Greg Stolze Interview (Part One)

Greetings and salutations, fellow gamers. I'm back, after a very long hiatus and sojourn into matters of real life in all its mundane, non-glory. And as luck would have it, my first article coming back happens to be an interview with my favorite game designer of all time,... Greg Stolze!

Writer/collaborator on supplements for numerous game-lines spanning the industry, and designer of some of the most engaging and compelling RPGs in the history of the hobby, Mr. Stolze's many accolades include the creation of Spherewalker, (the one and only supplement to the short-lived, and now cult-classic work known as Everway,) numerous supplements for White Wolf Publishing's Vampire: the Requiem (Nomads, Rites of the Dragon, Lancea Sanctum, Ordo Dracul, and VII,) the creation of Unknown Armies, Reign and co-creation of Godlike,... just to name a few. Mr. Stolze is also the creator of the One-Roll Engine or O.R.E., a system which continues to grow in popularity as Arc Dream Publishing prepares to release its 2nd Edition of their One-Roll Engine, supers-genre RPG "Wild Talents," this weekend at GenCon '09.

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Christopher: How did you get into the gaming industry?

Greg: As a young, dungeon crawlin' nerd, of course. Hmm, if I do the math I can probably figure out the exact year. I'll call it fifth grade, so I was probably twelve years old. I think I got the green box for Christmas, with the Errol Otus cover. Then another guy got the DMG,(Dungeon Master’s Guide) the old MM (Monster Manual) with Cthulhu and Elric in it, and the PHB (Player‘s Handbook.) I think his folks made him get rid of them, so I bought them. They're probably still around in my basement, in absolutely crap, CRAP condition. I mean, the PHB and the DMG with the Effrit in the G-string? They literally look like they were dragged behind a car. The MM wasn't so bad until I used it -- extensively -- as a clipboard, so now the cover's all scratched and incised.

So that was junior high, then I got into Car Wars and Star Fleet Battles in high school, and then girls, which cut into my gaming time severely. On to college, where a friend of mine from the theater department said, "You should meet this guy who runs a game at his house. You'd like it." That guy was an insurance salesman named Jonathan Tweet and the game would eventually turn into "Over the Edge." Once I learned Tweet was getting money for writing? Oh, it was on. I'd wanted to write for money since I was in kindergarten. I badgered Tweet and wrote a ton of on-spec stuff and got connected to Jolly Blackburn and SHADIS magazine. And from then it just crawled forward through L5R, (Legend of the Five Rings) UA, (Unknown Armies) White Wolf and the One Roll Engine.

Christopher: What are some of your favorite games? Why?

Greg: EVERWAY is pretty awesome because it's so deeply right-brained. It's basically an indie game before there were indie games, only with WotC production values.

Some other games I've had a load of fun with are Call of Cthulhu (of course) and I have fond memories of some FUDGE games Anne Dupuis ran at a couple Origins conventions years back.

I also like my own games, but it would probably sound narcissistic to talk about that.

Christopher: When you begin the process of taking that initial spark of inspiration and crafting it into a game, do you have a particular process? How does a game take shape?

Greg: It comes on different ways. Sometimes I get an idea for a crazy mechanic or approach and look for a setting where that idea isn't just acceptable, but really fits. Or sometimes I'll think up a setting or an idea I want to explore, and let the mechanics grow out of its needs. It's usually best when two disparate ideas come together and fit. Like a jigsaw.

Christopher: Tell us about the One-Roll Engine. Where did the inspiration for the mechanics come from?

Greg: I was working on Hunter: the Reckoning and trying to get a handle on what the practical difference, in OWoD, (Old World-of-Darkness) was between raising the TN (target number) and requiring more successes. I thought, "Golly, wouldn't it be efficient if you could pull more information out of each roll by having the number of successes mean one thing, and the degree of success mean another?" And that thought went and had a lie down in my subconscious for a few months until I was dinking around with dice matching instead of success counting or addition on the fly. It worked.

