Rising Phoenix Con 2025 - GM Bookclub
Module Cover with Rising Phoenix
This lively discussion brings to light the intricate relationship between literature and tabletop gaming, particularly focusing on how beloved book characters inspire Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. The host engages with a trio of experienced Dungeon Masters—Dan, Pat, and Neil—who share their unique experiences and insights from years of gaming. They dive into the mechanics of character creation, the artistry of storytelling, and even sprinkle in some humorous anecdotes about their personal gaming journeys. Notably, they emphasize the importance of drawing inspiration from a myriad of sources, ranging from classic literature to modern comics, showcasing how these narratives can enrich the gaming experience. As the conversation flows, listeners are treated to a blend of clever banter and thoughtful reflections on how to weave literary elements into the fabric of their own campaigns, making for an engaging and informative episode.
Here is a link to Rising Phoenix Game Con: link
Here is the transcript:
Speaker A 00:00:01
Welcome to a special edition of the Game Masters Book Club recorded live at Rising Phoenix Game Con in Milford, Mass. On Saturday, April 26. At a critical Chat, one of the con's lunchtime panels, I sat down with three DMs who were attending the convention and chatted with them about their D and D experiences and about book based characters that they've brought to their own campaign and what they're reading now for inspiration in their own games. Big thanks to those DMs. Dan Collins of the Wandering DMs podcast, Pat French, who's a Pathfinder game designer, and Neil Deafly, a Gen Con game master and GUI Cube game master. Let's go to the conversation live at Rising Phoenix gamecon.
Speaker B 00:00:41
I don't have any waivers here, but does everybody agree to be recorded since this is a podcast?
Speaker C 00:00:46
Yes, please.
Speaker B 00:00:47
All right, fantastic. We have verbal agreement, Michael. They all said they wanted to be recorded. Okay, so that's great. Fantastic. All right, so yes, you can't, can't escape now. Yes. Thank you to Michael Stair, who brought all the cool recording equipment that makes this at all possible. Normally the Game Masters Book Club is a book club where we get together as GMs and we talk about books that we choose to read. So far we've done. Currently published, there is Stephen King's Fairy Tale, there's Becky Chambers, Robot and Monk Duology, which we've done. And the third one that's currently out is Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher. We have more coming out. I've got four in the can, as it were, that are still waiting to get processed because doing audio editing is still new to me. So that's been fun. But really what it comes down to is I'm a game master. I enjoy reading books. I steal all kinds of things from books when I read them. In fact, I think some of the earliest memories that I have about Dungeons and Dragons are when I took out the Greek mythology book from my local library. And I said, wow, look at that Hermes guy. He does all these cool things where he steals stuff and he stole that cattle and he had a magic. He has a magic Asclepius wand. What's an Asclepius wand? What does that do? And since literally, literally since 1979 till now, that's what I've been doing. I've been reading books and putting them into my game. A more recent version of this would be have any of you read the Vorkosican series by Lois McMahon, a fantastic science fiction piece, really interesting main character. But what I stole from it was that our main character is actually born out of a uterine replicator. So it's a. They take the uterus out, they put it into, like, a little canister, and that's where the baby grows, so they don't have to grow in the mom. This is standard practice in some cultures, but in his culture, it's sort of an emergency thing that happens. Great, great stories, by the way, if you get a chance to read them. And I thought, well, what if I took that and combined it with the dwarf fiction that there are only male Dwarves, and the Dwarves are great craftspeople, right? So they could make a uterine replicator if they had the wherefall and they had maybe their God's help for the first one or something. So that's the basis of all of the Dwarves in the current campaign that I'm running, which is based around the idea that there really are no female dwarfs. They're all male dwarfs. Everybody's male. They all get together and they all make more male dwarfs. So today, yeah, it's fun to explore where all these great ideas come from. So today I thought I'd come to the con. We're here at Rising Phoenix, April 2025, and I have some nice, lovely people who I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourselves and after you introduce yourself, just so everyone gets a chance to know what kind of gamer you are. Let's go classic and say, has everyone here played D and D? It's kind of a baseline. A lot of the stuff that we talk about, we try and go beyond D and D, but that's not. But D and D is great for. It has its thing and it does it well. It's most common language and most people play it. So give me your name, like how long you've been playing and what's your favorite D and D class.
Speaker D 00:04:14
Great.
Speaker B 00:04:14
Why don't we start over here with. I think that's Dan.
Speaker C 00:04:16
I can see her. Yes. So I'm Dan Collins, and if it's okay, Eric. I have my own podcast, Wandering DMs.
Speaker B 00:04:22
Plug it, plug it.
