanted to know more what was inside, so--with some bravado--I put a beat-up old brief case on the table in front of them and...

You get the idea.  All of that prepared me for the day when I started writing names, dates, and places in a notebook that would eventually contain the nuts and bolts of the backstory that was eventually used for A.C.: After Collapse.  I hope you enjoy it!

Rise of the Scavenger

Years before I was ready to begin work on A.C.: After Collapse, I was thinking about the nature of Player Characters and why they are so often...the way they are.  People I knew at the time spent many casual evenings with a pad of paper and a lot of math; trying to figure it out.  The answers to many of our most aggravating questions didn't come until we saw "classless" character generation in action.  Then, we began to understand what was so elusive.  All of that abstraction played its own part in the way I eventually approached role playing games.  What we think of as the Rogue or the Thief in Fantasy gaming evolved in to my concept of salvagers and scavengers in post-apocalyptic settings.

In my youth, the Cold War (1945-1991) was always on our minds.  More than anything else, we asked ourselves questions about survival.  Books and movies probed the question darkly, it was widely believed that surviving a nuclear war just wasn't possible.  I've never been one of those people who takes "no" for an iron-clad answer.  Life has taught me that people can survive anything except extinction--if they want to.  When it came on to the market, The Morrow Project seemed to support my thinking; that it was possible to survive "the end" no matter what form it may eventually take.  When I got, the internet and the mapping of our human genome made me revisit this grim subject.  As we approached the 21st Century, my thinking crystalized.

In those days, I was not yet a full-time author.  I'd write short stories at night and during weekends that always got thrown out every Monday.  As a civil servant who was working 40+ hours a week, that process of writing was good therapy that reduced my frustrations; it also helped me to construct the pieces woaht eventually became the backstory for A.C.: After Collapse.  That part of me that doesn't like to give up kept coming back to salvagers and scavengers.  Over the years, I've known people who are like scavengers.  You know the type, they're always trading one thing for another.  For some vague reason, they always seem to know a guy who has the thing you want--for a price.

People like that exist in every society, it made sense to me that they would thrive in a dying world where nothing was off limits...if you could find it or pay for it.  In some ways, the might be the most heroic resistors of the Collapse.  You can think of the civic-minded thief in a Fantasy game as the man or woman who becomes the new Robin Hood.  Imagine how hard it might be find prescription drugs during the collapse, then imagine what you might be willing to do just to get those drugs for people who mattered to you?  As criminals go, you might not be terribly noble--but--you'd know why you taking the risk.  That's an extreme example, though it does illustrate why I put so much effort to portraying scavengers in the post-apocalyptic fiction I write.

Post-Collapse Priorities

A.C.: After Collapse has been formally-officially launched and on the market for one whole month; the dust is beginning settle while we catch our breath.

I don't think I've worked this hard for anything in my entire life.  As you can see from what's in this blog, I have been trying to gather my thoughts and put them in to some sort of order you might want to read.  It's not quite everything I have learned, though it is a lot of it.   Anyone who has ever chased a dream can tell you from firsthand experience that pursuit is one thing; achieving the goal is something else!

 What do you do AFTER you finally found and captured the one "thing" that kept you awake at night for so many years?  In our case, we already know what has to come next.  Over the next few years, we have to finalize and publish more.  As a compulsive maker of lists, I constantly update my list to reflect what we finish and what needs to be done next in the long line products.  It's not glamorous, but it does keep me out of trouble.