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Fred Hicks interview - part one
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As a gamer, I’ve never been a big fan of most of the larger companies. I find that, very often, as a company swells it focuses on one or two of the things that made its game(s) great, deciding to commit the lion's share of its R&D resources toward the bolstering of that particular handful of merits at the expense of lots and lots of other qualities. Over time, the game you came to love begins to resemble its old self less and less. Now, when it comes to the companies that do this, and I won't name names, (let's just say it rhymes with "Lizards on Your Toast.") they certainly have solid financial reasons for comporting themselves as they do.
However, one of the truly fulfilling aspects of the RPG experience is that, given it's singularity as a form of entertainment, each and every one of us feels in some way like he/she is truly a part of the hobby as a whole. The companies publishing our games-of-choice actually see and hear us, and well... that's really nice.
With the big behemoths however, you feel less and less visible... less a valued-fan and more a necessary-revenue-stream. It is the nature of the beast, perhaps. But,... there are other beasts roaming the lush countryside of our shared pastime.
Personally, I’ve always found that the indie-press leg of our particular hobby is filled with brilliant ideas, rules-systems ranging from the truly-thoughtful to the downright-ingenious that are perpetually open to revision and streamlining, and (best of all) developers and writers who actually listen to the feedback of their fans. With the tiniest bit of internet-leg-work one soon finds that the indie-gaming community is a vast treasure-trove of revolutionary ideas, fresh approaches to the hobby and lots and lots of little-known games just waiting to rock your world.
Recently, I got to interview one of the mad geniuses responsible for the contents of that treasure trove;… Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions, co-creator of the Fate (Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment) rules, the Spirit of the Century RPG as well as the upcoming Dresden Files RPG, to name just a few. It's been a dream of mine to interview this particular game developer for some time. And so it was with a quickened pulse and a freshly polished and eagerly thrumming set of brain-picking tools that I set about the business of my delve "under the 'Hat," so to speak. (That pun's mine! Nobody touch it!)
(As I am as yet unequipped to conduct interviews over Skype or any other such audio-communications medium, this interview took the form of email correspondences/chatting between Mr. Hicks and myself. What follows is the first of two-parts to that interview.)
Christopher: Tell us a bit about yourself, your background in the gaming industry and your interests as a gamer.
Fred: Oh, is there really an "industry", per se? Let's call it a "hobby" (though yeah, you'll catch me calling it an industry on occasion, too). My background in the hobby starts with a discovery of polyhedral dice on the playground in 3rd grade, kit-bashing existing systems to create strange new hybrid homebrews throughout my teenage years. I've played all sorts of things, though spottily, so my mental landscape of gaming is a bit of a motley crew. The Amber Diceless RPG figured in strongly for me, as did Fudge, and it was bashing those two together that ultimately produced Fate.
Christopher: How did Evil Hat Productions get started?
Fred: It started out as a "brand name" that we did some small-scale Amber LARP events at AmberCon Northwest. We took the name from the way a collaborator of ours, Lydia Leong, tended to enter virtual rooms online, proclaiming things like "Lydia perches on Fred's head like an evil hat." My marketing-ear picked up on that "Evil Hat" as a solid name, and the domain name wasn't registered yet, so it was quickly adopted. When Rob and I (and eventually others) started collaborating to publish things, both free and for pay, it just made sense to continue using the name.
Christopher: Who are some of the key people at the company, and what do they do?
Fred: While we're technically a company, honestly Evil Hat could be looked at more as an alliance of creative folks working together to pursue their passions. Each project gets its own team that gets assembled pursuant to the needs of the project.
Nobody pulls down a paycheck (which isn't to say folks aren't getting paid in whatever ways we can manage). We're just too small to be a company with positions and salaries and whatnot. Few game companies can.
I do all of the layout and book production work, most of the art direction, and some of the writing.
Rob Donoghue is sort of our personal Gleemax at this point, a brain in a jar pulsing with vast amounts of gaming knowledge. Occasionally he finds he MUST WRITE SOMETHING and interesting stuff comes of that, but the Donoghue is not a predictable beast. We dance when he shoots his gun.
Leonard Balsera is currently the lead system developer for the Dresden Files RPG. He came along out of the fan community around Fate and turned out to have strong ideas for how we could improve our own. Lenny's done a lot to make Evil Hat's games consistently strong; his method for pushing us to put what we do at the table into our games works so well it's practically become company policy.
Lydia Leong did editing on SOTC for us and is still considered part of the Evil Hat family, even though she's more consumed with her day-job now. I think of her as our spiritual mascot in a way, what with the whole original perching upon my head in a malevolent haberdashery sort of way.
Chad Underkoffler has been adding his uniqueness to our own for about a year now, helping out with the Dresden Files RPG on the setting writing and research side, as well as working with us to publish his future works, sort of taking over from his Atomic Sock Monkey imprint. The first collaboration of this nature has produced Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies. I'm pretty excited about it!