Speaker C 00:04:23
With my good friend Paul. Paul Siegel is co host, and we're on YouTube and Twitch and podcast sites. That's wandering DMs. So I have been playing DD, I think, like you, since, I think 79 is when I started with the Holmes Blue Book Basic. I play a lot of D and D. I play that predominantly. And the funny thing is that over time, I've kind of regressed in what I Play. So I was playing, you know, first edition AD&D in the 80s and then it was a little bit before my time. But then later on I discovered original D and D from 74 and I decided I actually like that better. It's a little more minimalist. You can shape it more to what you and the DM and the players kind of prefer. So I actually play, I think lightly house ruled. Original D and D is what I play mostly for my fantasy gaming. And I currently have, if you remember, the 80s TSR Star Frontiers science fiction game. So I've been running a classic Star Frontiers campaign for about a year and a month at this point with some much younger players like our around 30 and we're having a blast with Jack, right? Yeah, right. So some people criticize me for being a little bit narrow focused, that I kind of want to dig into a game and really understand it. And so I played a lot of D and D and not a whole lot of other stuff. But that's my history basically.
Speaker B 00:05:45
Just to be fair, one of the reasons why I started this book club is so I would be forced to find new things and try new things. But I am primarily a D and.
Speaker D 00:05:54
D player as well.
Speaker B 00:05:55
I'm usually when I invite other people on the show it's like hi, you play all these cool games and I'm the D and D player.
Speaker C 00:06:01
Let's do it.
Speaker D 00:06:01
I'm Pat Friend. I don't have a podcast to plug, but I do have a book coming out hopefully in the next month on Pathfinder Infinity called the Doomworks Field Manual. So if you're listening to this and it's a month later, please look on Pathfinder Infinity.
Speaker B 00:06:14
Oh, I guarantee you it will be more than a month before it gets up. No matter how fast, no matter how fast I am, it's still gonna take a month for it to get up.
Speaker D 00:06:21
I've been playing since so probably like 30 years, like the mid-90s I started playing. So it was whatever shapes I second edition AD&D was at that time. You know, I started with like the kit and went from there and then I was third edition and three five obviously like was really like that was like my home for D and D. Like and then it was such a great era because there was all the other like D20 system games and there was, you could really just like find almost anything and none of it was bounced to each other even like within its own system. So it's still great. So like that and I Vampire the Masquerade obviously the same Era. And I'm really, really into Pathfinder now. That's my main thing. Pathfinder second Edition. I buy every book. Very addicted. And that's my book is in that system. The DoomWorks Field Manual is the source book for that. And I'm running some of those games with it this weekend. Neil was at 1 yesterday, right?
Speaker B 00:07:16
Yeah. Okay, Neil.
Speaker E 00:07:17
Hi, my name is Neil Devlin. I don't have a podcast or a book, but I'm a game master. I got into D and d back in 2008, didn't have a job and friend was like, want to play D and D? I'm like, sure. And then played off and on. Then we actually switched to pathfinder to our 3x5 fluent pathfinder. Then played that on and off. And then, you know, it was quiet for a bit. And then what changed a lot of things was the pandemic. I started playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition. I love Pathfinder 2nd Edition. But I met this guy on a Facebook group and he helped me start running games and being like my GM mentor. And then he introduced me to this thing called the GUI Cube. They are a Denver based company and they run, they make modules for 5th edition and they're fantastic. And long story short, I ended up. The past couple years I've been running for the GUI Cube at Gen Con, Gary Con, Genghis Khan, you know, as a GUI Cube GM and having a great time. And I also. My main focus now is I want to run more games. I also want to play different systems. Like I. I have a DCC shirt on today. I know audio people can't see my.
Speaker B 00:08:49
Shirt, but imagine and the Gary Khan hat.
Speaker E 00:08:52
So yeah, Gary Con hat. Yep. But I, I've been trying to play DCC more. Pathfinder 2 more 5e, you know, 13. I was in the 13th age. I was in Pat Steamworks game. I've also been playing stuff like Morkborg, Dragon Bane, Pirate Boy board. Just trying to diversify and play different systems just to see what else is.
Speaker B 00:09:17
Out there, see what we can steal. Right.
Speaker E 00:09:20
That's always the best part.
Speaker B 00:09:21
So Dan, what is your preferred D and D class?
Speaker C 00:09:25
Oh, interesting. As a player.
Speaker B 00:09:26
Yeah.
