Looking back, looking ahead

Traditionally, late December is a time for summarizing the past year and taking a look at what the next year might entail. Here in my blog I focus on my writing endeavors — what’s been accomplished in 2018 and what I hope work with in 2019.

2018: My Accomplishments

1. Partisan, the Great Surprise: In March, somebody found the sole remaining printout of the legendary and never-published Swedish RPG Partisan and gave it to me. It deals with foreign occupation of our country, presented in the four settings Brown (Nazi Germany), Red (Cold War Soviet), Blue (Cold War with an authoritarian United States), and Ultraviolet (nefarious aliens from space). Serendipity: everybody had thought that the game was lost forever, but here is my incomplete manuscript from when the game was shelved thirty years ago. The printout nowadays rests securely in a safe. Link (Swedish) >>>
2. During the autumn, I launched my Patreon page, where you can sponsor my writing role-playing games (RPGs) and get various goodies, such as the extant three Partisan settings Red, Blue, and Ultraviolet; and Thriller, my unpublished RPG manuscript from 1983 (espionage and sleuthing in the vein of the original Mission Impossible TV series). Link (English) >>>
3. In October, Helmgast published Sorgeveden, my campaign setting for Krister Sundelin’s fantasy RPG Hjältarnas Tid. The book depicts an immense forest, stretching from spruces and birches in the subarctic north to jungles in the tropics. Link (Swedish) >>>
4. In November, I delivered Märk hur vår skugga, an introductory adventure to the new edition of Chock, a Swedish horror RPG that will be published by Eloso in 2019. Link (Swedish) >>>
5. In December, I launched my product page on DriveThruRPG. So far, it is a trial version, but I intend to use it to sell English PDFs of Traveller settings and other “stuff”. Link (English) >>>
6. In December, my adult daughter Elin, aka the Tiger, joined forces with me as Team Fox. She is currently a student at an art & design school and she will illustrate some products that will get published at DriveThruRPG. Link (English) >>>
7. In December, I published Dust & The Road, a paperback with two dieselpunk shortstories that are partially based on my experiences of serving in Afghanistan ten years ago. The stories introduce my setting Patchwork World, a fragmented steampunk & dieselpunk world. Link (English) >>>

Q4 2018 was obviously a hectic time. When I look at the list above, I feel contented with what I achieved.

2019: My intentions

1. Since 2014, I have planned to make a revised version of the vintage Swedish postapocalyptic RPG Wastelands, but I quickly encountered various snags and obstacles. When Tove & Anders Gillbring a few years later decided to produce Freeway Warrior as an RPG, we agreed that I would turn Wastelands into a Swedish setting for the game. My vision is best summarized as “Lars Molin meets Mad Max”. Tove’s cancer has repeatedly delayed the project, but I hope we can get it moving during 2019.
2. The hush-hush job: I have made a deal with an publisher about a major RPG project. A non-disclosure agreement prevents me from mentioning details until the publisher has announced the venture. But I am already working on it, and the production team has had fruitful brainstorming sessions on Skype. My deadline is late 2019. Yeah, I feel good about this project.
3. Dusk and Dawn is a standalone steampunk novella taking place in Patchwork World, though far from the locations of “Dusk” and “The Road”. I have written the first half of the story and and I hope to complete it in 2019. Link (English) >>>
4. I have outlined a Traveller universe with distinctive qualities, grimmer than the one Marc Miller developed. It’s there to be written when I get time for it. It will sooner or later get published via DriveThruRPG. What rules? Well, probably one set of Cepheus Light and one set of BRP.
5. I have outlined a dieselpunk RPG, working name Iron Empires, that takes places in an alternate timeline. The game will get at least two Terrestrial and one Martian setting. It is too early to go into details, but you’ll get updates in my blog when I have something substantial to tell. My plan is to publish Iron Empires via DriveThroughRPG, using a variant of the Cepheus Engine rules.

I don’t expect to complete all these projects during 2019, but if I get sunny weather with the wind in my back, and there is plenty of coffee in my thermos flask of holding, I might walk a part of my road. However, an ancient word of wisdom cautions us: Man supposes, God disposes.

My Patreon page is live

I have activated my Patreon page. My supporters get access to RPG articles in Swedish or English, among other things my first complete game, Thriller, an espionage/action RPG with science fiction opportunities. I wrote it in 1983-84 but it never got published. And more content is on the way.

