Industry Insights: From The Industry Side

An Interview with Ken Hite

by Gareth-Michael Skarka
February 8, 2002 Second of our three-interview series.

This interview originally ran in "THE RELEVANT CONUNDRUM" at the Gaming Outpost, and we appreciate Gaming Outpost and Gareth-Michael Skarka for allowing us to republish it!

Kenneth Hite is perhaps best known for his weekly column of bizarre theories and supernatural historical deconstruction, Suppressed Transmission, found on Steve Jackson Games' Pyramid ezine. He's also the author of GURPS CABAL, one of the best supplements of 2001, filled with secret histories and occult conspiracies. He's a strange one, alright...

GMS: First question: what the hell is wrong with you, anyway? I was going over the two collected editions of Suppressed Transmission last night, and it should be obvious to anyone who reads those that you are a deeply troubled man. In all seriousness, though-- where does that column come from? What was the impetus, and how do you go about crafting these essays of high wierdness?

Hite: I like to say that roleplaying games got me into black magic, and the rest followed from there. I bought possibly the first ever copy of Call of Cthulhu sold in Oklahoma. Soon after I started running it, I began looking into more stuff for the Bad Guys to use -- black magic, conspiracies, and so forth. That tied in with being twelve when Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out -- I soaked up the rich juices of America's second (well, third) great UFO flap right along with the Nestle Quik. Stir that together with one of those trick brains that takes SATs well ("the Templars are to Majestic-12 as the Matamoros murder cult is to...") and you pretty much have Suppressed Transmission.

The specific impetus for any given column, to paraphrase Edison, is 10% inspiration and 90% desperation. I either have some brilliant thing I've just read about that I want to share with everyone, or I just cruise through my library and the Web until enough stuff congeals and a column falls out. Occasionally, there's some topic like manticores that I just want to research anyway, and I discover whatever neat stuff there is right as I'm writing it. Every now and again, I buy a book that looks good and use it to write a column from -- when I bought Michael & Sophie Coe's History of Chocolate, I wrote a column on the conspiratorial secret history of chocolate just so I would have an excuse to read the thing.

GMS: A common lament among writers in the RPG industry is a lack of time to actually get any gaming done. Are you currently playing anything?

Hite: I've run a game every Monday for about the last twelve years. Right now, I'm running Unknown Armies; I'm not sure what's next -- either I'll let the players pick, or I'll force everyone to play a pulp game. I'm also running a modern-setting Call of Cthulhu campaign on Wednesdays, but that may end since two of my players are moving. We'll see.

GMS: The collections of your Suppressed Transmission columns have exposed this work to a wider audience than just the subscribers of Pyramid. Are the collections going to continue?

Hite: That's up to Steve Jackson; I imagine once he and I get enough time to talk about it, we'll try to get a Third Broadcast out -- I've got another year's worth of columns built up.

GMS: What's in store for you? Games? Novels?

Hite: I'm working full time for Decipher on the upcoming new Star Trek and Lord of the Rings RPGs; besides that, there's a few other projects in tangential stages of development for some other companies.

As far as novels go, I just have to pick six months or so when I don't take on any other work and write one -- I have no idea if I'm any good at it, but it would be neat to find out that I am. It's just that if I suck, I've wasted six months of theoretically productive time. Plus, as I'm sure you know, it's difficult to write something "on spec" again after years of having anything I write basically pre-sold. But, if I get over that hump, I've also got a few other notions for some non-fiction books which may or may not ever see the light of day depending on my free time.

GMS: Describe your "dream game" (or "dream campaign", if it's for an existing game.)

Hite: My dream game varies. Although right now I've hit the supernatural horror stuff pretty hard, I'd still love to run either a Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies game set in Georgian England, maybe centering on the infamous Hell-Fire Clubs. Either that or a wild pulp-fantasy type game set during the 16th century Age of Exploration. I use the Call of Cthulhu rule set for almost everything I play, although if I run a pulp game, I may switch out to a more forgiving mechanic than pure, beautiful, brutal percentiles -- GURPS, or even a dice pool system.

GMS: Thanks for your time, Ken!

Hite: No problem!