Speaker C 00:09:26
See the funny thing is that is that I was almost never a player. So I got started at a point where there weren't any other people that knew what D and D was. So I was actually always the dm since day one, since I opened the box. Honestly, if I sit at a table, I usually try to help the rest of the team and I'm usually the last person to pick to make sure that I get something that assists the rest of the team. So if I had an open field, I'd probably pick fighter. Weirdly, I usually wind up playing clerics a lot of the time.
Speaker B 00:09:56
Oh, shock.
Speaker C 00:09:57
Because I was just gonna say I.
Speaker B 00:09:59
Like to support everything everybody does.
Speaker C 00:10:00
Yeah, there you go. There you go. And I'll say the really ridiculous thing is the number one thing that I house roll my own D and D game is I prohibit clerics. There are no clerics. There are no good player clerics in my games. And then ironically, I wind up playing them all the time in other people's games. So there's a weird yin yang in my life about. About which side of the table I'm on. And. And I usually wind up. My longest running character that I had in a long running campaign was. It was a cleric. Yeah.
Speaker B 00:10:30
When I started, I was one of the first people to keep playing too.
Speaker C 00:10:32
Yeah.
Speaker B 00:10:32
But my father actually just found the Dungeons and Dragons thing for me. He was a mathematics professor, or rather mathematics high school teacher, and he was working with some kids and a kid came up to him and said, oh, Mr. Jackson, I'm trying to buy a new car. And he's just selling everything he has. And my. My dad's a geometry teacher, so he sees all this graph paper and all these geometric solids and he's like, you say kids play this game, and he's like. And he's like, yeah, absolutely. And he's like, my son enjoys a good fantasy book. Perhaps I shall bring this home. My father did not speak like that at all. But my dad brought it home for me over, actually over an April break, just like this would be for kids right now. So it was a winter break. He brought it over for me for a February break, and he ran my first dungeon for me. So that was. He was my DM for a little while, and then I eventually took over for other people. So. Yeah.
Speaker C 00:11:24
I should also point out that I'm also a math professor from my day job. That's very close to my heart.
Speaker B 00:11:29
There you go.
Speaker C 00:11:30
Yeah.
Speaker B 00:11:31
I'm talking about, like, the first thing I learned about DM D&D was like, what is the probability of rolling an 18 on 3D6? Like, I learned probability theory from D and D. I would argue that that's.
Speaker C 00:11:41
Why I have a math career, actually. It's like digging into DND and those kinds of questions is probably what put me on the path to be having a job, frankly.
Speaker B 00:11:49
There we go. Yeah, fantastic.
Speaker D 00:11:51
So classic D and D class I hate to say cleric again, but the three five. But the three. But the three five cleric was so good and I miss it so much. Like the 35 cleric could like wear armor and use shields and they haven't really gotten back to that I feel. Although clerics in 5e are pretty powerful, I shouldn't crap on that.
Speaker B 00:12:11
The domain, once they started adding domains they really became quite. They way more interesting.
Speaker D 00:12:16
So that was so like. And again forever DM experience in a lot of cases.
Speaker B 00:12:21
I.
Speaker D 00:12:22
If I get to expand it out of D and D. I want to say Pathfinder Inventor is my favorite card class though, because that is a fun class. That is a fun.
Speaker B 00:12:30
Is that like the Artificer? I haven't played a lot of.
Speaker D 00:12:31
I haven't played an artificer, so I.
Speaker B 00:12:33
Would say it's hard to be certain.
Speaker D 00:12:35
It is. You can use magic stuff, but it is specifically non magical creation of. Of items. So I think, I think Artificer is a little bit.
Speaker B 00:12:43
Artificer is a little more mixed of the two. If you've ever seen ever read the comic Girl Genius by Pil Kajabolo that in like the spark magic makes things that don't normally work work because if you put all those gears together they wouldn't work. But because I'm magical, that's more. The artificial yours is a bit more physics oriented.
Speaker D 00:13:01
Yes. At least in terms of the class. And then in ter as you're leveling up, you have the ability to gain those magic things and create magic items and take the items that you're creating and add magical elements to them. But I love just the putting stuff together aspect of it. If you're playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition right now and you want a class that just does an absurd amount of damage, I cannot stress how powerful Weapon Inventor is. Weapon Inventor is so powerful. Construct inventor.
Speaker B 00:13:27
You get guns.
Speaker D 00:13:28
You can get guns. Guns. I was from the Guns and Gears books. So like. So depending on how your DM is playing and what their world looks like, there might be some push and pull on that. But generally speaking, if you're playing one of those classes, you should have access to those items.
Speaker B 00:13:40
So there you go, Neil.
Speaker E 00:13:42
So you're listening. Are going to be like he's gonna say. He's gonna say yes. I'm gonna say cleric. I love clerics.
Speaker D 00:13:52
There's a GM thing.