There are others. Amanda Valentine, Adam Dray, and Ryan Macklin are helping us out with the Dresden Files RPG in an editorial/project-management/people-wrangler sort of way. Paul Tevis and Daniel Solis (and Ryan Macklin, again) are looking to publish games in the future as a part of Evil Hat.
Oh, and my goes-way-back gaming buddy Matt Gandy is our Sin Eater, in a way. It's all his fault. No, I won't say more.
If I'm forgetting someone, I'm going to be very, very embarrassed.
Christopher: Tell us about the Fate System.
Fred: The Fate system arose from my attempts to run the Amber setting in Fudge a couple times. Rob and I were driving back from Lake Tahoe and got to talking about the next iteration of that effort... about two hours later we'd put together ideas of what would become "Fate Version Zero". Things just sort of rolled forward from there.
Fate is more sort of its own thing now, but originally started as an effort to provide some "advanced pre-built configs" of the Fudge system. Aspects were just one part of that, but have become the real signature element of Fate -- they're elements of character that have both an up-side and a down-side, situationally, allowing who a character is to profoundly affect the story.
Christopher: Given that Fate has recently been updated to 3.0, what are some of the improvements, innovations, tweaks, etc. that have been implemented?
Fred: Well, first off, there is no Fate 3.0 proper. Fate 3.0 in an "alpha" or "beta" form is what you see in Spirit of the Century. But that's not necessarily Fate 3.0's final destination. It's just our first public expression of one way to make use of our current notion of the state of the Fate toolbox.
In Spirit of the Century, we've merged the idea of "boxes" on aspects and Fate points into a single cohesive whole, creating a 
much better-tuned game economy than before.
We've revamped the way we run conflicts. It'll still feel familiar, I think, but it links together with the way that aspects make the system work a lot better than previous Fate versions have.
We've introduced the idea of stunts to replace the concept of 'extras' from Fate 2.0. Looked at from a sufficient remove, they're a lot like d20's feats, but then again, d20's feats are a lot like a lot of other things in other systems. They're an extensible vehicle for providing persistent benefits (often, special powers) to the PCs.
We offer a boatload of GM advice on how to make all of the parts -- old and new -- work together for optimum effectiveness. We've revamped the idea of "phased character creation" and turned it into something that more reliably (and, I think, more entertainingly) builds a solid backstory for your characters and a rationale for PCs to be who they are, where and when they are.
Christopher: So, would it be fair to say that Spirit of the Century was the first incarnation of Fate as a true system of its own?
Fred: Spirit of the Century is our first attempt to put the ideas of Fate 3.0 into a solid, playable form for the public. It's a pulp game -- because pulp is easy, pulp is freewheeling, and pulp has talking gorillas -- on the surface, but really it's a *high action* game that happens to have some light pulp trappings. But it's a side-effect of our efforts to revamp Fate for the Dresden Files RPG, at the end of the day -- a much more successful side-effect than we expected, of course. The next iteration of Fate 3.0 will be seen when we (finally) get the DFRPG out the door.
Christopher: Now, you’ve got another game called Don’t Rest Your Head that is also very unique and compelling. In a way, it’s always struck me as being in a genre all its own. How would you define DRYH, and where did the inspiration come from?
Fred: Oh, I don't know about it being its own genre. DRYH is, for me, a sub-genre of horror, sort of in the "surreal mind-scape" vein. From some perspectives, DRYH's horror is very personal -- you're fighting your inner demons in a lot of ways; they just happen to be walking around outside your head.
The inspration came from a long-seated love of Grant Morrison's run on the Doom Patrol, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, J. Michael Straczynski's Midnight Nation, and the Dark City movie.
The *trigger* came from a story I heard on NPR while driving. I half-remember the particulars. I think it was about a drug the army had developed to keep soldiers awake without feeling the downsides of it. You still needed to let them sleep on occasion -- if you stay awake for too long, whether or not you're feeling the effects of it, you'll flat-out die. Your system can't handle it.
What that story made me ask was: What happens if you don't die? What happens if you become permanently awake? My sources of inspiration provided the answer, and I was off to the races.
Christopher: How does Don’t Lose Your Mind factor into the DRYH equation?
Fred: I don't think DRYH ever really expressed what madness talents could fully, so I wanted a product that would showcase their potential. Don't get me wrong -- a lot of what happens in Don't Lose Your Mind proceeds directly from Don't Rest Your Head, I just don't think that it's as obvious or as highlighted as it could be. DLYM addresses that concern, going deep on 26 different madness talent concepts, and also pointing to the monstrous Nightmares that can result if the character lets the madness get the best of him. So it's both a powers book and a monsters book rolled into one, as well as an extended example of what madness talents are really all about.
For more info: Check out Evil Hat Productions. And buy lots and lots of their products, damn you! You'll never regret it!
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