INTERVIEW WITH PAUL VERNON, PART ONE

Paul Vernon is a name well known to gamers of a certain vintage. In the 1980s he was a frequent contributor to White Dwarf, Imagine and Dragon magazines. In particular his articles on designing quasi-mediaeval towns and societies were very influential, with subsequent echoes in places like Irilian, Pelinore and Middenheim. He was author of the Starstone fantasy campaign pack, published by Northern Sages, and the Fatemaster gamebooks from George Allen & Unwin’s Unicorn imprint. His writing also extended to WFRP. He worked on the first-edition rulebook and an abortive campaign for the game. He was kind enough to discuss with me his role in UK gaming from that time.

How did you get into roleplaying games?

Well, my first encounter with D&D…. I was into tabletop gaming, primarily ancient wargaming, when I was at university, and there was a wargames club, and somebody was running a D&D game one evening. So I sat in and I was given a level-one Fighter. I found it pretty boring, really. It was pretty much a random dungeon. It was just kind of go down the corridor, find a door, the Thief checks it for traps, blah, blah, blah, bang the door down, kill the baddies, you know, get the treasure, wander round the corridor to the next door. There was no raison d’être for any of us doing it, to be honest. So I kind of discounted roleplaying games with that. But I was involved in a postal Diplomacy game run by a guy who had some friends that he used to, you know, go for weekend game sessions. I mean primarily board games, or whatever. But on one occasion, one of the guys DMed ‘The Halls of Tizun Thane’. I think it was a White Dwarf adventure by Albie Fiore. And it was really good! I really enjoyed it. So I kind of got into it.

Page from ‘The Halls of Tizun Thane’, White Dwarf 18 (April/May 1980)

What led you to write your articles on designing urban fantasy settings for White Dwarf?

Looking at the adventures that were around at the time, a lot of them… well, in order to suspend disbelief sufficiently to enjoy a roleplaying game, the actual milieu has got to be consistent for me. I soon got the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons player’s guide and stuff, and the economics there just didn’t make sense. I did raise this with Gary Gygax, actually, at one point at a games convention at Reading that he was a guest at. Yes, I remember him offering to buy the bar when they closed it at 11! But I had a chat with him about it, and he didn’t see a problem. He said, “Well, you know, the economy in D&D is inflationary, blah, blah, blah, blah”. I mean, all that meant was that gold was cheap. It didn’t mean that bearers working for you all day didn’t get enough to live on. That didn’t make sense. So, I contacted White Dwarf, I think, asking if they might be interested in an article or two about that. It was Jamie Thompson who was the Assistant Editor at the time, and he was quite keen. So I wrote the… I think I called it ‘Designing a Quasi-Medieval Economy for D&D’, but they changed that to ‘…Society…’ at some point. Yeah. And then followed on from that with ‘The Town Planner’.

Pages from ‘Designing a Quasi-Medieval Society for D&D’ and ‘The Town Planner’, White Dwarf 29-33 (February/March-September 1982), reprinted in Best of White Dwarf Articles III

How did Starstone come about?

I left Leeds University with a degree in Sociology, which isn’t a very tangible, terribly employable qualification, so I went on to do a post grad in Computer Science at Bradford the year after. Unfortunately the timing was really bad in that it was 1979 I started the course. Over that year, the first year of the Thatcher government, a lot of small computer software houses and stuff were going to the wall. No new ones were starting up, and there were a lot of experienced guys on the jobs market. With no work experience in the field and just paper qualifications I was in a poor position.

After a number of unsuccessful attempts to get a job in computing, I realised that the only way that I was going to get a job at all was to make one. So I decided, since I was into roleplaying games, that I’d try writing and publishing scenarios for D&D.

From my point of view, one of the main purposes of the articles in White Dwarf was to get something of a name for myself before I released Starstone. I moved to Rossendale because it was one of the pilot areas for a scheme called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, where you got some amount of cash first year of operating a new business. So I went ahead and published that under my own flag, if you will.

So Northern Sages was you.

Oh yeah! It was very much a one-man-band. In addition to writing Starstone, I drew all the maps, arranged for the printing out of my own pocket, oversaw the paste-up of the artwork by Diane Hadfield (who also did a few of the illustrations), hired a sealing machine to individually bag each copy, prepared and posted all the mail order sales and hawked it to what retailers I could. I arranged US distribution with The Armory in Baltimore.

Unfortunately I underpriced it. I thought that there’d be more mail-order business than selling through shops. And, of course, with a cover price of £2.99, there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room regarding supplying retailers. But what really killed me was, there was an outfit called Game Centre that had about, I don’t know, six or seven shops. They put in a big order, about six hundred copies, maybe? Well, then Game Centre went under, and I got bitten by a pernicious piece of legislation called the Sale of Goods Act, which states that unless trading terms agreed beforehand say differently, the property in goods belongs to the person or the company receiving the goods as soon as it’s transferred, whether they actually pay you for them or not.

So the original run of Starstone was 3,000 copies. Six hundred was effectively my profit for the exercise. And Virgin ended up buying all the Game Centre retail outlets, and the copies of Starstone went with that. So basically those six hundred were sold to Virgin to pay off the bank and I didn’t see a penny from it. That kind of killed my efforts to run Northern Sages as a publishing outlet.

Starstone (1982)

There was a sequel planned to Starstone, called Ristenby Town. What can you tell me about it?