Speaker E 00:13:53
Yeah. What you were saying earlier. I also will shift to wherever my party needs me. But I love playing clerics just because not only they can heal, they can also generally do damage themselves. They're also versatile. So you're not just always swinging a sword. You're doing multiple things, and you have.
Speaker B 00:14:15
That immediate tie into the world. Right. Like, you. You don't have to work for it. You don't have to build anything else. You can just be like, I worship the Raven Queen. I worship Cthulhu. I worship, you know, I worship Zeus, whatever. You're gonna pick. Right?
Speaker E 00:14:28
Right.
Speaker B 00:14:29
So you have that immediate tie in, and that starts you onto the world building thing, which I think obviously is GMs. We're all, you know, that's. We want to. We want to be attached to that. I don't know if there's a small.
Speaker C 00:14:38
Thread with clerics of, like. Like, we're dms. And it's like, now you get to listen to me because I'm the cleric.
Speaker D 00:14:45
Okay.
Speaker B 00:14:46
There's a.
Speaker D 00:14:47
Well, I don't know what you think, but God told me, like, just a little aside.
Speaker B 00:14:54
Yeah, I'm not God, but I'm talking for. All right, So I feel. I feel like I'm going to be. Buck the trend here. I have two basic types of characters that I play. Up until very recently, I would have. I would have 100% said Paladin all the way. And I think part of that is. Yeah, I know. Thank you, Michael. Thank you for that. Thank Michael. Giving me the look, like.
Speaker D 00:15:16
Oh, really?
Speaker B 00:15:16
I'm so shocked. Yeah. So I'm a Paladin guy. I do, like, again, for me, it's the lore tie in. It's a very. I like having a code and doing a thing and being sort of. And also speaking for my deity, as it were, and having that authority as it. As it is. But I've been. I spent 20 years as a. As a high school teacher, so I tend to flow a little into Bard now as well. And I do like the idea of, like, having all the knowledge. Like, if I can't. If I can't be in charge, I want all the knowledge. Right. And that's. That's. That's the way those. Both of those two things go. So given that we only know, like, where you're coming from and what kind of characters you like to play, and I assume you have all read books before. Do you have a favorite character that you have either already brought into a campaign that you've run, like a favorite character from a book or one that you've cleverly disguised to be, you know, like, this is clearly so and so. But I call him this in my campaign. Is there a character from a book? That you've brought into your campaign and who are they and what do they do?
Speaker C 00:16:15
Interesting. The thing I would say is, and I was, I was just talking to my co host Paul about this this morning, is that a lot of the overall sensibility of just how magic and wizards work in the world for me comes from very old school pulp traditions where wizards mostly weren't good guys at all. So if I look at something like Elric of if you're a wizard dealing with magic, you're inherently kind of dealing with sketchy forces all the time, has really informed a lot about how the backstory of wizards in general work in the world. And we were just talking about, in my world, most of the time I'm assuming that there aren't any really good high level wizards. And that might not be evident to the player character at lower level, but maybe at some higher level it's going to be revealed that all the wizardly magic in the world is tainted in some way. And I largely get that kind of thing from the Elric books or, you know, in the Conan books. There aren't any really good wizards either. So that kind of inspiration very much. I can see the DNA of that in the original D and D rules. And it's nice that those things synthesize for me. And I probably, if I hadn't been reading those books, I probably wouldn't think about it that way.
Speaker A 00:17:38
There we go.
Speaker B 00:17:38
And you did exactly what would have been. The next thing I would have said was like, is there system that you would choose? And obviously that's your preferred system.
Speaker C 00:17:45
Exactly, exactly.
Speaker B 00:17:46
And that's how that all ties in.
Speaker C 00:17:47
Yeah.
Speaker B 00:17:48
Fantastic.
Speaker C 00:17:48
Thank you.
Speaker B 00:17:48
Thank you so much. Keep going in the way we've been going.
Speaker A 00:17:51
Pat.
Speaker D 00:17:52
So I don't know that I have a specific character from this series, but is anyone familiar with Robert Aspirin's myth adventure?
Speaker B 00:17:59
Oh, yeah.