Link to my Patreon page >>>

Patreon Progress (3): Almost there

This weekend, I made a complete mock-up of my Patreon site. What remains to do is adding the final batch of PDFs.  My Patreon supporters will get access to: Thriller, the first Swedish role-playing game I wrote; an English alpha version of the rules to Iron Mars, a dieselpunk planetary romance RPG I have been working on for over a year; and some other goodies in Swedish or English. And there is more stuff waiting in the pipeline. Launch within a week or so, so stay tuned to this blog for further news.

Quick Authorial Update For Q4 2018

I haven’t touched the blog for three weeks, because I have been terribly busy with my daytime job as a techwriter and with various family-related matters. However, I’m gearing up for an exciting fourth quarter. My first priority is to complete my introductory adventure to Eloso’s new Swedish horror RPG Chock. Only 20% of the text remains to be written.

After that, it’s time to get going on Wastelands Sverige, a Swedish setting for Åskfågeln’s postapocalyptic RPG Freeway Warrior. My setting is based on the classic Swedish RPG Wastelands from 1991, updated to fit the 21st century. I intend to pay a lot of attention to the port city of Gothenburg and to the fertile farmlands of the adjacent province of Västergötland.

And there are a few other “gamey things” in the pipeline, though my non-disclosure agreements prevent me from saying more. It looks like I’ll have an exciting 2019 when it come to writing games.

I am still working on my Patreon site, and I want to get it up and running before the end of the year.

As for my science fiction and fantasy novels, they are in the backburner for the time being; they have no deadlines, unlike the game texts.

Patreon Progress (2): “Thriller”

I am currently busy fixing a lot of things at home and that is a recipe for serendipitous discoveries: in this case, I unearthed the typewritten manuscript for Thriller, my first complete role-playing game design.

In the summer of 1983 I worked night shifts as a solitary security guard at a factory in my hometown Gothenburg. The nights were long and dull, so I took a small typewriter to work  and wrote Thriller during the slack hours between my patrol rounds. (My boss didn’t object, because my hobby kept me awake.) The game was based on tropes from the spy comics (e.g. Secret Agent X-9) and action-hero television series (e.g. The Professionals) that were available in Sweden in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Thriller was an adequate game in those days, though it is outdated nowadays. I submitted its manuscript to Titan Games, the Swedish company that a few years later published Swedish Dungeons & Dragons, but they were not interested. I kept on working on the project for some time: my manuscript contains an addendum from 1984 that outlines a parallel-worlds setting, comparable to Steve Jackson’s much later GURPS Alternate Earths. I remember play-testing a Thriller adventure in late 1984 with Ylva, Christer, and Per, three university friends in Lund. The set-up was a cross-over with Call of Cthulhu, even though the players never realized it. Hence Thriller was flexible enough to handle any kind of contemporary action-oriented campaign.

However, when I joined Target Games in April 1985, I got busy with that company’s games so Thriller ended up in my collection of unrealized game projects.

A scanned PDF in Swedish of Thriller will become available for my supporters  when my Patreon page is up and running.

Patreon Progress (1)

I have decided to tell you, at irregular intervals, how my preparations for my Patreon page are progressing. So here is my first report.

I have had a brain-storming session with a friend to determine my focus and priorities. My conclusions were pretty straightforward:

1. I will emphasize PDFs for role-playing games, mainly in English because these days my readers come from all over the world.
2. I will also emphasize prêt-à-porter, that is, stuff that you can start using straight away without having to buy some other game product.
   • As a consequence, I will develop a flexible rules engine that can be revised and attached to any setting or adventure that I put in my Patreon library.
3. Mars, yes there is no escaping Mars when you deal with me. I intend to complete a semi-finished science-fantasy Mars game that has resided on my computers for several years.

Well, that’s all for today. Please stay tuned to this blog for further news.

 

I am preparing my Patreon library

“Anders Blixt is a machine that turns coffee into role-playing games.”

This summer I have started working on a Patreon page. My intention is to create an interesting library with English and Swedish gaming articles (plus occasional fiction, and non-fiction) for my supporters’ enjoyment. I have accumulated a lot of unpublished “stuff” over my 35+ years as a professional game designer and writer, and I have ideas for plenty more. My three children are now adults or almost-adults, so I have more time for sitting at my laptop and turn coffee-fueled dreams into texts. And these days, there are publishing tools available that would have been science-fiction-ish at the time of the publication of my first paid article in 1980: “The Werewolf Disease” in Journal of Travellers’ Aid Society #5 .

I have no idea how many months it will take for me to put together an attractive collection, because many old texts exist only on paper and need to be scanned and processed. And I have no wish to launch my Patreon place too early and thereby make my supporters disappointed.

Therefore, my advice is: stay tuned to this blog.