Looking back at Tales of Terror

I first published Tales of Terror in 1990.

Tales of Terror was put together using an Amstrad PCW 8512. I had bought one in 1986 or 1987 to write my dissertation. While I did use it for that, I also discovered a joy in writing that I didn’t know I had. That eventually led to Tales of Terror (and many things beyond).

The idea from Tales of Terror came from my delight in Call of Cthulhu’s elaborate handouts. For me, Call of Cthulhu was the first rpg that made good use of handouts, but one thing that I found slightly irritating was that it was always clear when you found a handout - you could tell from the fact that it had been copied from the book.

As a Keeper I liked the idea that you could drop other handouts into a scenario that might lead to other places. I envisaged a product that was almost entirely handouts (newspaper cuttings, extracts from books, letters, and so on), with some simple ideas for where the handouts might take you. (When I look back on that now, I wonder if that was really a sensible idea. As a player I might have found it very frustrating.)

From there, that lead me to the Tales of Terror format. (The idea of three different variations I took from Traveller’s 76 Patrons.)

That’s why the first edition features so many newspaper cuttings and book extracts. Over time, I realised that they weren’t necessary, and they’re rarer now.

Garrie Hall was my co-conspirator with Tales of Terror, and he helped with the printing. Garrie had produced a small-press fiction fanzine called Tales After Dark. As luck would have it, Garrie lived in Loughborough, where I was studying at university. I liked the feel of Tales After Dark; its glossy card covers gave it a veneer of quality that was lacking in many rpg fanzines of the time. We used the same printer for Tales of Terror and printed 250 copies.

I did the art in the first edition, inspired by Lynn Willis’ silhouettes in Call of Cthulhu. I didn’t like later editions of Call of Cthulhu that had detailed picture of the entities. Silhouettes left plenty to the imagination, and let me fill out the details. So I took the same approach with Tales of Terror.

Pulling it all together and getting it into print was one thing. Selling it was another. I’m not very good at selling. I sold a few by post, I sold a few at Convulsion, and I sent a whole bunch to John Tynes to sell via Pagan Publishing.

I sent a couple to Chaosium, just out of courtesy. I got a nice letter from Lynn Willis, followed by a scary letter from Greg Stafford telling me I’d infringed their trademark. That caused me a sleepless night or two before it was resolved, but it seemed that Chaosium thought that Tales of Terror was a professional publication, rather than the not-for-profit small press zine it most definitely was. (Mark Morrison suggested I should consider it a compliment.)

Pagan Publishing persuaded me to edit two more volumes, one in 1996 and one in 2000. All I had to do this time was put the words together. They took care of the layout and the sales. That was easier, but looking back I’m not sure if that was a good thing or not.

In 1994 I got my first web-space, and one of the first things I did was create a Tales of Terror website. That’s now defunct, as is the website that followed it. I am now slowly populating a new Tales of Terror website using Blogger, here. If you want to keep up you can follow it via RSS, or my Tales of Terror Google+ collection.

I still write the occasional Tale, but only two or three a year, just to keep my hand in. My most recent was The Old Quarry.

As for the future, I will continue to populate the new website with all the old Tales, and I will continue to write new Tales now and again, as the mood strikes me. But a new collection? I’m not so sure.

Knee Deep in Doom

I’ve just finished listening to 2003’s Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner and read by Wil Wheaton. I couldn’t stop listening to it - I was even kicking everyone out of the kitchen so that I couldn’t continue to listen while I did the washing up. (It’s not something I can listen to when Megan is around - the language isn’t very age appropriate.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed listening to how John Romero and John Carmack met, created some astonishing games, and then self-destructed. And it got me thinking about Doom again.

Doom was released in December 1993, but I don’t think I played it until 1994. My first PC was a 486-66 DX2 (if I remember correctly). I bought the parts from a shop in Armley and, with my good friend Richard’s help, built it. I bought it so that I could play X-Wing, but it wasn’t long before I was also playing Doom.

Richard introduced me to Doom (and X-Wing and many other games as well). He was always a lot better than me, and we played cooperatively at first - he helped me learn the levels.

I loved the shareware levels, Knee Deep in the Dead. We played them over and over. We didn’t often play much deathmatch - Richard was so much better than me that it wasn’t that much fun. I’ve never really liked deathmatch (which is particularly interesting given the prominence that it had in most of the Doom community, at least according to Masters of Doom).

I didn’t enjoy the later levels of Doom (The Shores of Hell and Inferno) as much as the shareware levels. To my mind they weren’t as attractive, nor as memorable. They’ve sort of faded in my memory into a bit of a flesh-coloured blur. Doom 2 I really liked, and was one of the many millions that bought it as soon as it came out in September 1994.

Masters of Doom describes the t-shirts the designers bought themselves with the Doom logo on the front and “wrote it” on the back. I remember seeing Sandy Petersen at Convulsion in July 1994 wearing one of those t-shirts, and thinking how cool that was. (Wil Wheaton does a great Sandy Petersen impersonation.)

I also remember Sandy saying that each of the Doom levels was designed to be playable from scratch on ultraviolence. That added a new dimension for me - each levels was a puzzle to be solved. Sure, they were easy enough when you started a level with all the weapons from the previous level, but starting with just a pistol? That was a new challenge.

With Doom 2 I really started noticing how the levels were designed, with the ever more powerful weapons leading you through the levels.

It’s interesting that Masters of Doom comments that while Sandy’s levels were fiendish, they weren’t as pretty as those designed by John Romero. That’s something you can see in Knee Deep in the Dead - Sandy’s only level (the finale, Phobos Anomaly) is difficult, but not as visually appealing as the previous levels.

My favourite Doom 2 memory is playing level 15 Industrial Zone (I think) cooperatively with Richard. We were working our way through the levels and unexpectedly encountered a cyberdemon. It’s not there when you play single player. We lured it into the respawn area where it killed us. We respawned, fired a few shots with our pistol before it killed us again. And again. And again. On and on this went. I don’t know how long it took us to take down that cyberdemon with just a pistol, but our corpses filled the area.

I tried Quake, but didn’t get on with it. It was a too brown, the controls were too hard to use, and and it just seemed like Doom but harder.

I played a few other first person shooters. I enjoyed Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D. I enjoyed the story aspect to Half-Life, but I missed having discrete levels to play through. My overall favourite was Dark Forces 2, which (for me) blended levels with story perfectly.

But that was the end of first person shooters for me.

I pretty much stopped playing computer games altogether in 1998. They were taking up too much time, and I was finding them a little too addictive.

(Since reading Masters of Doom I have found shareware Doom for android. It’s a bit fiddly saving a game as you need the keyboard, and as I can’t figure out how to call that up mid-game I’ve been using my bluetooth keyboard. But it works and it’s as fun as I remember - although the controls aren’t as intuitive as they were on the PC.)