Speaker D 00:18:00
So that's like kind of. That's a vibe I like to bring to my worlds a lot. It's very like this comedic aspect to it. And one of my favorite things, like trope wise, is the idea that the most powerful magician is just a freaking liar and that like the most powerful thing they can do is lie to you effectively. And that happens a lot in those books. Like, I think the best example off the top of my head is the main character has like these rings that are just like these tchotchkes and that the only enchantment on them is that the rings don't come off. But he convinces this like King and Queen who are getting married and they don't want to get married. And what, they want to kill each other and it's going to be this whole thing. He convinces them that should they hurt one another, the rings are bonded and it will like, if you stab her, you'll take a stab wound and so on. And it's just a total lie. It's just total fabrication. But it works and it moves him forward in the world. And I really like that as a thing. But there's other great examples, like in Willow, the end of Willow is him doing his disappearing pig trick and it defeats Brav Morta, the incredibly evil, incredibly powerful magic user, because she can't figure it out. And she's just straight. What spell was that? I've never heard of that spell before.
Speaker B 00:19:16
What in the world?
Speaker D 00:19:17
You know? So I don't know. I really like that vibe in it. Like the idea that like, and to put it in terms of like a GM situation, like have your players, like, they think that they're dealing with a really powerful person and. And they're not. You know, they're just being lied to and like, they're not passing their perception checks to sense motive or whatever. So I always really like that idea of it. That's always like, kind of stuck with me.
Speaker B 00:19:39
So the clever use of magic. Yeah.
Speaker D 00:19:42
Or the clever use of not magic.
Speaker C 00:19:44
Right.
Speaker D 00:19:44
Like, Infinity War has a great example too, when Dr. Strange is fighting the dude at the beginning with the telekinesis and he can't get the Mind Stone from him. And he says it's a simple spell, but quite powerful or something, and it's just a lie. That's not the Mind Stone. He's hiding it over his shoulder invisibly, the same way that Loki was hiding one. It's the most obvious thing in the Marvel movies. That's where everything is. It's right over someone's right shoulder. But like, but it works against a freaking telepath, I think. I don't know. He has my powers.
Speaker E 00:20:13
Like, you know, Neil, I'm a little different. I generally. I've been trying to read more, but I generally run like pre written modules and stuff. So all those characters are brought in. But if I have to create something on the fly, I am a. I used to be a Ghostbuster. Yeah. I have a proton pack. I. The whole thing.
Speaker B 00:20:37
Okay.
Speaker E 00:20:38
Yeah. And I did a bunch of like the safe Paris Day Parade march for the Ghostbusters, etc. So I will sometimes bring like the art archetype of like guys into a Role playing game, like Ray, kind of like the Heart or like the cockiness of Peter Main, stuff like that. But generally. And I've also played the Western games. Ghostbusters rpg.
Speaker B 00:21:04
Oh, wow. I didn't know they had one.
Speaker E 00:21:07
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Came out in the 80s, I believe. It's great.
Speaker C 00:21:12
Yeah, it's a great premise.
Speaker E 00:21:13
Yes.
Speaker C 00:21:14
Yeah.
Speaker B 00:21:17
And now you're doing Monster of the Week, though. In this case the trope, not the game. Right.
Speaker E 00:21:21
And then what we were doing is that we were playing ourselves. So we were all playing ourselves as Ghostbusters. Well, actually, so I was kind of mad. That was.
Speaker B 00:21:31
That can be a little embarrassing, though, when you start realizing how low your skill levels are and so many things. That's always tough to play yourself. You're like, yeah, it's really only a two there. It's. That's tough.
Speaker D 00:21:42
Very, very toxic experience years ago where someone surprised the group with, this is what we're doing. And it was that. It was. You're playing yourself.
Speaker B 00:21:49
And he had made the sheets.
Speaker D 00:21:50
Oh, everyone. It was.
Speaker B 00:21:52
Oh, yeah, that's a little rough.
Speaker D 00:21:54
It was real cringe.
Speaker B 00:21:55
Yeah, you really. Wow, my charisma's that low. Oh, man. I noticed your sheet's real nice.
Speaker D 00:22:02
What are all these skills you have that no one else has?
Speaker C 00:22:05
I find if you ask people to gauge their own ability levels for role players, there's a real preponderance that they'll say that their intelligence is 18. And I find that really, you know, role players are very, you know, tasteful, intelligent people. But, man, there's a lot of 18s when people stab themselves out. Oh, my goodness.
Speaker B 00:22:24
All right, so, Neil, we're gonna reverse here because you had said you hadn't been reading quite as much, but we're gonna do the last part here where we're gonna talk about, like, books that you've read or things or media that you've watched that you're currently drawing inspiration from for either your games or, like, or what you're doing. And you, obviously, you hit us with the Ghostbuster thing, but you have a second piece of media, actually have Every.
Speaker E 00:22:43
Single Pathfinder 2 book. So I take a lot of inspiration from that world. And so I'll read a bunch and just pick up different, like, story notes that they, you know, because there is. Each of the adventure paths have a story and they actually affect the world and stuff.