The idea of Starstone was that, rather than have linked adventures that use different locations all the time, that nefarious powers had tried overtly taking over the area previously and been sent packing, because it attracted, in D&D terms, high-level characters to oppose them. So they kind of changed their tack and were trying to encourage people to leave the area by increasingly serious threats, which basically would mean that characters could make a home inside – Ristenby town was where I was planning this primarily – and be faced with ever increasing and ever more serious opposition, as opposed to having to move around. So it’d be a lot more immersive in that they’d end up buying houses in Ristenby and get involved in the life of the town outside adventures.

Did you ever write Ristenby Town?

I made notes. I’ve got an orange exercise book knocking around somewhere that’s got all the notes for it. The town was going to be pretty well fully fledged, along the lines of ‘The Town Planner’. Three weaving families out of ten would be fleshed out, for example, and if any more needed to be brought into play, DMs could do that themselves.

I was going to base it on Conwy, which isn’t too far away from me, in Wales. It’s a walled town with quite a big castle. It goes back to, what, the 1290s. That would have been an ideal template, really, for Ristenby. Midkemia did a town I found later that was actually based on Caernarfon, so the same kind of idea. I think it was Carse.

Conwy Castle

The City of Carse (1980)

So that was the basic idea of Starstone, in that you can reuse areas, but populate them with different things. It’d be like an alternative real life.

There’s a strong historical element in ‘Designing a Quasi-Medieval Society’, ‘The Town Planner’ and Starstone. Where does that historicity come from?

I’ve always been interested in history. I didn’t study history formally past A-Level, but sociology to a large extent is a continuation of history. It certainly came in handy when writing the ‘Town Planner’ series. I wanted a believable working society as a background to any adventures that I decided to write. It’s a fine line. It only takes one thing that doesn’t make sense. Adventures and backgrounds have got to have an internal logical consistency to be believable. So I did kind of borrow from history.

What other influences were there on your gaming writing?

I read The Hobbit as young teenager, quickly followed by the three volumes of Lord of the Rings – loved them all. Despite all the “as good as Tolkien at his best” hyperbole seen on subsequent fantasy literature, I still think they have yet to be equalled. I probably sat in the same leather armchair as Tolkien had when I went to 40 Museum Street to finalise the Fatemaster contracts.

Ruskin House, 40 Museum Street, Bloomsbury, London, former office of George Allen & Unwin

Then, just games I’d played with people. As I say, the Albie Fiore one. That was a really good adventure. The other influences were primarily on where people had been going wrong. I don’t know if you’ve run into The Village of Hommlet, but it’s got tradesmen that wouldn’t survive in a village, like stonemasons when there aren’t any buildings made of stone. They didn’t really have a feel for the milieu, I don’t think, but then again living on the wrong side of the Atlantic, it’s understandable, isn’t it?

T1 The Village of Hommlet (1979)

You wrote a pair of Fatemaster gamebooks. What’s the story behind them?

Solo adventure gamebooks were becoming popular at the time. Somebody suggested that I offer to write some for Penguin, you know, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, work for them. Well, I’ve never been a particularly good employee. I like to be in control of my own work, where possible. So, I decided to try doing that on my own. And I contacted George Allen & Unwin, who were Tolkien’s publishers.

Oh, at the same convention that I met Gary Gygax, I had a chat with Steve Jackson, and he was saying that George Allen & Unwin were the first publishers that they’d taken The Warlock of Firetop Mountain to, which was kind of interesting.

I got a deal to write two solo adventure gamebooks, Fortress of the Firelord and Treachery in Drakenwood. I’ve got to say my heart wasn’t really in them, but the deal was that if they went okay, I’d be able to write solo adventure gamebooks set in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, which would have been mega. Do you remember a really crappy cartoon film of Lord of the Rings?

The Ralph Bakshi one in the 1970s that only got half way?

Yeah, that’s right.

Iron Crown Enterprises bought the merchandising rights to that film and started doing Middle-earth material for roleplaying on that basis. Nothing to do with the film, really. Unfortunately, well… rather than call out Iron Crown for exceeding the remit of their merchandising rights – it stops at action figures, right? – they came to some arrangement with Iron Crown and shelved their own plans to start publishing gamebooks. I wasn’t party to the negotiations, but it was certainly bad news for me. So that’s how I lost my second million!

Treachery in Drakenwood (1986) and Fortress of the Firelord (1986)

There was a plan for a third Fatemaster book, wasn’t there? I think it was called Marauders at Red Marsh. What happened to that?

Well, a friend of mine who was in computing suggested a really good development for solo adventure gamebooks, which again I floated to Unwin. The editor I had originally been working with had been replaced by someone else, who wasn’t really that into solo adventure gamebooks.

The idea I had was how they do in computing: when you leave a room or area, to tick a box at the back of the book. If you return there, you get a get a “Go to box whatever at the back”, and if it’s ticked, you’ve already been there and go to the section which deals with the room as you left it, which would have made the actual experience a lot smoother, really.

The Fatemaster books are quite unusual because they use the floorplan tiles from Endless Plans for the maps.

I ran into the guy that did Endless Plans. He was pretty well a one-man band trying to get to the market. I used the Endless Plans kind of as a favour, really. I mean it was a lot more fiddly than actually drawing the maps from scratch, as I did in Starstone. But my philosophy has always been that if you can help people out, why not? Well, the guy who ran Endless Plans at one point suggested that because I was using them, I should be paying them a royalty! You know, “I’m only doing this as a favour to you!”.

The second part of the interview discusses Paul’s work on WFRP.

I would like to thank Paul for taking the time to speak with me. I would also like to thank Allan Grohe for his help.

Title art by Emmanuel. Used without permission. No challenge intended to the rights holders.