"Mike, I was wondering if you would be interested in helping me put together a Scifi game world? I'd like to crank out a 30-page game world background for a new line I'm trying to put together. Let me know if you're interested and I'll give you a call and talk about it."
The HELLAS: Worlds of Sun and Stone role-playing game began its journey on September 26, 2006 at 9:24:36 PM PDT, when I received that email from Jerry Grayson (aka "Delicious"). At the time I was just in the process of wrapping up one technical writing contract and accepting another, so it more than caught my eye. Technical writing pays well, but it's pretty dry stuff, and I was looking for something fun, a short side project. Writing some background material for Jerry seemed like it would be just the thing. I'd hammer it out, and be done with it by Thanksgiving.
Yeah, right.
Instead, the project that would become HELLAS gradually grew larger and larger, until it started to push aside other projects, to loom bigger on the horizon, to be more important and then most important as time went on. For me, this would not be the first time I'd taken a book from conception to publication: Ninja Burger: The RPG 2nd Edition takes that honor. However, I'm assuming that for most people the process of actually publishing a book is fairly mysterious, and so with Jerry's permission I'm going to share some "behind-the-scenes" insights into the process that led to the publication of HELLAS: Worlds of Sun & Stone.
Just to be clear: what follows is from my perspective, and contains either my opinions, or what I believe to be the facts as I know them. Others may have different opinions or views of the facts, and I would encourage them to add their thoughts in the comments section. This column is about adding transparency to an often opaque process, and that's my only goal here. If I get some math wrong, it's not because I'm trying to mislead -- it's probably because I'm bad at math. Please, correct me. If my opinion or description of a situation differs from your own, please, jump in. That said...
I don't recall every detail of the phone call that followed Jerry's initial email, except that Jerry pitched two ideas to me at the time. One was this crazy thing about Greek mythology-inspired space opera, sort of Spelljammer meets Clash of the Titans. The other was a post-apocalyptic setting (which, coincidentally, we'll be revisiting in the near future, in an unexpected way). It could have gone either way: Jerry was basically asking me to choose. And so I chose HELLAS. It sounded more timely (300, Troy, and the like were on the lips of moviegoers everywhere), and it also sounded easier, frankly, with clearly defined influences that would be easy enough to make our own.
The game wasn't called HELLAS right away. In phone calls and in emails, Jerry and I threw the phrase "Greeks in Space" back and forth at each other. In fact, the original Word Document that would eventually blossom into HELLAS was called simply "greeksinspace.doc." Jerry wisely insisted that we pick a "better title for this than Greeks in Space," because he kept hearing The Muppet Show's "Pigs in Spaaaaaace" in his head. Eventually, on November 20, Jerry sent me an email that suggested HELLAS as the title of the new book. He also suggested that it needed a subtitle, and so I did a little research online. Hellas, in ancient Greek, literally means "the land of the sun and the stone," and since we were building a setting that encompassed multiple worlds, it seemed that "Worlds of Sun and Stone" would suit better. Jerry and I agreed, and so it was thereafter.
We began work on logo creation that same night. The first one wasn't anything special (and I'll spare you my amateurish skills here), but it did kick off the creative process, and on May 7, 2007, Jerry finally got it nearly right on the nose, on try number 3. It's not exactly what we ended up with, but it's pretty darn close.
Of course, we were doing more than playing with fonts all that time; on November 23 Jerry had sent me the first preliminary outline for the book. "I'm shooting for a 128-164 page book," he said. "If it balloons, then so be it." Prescient of him; over the next several months, it became clear that we were working on something much larger, something that frankly felt epic in scope. By the spring of 2007, we knew we had to kick things into gear.
That meant we had to meet.
Now, Jerry and I weren't strangers. I'd known him since he first emailed me on March 31, 2004, back when I was still the Columns Lead for RPGnet. Over the next two years, I worked on several GODSEND Agenda writing assignments for him, and we exchanged many emails. He and I had also sort-of-met, albeit very briefly, at Gencon in August of 2006. We didn't have much time to chat there, however, so it doesn't really count. Jerry was manning the Key20 booth to hawk his GODSEND Agenda books, and after I picked up a stack of my freshly printed Ninja Burger RPGs from the booth, I was off to mingle and explore. It was my first Gencon, and there was a lot to do. I chatted with Mike Pondsmith about Cyberpunk V3. I hung out with Sean Frolich and Deborah Balsam from Dog Soul Publishing, and we won a gold award at the 2006 ENnie ceremony for an e-book I had written for them, named Folkloric: Baba Yaga. Jerry, frankly, was just another face in the crowd back then.
But now, just a few months later, we were suddenly in the middle of HELLAS and it was clear that we needed to get together to hammer out some details. It turned out that Jerry was going to be attending this new convention in Las Vegas called Games Expo, and he invited me to hang out. I decided to swing along, not only to meet Jerry, but to help work the Key20 booth. I flew in on March 18, caught an expensive cab to my hotel, wandered down to the convention hall, and started looking for Jerry. I had only seen him once before. Luckily I had this picture to guide me.
Now, in case you've never heard of Games Expo, you're not alone. It was intended to be some sort of competitor to the GAMA Trade Show, and since this was the first year of its existence, it was billed as a highly-exclusive event. Members of the public could not attend -- only industry folk. I think thousands were expected. But that's not quite what happened.
Games Expo was a ghost town.
For whatever reason -- the weather, sunspots, concern over oil prices, or perhaps just total disinterest -- there were practically no attendees at the show. A number of people with booths basically disappeared after the first day, and those of us left began wandering around the show floor, chatting with each other to kill time and dull the pain. Jerry and I met Brennan Taylor of IPR there, and we established a relationship that led to him carrying our products. I met the girls who designed the Redneck Life board game, which is now a staple at game conventions. The organizers even changed their minds on the third day and let the public attend, but that didn't improve attendance; if anything, it drove people away, as now we had to contend with casino guests who had been drinking and losing money all day long.
However, this meant that Jerry and I ended up hanging out at his booth for most of the show, and much of what HELLAS is today came from those conversations. We decided that the main characters would be called Hellenes, and we nailed down the details of other races like the Kyklopes and Goregons, influenced by but not direct copies of creatures from Greek myth (early concept sketches and final book art are shown below). We knew that we wanted there to be Greek gods, but we also wanted them to be unique to our setting, so we decided they would have slightly different names and spheres of influence. We solidified the idea of Slipspace, a sort of alternate dimension where travel between planetary systems in the galaxy was possible. We sketched out a metaplot that would unfold over five books (books 2 and 3 are in the final planning stages right now). We also decided that we were going to produce a game for adults, and that meant not pulling any punches when it came to descriptions of violence, or sex. After all, when Zeus appears before Leda in the form of a swan, they don't go out for tea and crumpets.
Who knows what might have happened if Games Expo had been a success... maybe HELLAS would have become a 128-page-long coloring book.
And then came the changes.