Speaker B 00:23:02
And there's a lot of really great writers out there. Oh, one of them's at the table, of course, maybe a little pandering, but you know, but there's a lot of really great. There's a lot of really great stories that you can be found inside your quote unquote average game on the other.
Speaker E 00:23:15
Side, which I mentioned earlier. Gully Cube, they have a lot of great writers. They're also getting a lot of. Last year they did the Tomb of Guys and Gags Kick center where they work with Luke Gygax and Ed Greenwood writes some things, I believe. So I read a lot of published adventures. So I'll read a lot of that stuff and I'll take things or maybe a little bit to either flow better.
Speaker B 00:23:37
Or sign of a great dm, be able to jump to take that right off the top there.
Speaker D 00:23:42
So for my book, I think like the wizard of O World is one of the big things I've drawn a lot of inspiration from because it is a really fun mix of there is magic and there's like 18th century industrial kind of technology. There's a train, you know, there's cog working stuff, there's steam powered things. So I definitely draw a lot of inspiration from that. Also I really love that Oz. Oz is maybe the most American fantasy, like in terms of a big fantasy concept. I mean there's probably another example that's newer than I'm not thinking of.
Speaker B 00:24:16
But it's. Be honest, it's the kind of thing where everything is going to draw from that. Right? Yeah.
Speaker D 00:24:22
Well, like when you think about certainly D and D, you're usually thinking about a very European fantasy kind of world, whether that's Renaissance or medieval. And like if we have a dwarf character show up, what's our default accent? We jump to Scottish or something. Right. Like what's our. If we have a royalty character, what's our default accent? We try to do a, you know, a Christopher Lee impression or something like that, you know, versus like as kind of going back to the. The myth adventure books. I just like characters who, I don't know, Americans. We have this very scrappy like swindler aspect to ourselves. You know, it is very like godless capitalist.
Speaker B 00:25:02
Very caveat emptor, right? Yeah. Like everywhere.
Speaker D 00:25:05
Yeah. The movie version of Wicked we bought as soon as it was available. And I watched that like four dozen times while I was writing because it's a great movie, great musical, but also like it's just the vibe of that world is very much like kind of what I'm looking for in terms of writing where there can be that mix of things, but it's not explicitly just a steampunk world. It's not explicitly just a fantasy world. And. Yeah, there you go. I trailed off again. Sorry.
Speaker B 00:25:31
No, you're good. So go ahead. We'll fix it in post. So go ahead.
Speaker C 00:25:34
That's great. So if I can bring up a comic book in the last. Specifically a Marvel comic book in the last, I think five or six years, there was a comic book called the Immortal Hulk. And I'm embarrassed that I can't think of what the creators names are, but I recently got. There you go. So I recently got the the Immortal Hulk omnibus that collects all. And they had. They did 50 issues plus some side stuff, and it collects all of the issues they did in a. It's about this big. It's about 1500 pages, I believe. Wow. So it's roughly Hulk sized.
Speaker B 00:26:09
That's a brick.
Speaker C 00:26:10
It's enormous.
Speaker B 00:26:11
It's two bricks.
Speaker C 00:26:12
Yeah. I'm getting a lot of exercise just picking the thing up and it's gorgeous. And what they do. And it's not a what if it's mainline Marvel continuity, but they recast the story of the Incredible Hulk as a horror story. And so they really lean into the body. It's like an ongoing Cronenberg horror film. And they really lean into the body horror of changing form. And it like, it really becomes a really horrible way that the Hulk changes form. Everybody around him is unpredictable and chaotic. People are getting absorbed into other people's bodies in terrifying ways. Right. And you know, it really digs into like Bruce Banner. Waking up in the morning. I don't. I don't know where I've been.
Speaker B 00:26:57
There's a.
Speaker C 00:26:57
There's a trail of destruction behind me. I'm in a different town than I thought I was. I don't know how I got here. And they also ramp up. He's psychologically dissonant, so he has multiple personalities. And I think I'm at the point where they have about six. There's at least six different personalities that are in contention. And when they transform who came out, it's like unclear to begin with who's currently in control. And sometimes that works to their advantage and sometimes it doesn't. And it's a really interesting different take on it. Usually when I bring this up to people, they go, what? The Hulk is horror. And it doesn't immediately click for them. My friend Paul has his own lightweight horror game called Fearful Ends, which is really neat. And I've been thinking about how can I run a game with the immortal Hulk, maybe with fearful ends, or maybe I should actually use a Marvel rule. Set and struggling with. Should this be, like, the support team around the Hulk? Should I have different players as different personalities of the Hulk or. That seems like a really hard problem to solve. So I'm still working on that. But I think some of the body horror is creeping into my Star Frontiers game. So at least some of my players have said, you know, every single monster has like. Like, tentacles, and they're dripping acid and they're poisonous, and they grab you and try to swallow you, and they're kind of like, everything is all covered with tentacles all the time now. So I think that's probably the way that seeped into my current game.