Christopher: Reign is a very unconventional approach to fantasy gaming. It tends to run against the grain of the typical, grow-in-power, eventually save the world, type fantasy-story mentality. Tell us a bit about how Reign is different.

Greg: I played a lot of the computer game CIVILIZATION and, at the same time, was leveling up through a really protracted weekly D&D 3.0 game. My wizard got Cloudkill and I remember hoping there'd be some kind of 'Helm's Deep' siege where that, and stuff like Wall of Fire, would really let me be the awesomest. But instead we kept hitting all these level-appropriate encounters that had, of course, too many hit dice for Cloudkill. "Dammit," I said, "Why do I have to be stuck saving the world when I could be carving out a nice fiefdom for myself?" I wondered why these powerful D&D characters with giant sacks of jingling platinum pieces and spells that could clear out entire counties were wandering around playing snipe hunt with giants. Where were their followers? And moving to Chicago, the hometown of 'clout,' put the idea in my head too.

I have nothing against save-the-world plots, but that's a crowded field and a lot of games have done it really well. What I hadn't seen was "The West Wing, only with badass sorcerers."

Christopher: What is Project: NEMESIS?

Greg: Project: NEMESIS is the website that supports (among other things) the free ORE (One-Roll Engine) game NEMESIS. NEMESIS is ORE tweaked for modern day Lovecraft conspiracy horror, or really anything modern. Project: NEMESIS has just a ton of stuff on it for NEMESIS, BPR CoC, REIGN, Wild Talents, Monsters and Other Childish Things -- the whole ORE stable, really. It does ask you to create an account, but it's totally worth it. The level of fan-craft is pretty high. It also has the Green Box Generator for Delta Green, which is fun.

Christopher: Anything on the horizon for Nemesis?

Greg: On my website, tucked away on the dusty "Games" page, there's a link to 'projects in limbo.' On there is a sort of bioterror technothriller idea called LEVIATHAN, and I'm working on that as a setting for the NEMESIS rule-set. It's meant to be a couple notches more realistic than "The X-Files" but in a similar kind of vein. All the PCs are military, medical, law-enforcement or espionage personnel who have been survived exposure to biological weapons or weirder stuff. This gets them "LEVIATHAN clearance" and all kinds of exciting and appalling misery.

LEVIATHAN branches the ORE out in a couple new directions. It has rules for social combat, political infighting (where you can wind up having to choose between getting your requisition filled or sticking your weasel supervisor with a reputation like "shows no initiative") and elaborate medical lifesaving. At GenCon I'm going to be running a scenario inspired in part by all those episodes of "Saint Elsewhere" I watched over my parents' shoulders. Presumably, you could use it for "E.R." too. Or throw in the social combat rules and do "Grey's Anatomy." Or work in the madness stuff and turn it into "The Kingdom."

Christopher: A few years back you collaborated with John Tynes to create Unknown Armies, possibly one of the most unique and engaging horror games on the market. What were some of your inspirations and intentions for the game?

Greg: Tynes really wanted to differentiate it from his first love, "Call of Cthulhu." As he saw it, CoC was such a perfect Lovecraft game, anything else operating on the same wavelength would, perforce, have an uphill slog. (That said, I haven't read "Trail of Cthulhu" yet.) He had these vague ideas for the Invisible Clergy and Alex Abel, and I just came up with rules and details and madness. The one thing I hadn't liked about the treatment of madness in RPGs was the "roll for your lunacy" business. "Oooh, nymphomania! Too bad!" I wanted to have it be an integrated aspect of character. And I'd just come off a year or so working as a secretary for a group of social workers. I'd seen a lot of people in crisis and heard a lot of awful stuff about mental trauma and coping mechanisms, and I put that into UA. I had to put it somewhere -- I couldn't have stayed at that job indefinitely. I'd have burned out.