Blast From My Past

Back in the '80s, I was a big fan of the Champions roleplaying game from Hero Games, which is why my first published RPG book, at the end of that decade, was Kingdom of Champions. While I went on to work for other publishers, I did a bit more for Hero over the next few years, and I've been quite pleased to note that the books in question have in recent years started to be republished in PDF form.

Well, if anyone is interested in seeing both what caught my attention back then and what I did for Hero, now's your chance to get there on a budget. Bundle of Holding are currently running a pair of really generous Fourth Edition Champions bundle deals which include my work for Hero and much more. If you stump up $35.19 or more for the Champions 4E Universe bundle, you get, well, quite a lot of books, but the list includes Kingdom of Champions and also Champions Universe, to which I contributed quite a bit of material including an extended scenario (and the bundle also includes things like the classic multi-universal Champions in 3-D, and the quite unique Foxbat Unhinged, by my late friend Alison Brooks). But you might want to start with the Champions 4E Essentials bundle; drop $30.35 on that and you'll get not only the Champions core rulebook but also Champions Presents 1, to which I contributed an adventure, and The Hero System Almanac 2, which includes my treatment of the UNTIL agency. Along with a lot else, of course.

Expand, Contract (39)

Some time back in the mid '90s - I've lost track exactly when, and my records don't extend quite that far back, but it would have been around 1995-6 - Atlas Games were publishing material for Hero Games's Champions RPG under license, and I sold them on the idea of a scenario book called The Sands of Time. I put a manuscript together and off it went ... and after a little while, the project fell victim to the collectible card game-powered chaos of the period, as that license deal faded out.

It happens. It's wouldn't have been the only project in my history to have died on me after too much work had been done. However, this one happened to have been assigned an editor, Spike Jones, who not only stayed in the business, but kept getting Champions-related editing jobs, and kept faith in the book, and sometimes brought it to the attention of other companies for whom he was doing work. Well, it didn't cost me any significant extra work.

Hence, in late 1997, the project was with Gold Rush Games, and was being reworked into their San Angelo setting/world. In fact, by 1999 it was edited and heading for layout - if only they could find someone with the time to do that job. It was supposed to be published in 2001, but then Gold Rush sold the rights to San Angelo to Hero Games. Sands should have gone with that ... but in 2002, the rights to San Angelo stuff went back to Gold Rush Games, who ended up using the setting with a completely different rule-set, and Sands fell through the cracks again.

So I was pleasantly surprised in 2010 when I heard from Blackwyrm Games that Spike had been talking to them. Of course, by then, the Champions rules were two full editions on from where they'd been when I wrote Sands, but they were prepared to get somebody else to do something about that - and for that matter, about updating the geopolitical background details. But that took a while...

Getting on for three years, in fact. But The Sands of Time is now, actually out - at least seventeen years after I wrote it. I don't know if that's any sort of industry record - I doubt it - but, well, there may be gamers who'll buy and run it who weren't even born when I wrote it. And it's certainly a personal record. Anyway, thanks and congratulations to Blackwyrm for finally getting this out the door.

Now we just have to sell it.

(Footnote to this: digging through my computer files, I realise that the date stamps on my first draft word processor files for this book go back to 1994, or in some cases late 1993. So it didn't quite make twenty years from first draft to print, but darned close. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that the scenario wasn't originally written for Hero Games, before being offered to Atlas...)