Speaker B 00:28:28
But I'd love to.
Speaker C 00:28:29
I'd love to try to run an immortal Hulk game, but I.
Speaker B 00:28:32
It's.
Speaker C 00:28:32
I'm. At the moment, I'm not seeing the solution.
Speaker B 00:28:34
Can I give a suggestion? Okay. So one of the things that happens with kids on bikes is that there's a central character that everybody controls on occasion.
Speaker C 00:28:44
Okay.
Speaker B 00:28:44
And they're all like, you're our support character. But everyone gets a turn at playing 11. 11. Yeah. Everyone gets a chance to play, like, they take a turn with 11. But they all have their own characters.
Speaker D 00:28:56
Though, and I was assuming it was Chunk.
Speaker B 00:28:58
That's also fair. Everyone gets to be sloth. Sloth, yes. Everyone gets to shout sloth and go, go. But yeah, so that might be an interesting way to sort of have either. You could do either. You could do multiple personalities and have everyone be a personality, or you could have that support staff, and then when the purple personality takes over, you know that that's Neil's job to. He runs the purple personality. And you can even do it like that way. So you'd have a character and a personality that each person would be responsible for that maybe that would work.
Speaker C 00:29:28
You know, I think I was starting to orbit around that. And it's interesting because. Do you remember when TSR published Conan modules for D and D? So I just read a couple of them in some reviews recently. The complaint in the review was, well, someone plays Conan, the rest of the support staff, and obviously they're the star. So that's kind of unbalanced. So I think that actually is a pretty good solution to the. There's clearly a main star to the story, but everybody should have a chance to somehow participate with that.
Speaker B 00:29:58
No one ever is. Actually. No one is ever 11 or Conan. Everyone. Everyone is. And then you're somebody else, too.
Speaker C 00:30:04
I think that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker B 00:30:05
Or if you wanted to do it in the episode by episode Version you could do. Have you heard of Ars Magicka?
Speaker C 00:30:11
Yeah, sure.
Speaker B 00:30:11
So, yeah, Ars Magicka does troop play where like I'm the wizard. This week you're my trusty stalwart companion and you two guys are minions. And then next week I'm a minion. You're the wizard, you're the stalwart companion. And it moves around that way so that each adventure somebody plays something else. If you wanted to do more of a issue by issue with the Hulk, you could do it that way as well.
Speaker C 00:30:31
Okay. Yeah. Nice. Those are good.
Speaker D 00:30:32
That's not like the best part though, like how he. How he turns into the Hulk. Now it's not just cuz he's angry, it's cuz he gets killed generally. Right?
Speaker B 00:30:40
Like correct.
Speaker D 00:30:41
Yeah, correct. Or someone kills Banner. Like correct.
Speaker C 00:30:44
So it's often it's called the Immortal Hulk. Because Banner can get killed, the Hulk can't. So the Hulk comes back to life at night after Banner's dead from Banner's is what happens. So. So Banner basically being hatches out of Banner.
Speaker B 00:30:57
Oh my God.
Speaker C 00:30:59
Exactly.
Speaker B 00:31:00
This is why I don't play horror games as much. I'm too grossed out. All right, fantastic.
Speaker C 00:31:04
You know, I normally don't either, but this, this story's kind of got me sucked in.
Speaker B 00:31:09
And that's what's really great about it. You can do T. Kingfisher is one of the authors that we've already covered so far and they've written a bunch of really interesting fantasy horror books. They recently put one out, but it's basically house to Uberville. Like classic horror but retold. So there's a lot of really good fantasy horror out there to draw from. So that's pretty cool. One of the books that we recorded but isn't out yet is the Black God's Drums. That is a pseudo fantasy steampunk Civil War piece. So I think you'd probably like that and Ghostbusters and. Or great games to read. Trying to think what was the game that I read there'd been a couple. The game that I enjoyed the background the most on and then I enjoyed the stories that got told with it is an old game which has a terrible but interesting mechanic. It's called Castle Falkenstein and it has a mechanic that you don't use dice, you use playing cards and so you have your own deck and they're randomly sorted and when you pull like clubs, it has this kind of effect. It's very complicated and kludgy and it doesn't work really well, but the world building based around the idea that fairies really exist and control parts of Europe and this whole fae thing that's happening there, it's great stories and there's a whole American aspect to it too. They six Guns and Sorcery. Really fantastic stuff. So Falkenstein, Black God, Drums and anything by T. Kingfisher, all their fantasy has a little bit of horror.
Speaker E 00:32:34
Also I found the. The author.
Speaker B 00:32:40
Pete Jelly Clark.
Speaker C 00:32:41
Yes, that.
Speaker B 00:32:41
Yes, thank you very much.
Speaker C 00:32:43
Yes.
Speaker B 00:32:43
Like the two of the games I.
Speaker D 00:32:45
Think you mentioned sound like Deadlands. Cuz Deadlands was like Wild west kind of stuff. But you also had cards as. It wasn't just cards though.
Speaker B 00:32:53
Right.
Speaker D 00:32:55
But like it was like too complicated, I think another.
Speaker B 00:32:57
Another way too complicated thing. And in that. I know in the episode where we talk about that, Deadlands definitely comes up. It is definitely one of our. Our main suggestions.
Speaker A 00:33:06
Great.
Speaker B 00:33:07
All right gentlemen, I know you've plugged some. Some things already, but this is the end part of the show. So take a minute and tell us one more time who you are and stuff you're doing and people you're working with and what do you want to plug so that my p. Little podcast can at least inform some other folks what's going on.
Speaker C 00:33:24
So again I've been Dan Collins and my other show is wandering DMS on YouTube and Twitch and Eric, I do think that listeners of your show would enjoy our show. We totally dig into the text and the books is exactly what we like to do. So I think that would be a good crossover actually with my co host Paul. We're live on YouTube every Sunday at 1 and they can go to our website wanderingdm's.com and see everything that we do there.
Speaker B 00:33:51
Fantastic.
Speaker D 00:33:53
My name once again is Pat French. I have a book coming out sometime in May, the doomworks Field manual gonna be available on Pathfinder Infinite, written by me.
Speaker B 00:34:03
It's got art by my friend Ryan.
Speaker D 00:34:04
Barch who's pretty amazing.
Speaker B 00:34:06
Oh, shout out the artists.
Speaker D 00:34:07
Yeah, absolutely. You can find his stuff on Instagram is probably the main place he has lots to sell. I also have a Patreon I just started. I'm gradually getting a real digital presence created by. It's a Patreon and it's under. It's called Vaudevillenous. Vaudeville and the word villainous combined.
Speaker B 00:34:28
Everybody sign up and join Neil.
Speaker E 00:34:31
I've been Neil Devlin. The biggest thing is I'll be at Gen Con running games for GUI Cube.
Speaker B 00:34:37
Like. Like it's nothing. I'm gonna be running games.
Speaker E 00:34:46
But yeah, when they release games. If you check out Gully Cube, there is probably a chance they run games for you.
Speaker B 00:34:53
There you go.
Speaker E 00:34:53
And when I run games, I'm only running one this week. I was able to get, you know, I don't think anyone has them, but the little flags on the name badges. Yeah. One thing that I do is I ordered only because I like orange and green. They're orange and green tags that say I played in one of Jam Neal's games.
Speaker B 00:35:15
Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker E 00:35:16
If you're playing one of my games, you'll get one.
Speaker B 00:35:18
So free and free stuff. Yeah, great. So, yeah, this is. My name is Eric Jackson and I'm the host of the Game Masters Book Club, which you've been listening to. Special thanks to our folks here at Rising Phoenix. That allowed us to use up one of their critical chats, which is happening here on Saturday, April 26, 26, 2025. And thank you all for being here on the podcast. Have been back with some other book readings. Hope you had a great time.
Speaker C 00:35:42
Definitely.
Speaker B 00:35:42
It was a blast. All right, thanks guys.
Speaker D 00:35:44
Awesome.
Speaker B 00:35:45
Are we out?
Speaker A 00:35:48
And that was Dan Collins, Pat French and Neil Devlin at Rising Phoenix Gamecon 2025. Ginormous. Thanks to Michael Stair, friend, Boone companion and amazing sound technician. If you need tech help for your event anywhere in New England, you should contact Michael stair@linktr EE stayre.
Speaker B 00:36:10
Continue.
Speaker A 00:36:10
Thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our theme music. Another gargantuan thank you to Scott Legault and the whole gang at Rising Phoenix Game Con for the opportunity to premiere the live podcast at such an excellent premier level convention one last time. I am Eric Jackson, host of the Game Masters Book Club, part of K Square Productions. Visit K Square Productions and the Game Masters book club@tinyurl.com gamemastersbookclub or follow us at Game Masters Book Club on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music and YouTube later. Gamers, and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.