MI-80 De Oppresso Liber

Gen Con '05 was a blast - four fun-filled days of crazy outfits, total gaming immersion, and using our press clout to get secret info and special treatment. The highlight, however, came on Saturday, when we were lucky enough to have an interview with Sam "Meridian" Johnson of Wolfpack Studios. It should be said that, this being our first big one on one interview, we didn't know quite what to expect from the Loremaster for Shadowbane, not to mention the man who unleashed vampires on the world. We certainly had all sorts of questions to ask: From Call of Cthulhu to Shadowbane(2?) and the Lore Server.

So it was with wobbly knees that we made our way up the escalators to room 262, where we were to meet. As we made our way towards the door, we heard "Ah, that must be them" come from the hallway to the side (You just can't get the jump on people when you wear your organization's name on your shirt and hat, I suppose). We looked over as Sam finished up conversing with a friend and wished her luck in the upcoming game.

Much to my delight, he was easy-going and very eager to talk, and quickly assuaged my trepidations about this whole thing. We certainly had all sorts of questions to ask, luckily for us, Sam was chock full of answers.

MI-80: Having gone through all this, what kind of advice would you have for the youngsters, and not-so-youngsters, out there looking to achieve the same thing?

Sam Johnson: People actually ask me this all the time, and I have been very honest. I've told them "I hate to tell you this, but it's who you know." The thing of it is; if you can just turn that first corner - once you know a few people, you know lots of people. And having been at Wolfpack for five years, now I know tons of people, all over the country.

So, it's pretty cool, I never thought in my life that I would have a career. I was one of those liberal arts degree people, and the corporate world did not fascinate me at all. And now I have a career, and it's pretty cool. So, that's me.

MI: I understand you're here for a Cthulhu tournament. I know that we, as well as many of our readers, aren't familiar with the game. Could you go into the basics for us?

SJ: Sure. Call of Cthulhu is a game that has been around since 1980, and is based on the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, who was a weird, obscure little misanthrope who lived in Providence, RI. He wrote some amazingly scary stories. When it first came out, it was a weird sort of anti-game, because unlike most games that follow the paradigm familiar to anybody who's played Everquest: You kill things, you get their stuff, and you become more powerful; this game was much more about just being scary. Your character never has many hit points, and his stats don't increase - you have skills that go up, but the point is, your average monster will take you apart pretty easy. It's like if you put a real person in a cage with a Bengal tiger. He's not gonna make it.

The real thing it brought to the table, though, is the notion of sanity and insanity. Whenever you see shocking things, you can go gradually nuts over the course of the game. It's not about slaying the dragon and saving the princess. It's about figuring out what the mystery is, figuring out how you might be able to stop it, and trying to do it in such a way that you don't get maimed or go nuts - Or even if you do, as long as you keep the monsters from ending the world, that's at least something. It's very different, but it's my favorite pen-and-paper game in the world.

MI: Anything else you're here to see/do?

SJ: The other thing that I'm here to do - In the course of running all these tournaments, I've gamed with a lot of really cool people, and I'm actually here to shake hands, hang out, and have a drink with them, too. I’m also here to recharge my creative batteries, look at what's going on.

MI: So I understand big things are afoot in Shadowbane, with the introduction of the Lore rule set, could you talk about that a bit?

SJ: I have to say, Ashen and Lietgardis had more directly to do with it than I did. But essentially, we wanted to set up a rule set that would keep the ARAC's (Any race, any class) from forming. We're trying to beat the zerg. We wanted to set limits on who can guild with whom, and who can sub to whom, and that was as far as we wanted to reach.

But, some of the really cool stuff that happened was that we got even more. We got stuff that we didn't think we'd ever get, once the programmers got into it. We even have limits on grouping, and we have limits on casting powers on people - The big one is Summon. So, after much debate, on the boards and elsewhere, after going round and round, we ended up having to essentially have a one-tier-deep kind of system. Originally we were thinking of having, you know, "Maybe an Aracoix guild can sub to an Elf guild, but not vice versa," but we finally had to say "Nope, each guild charter can only sub to its own kind."

We're hoping there are going to be two effects from the Lore rule set. One will be the ARAC problem. It's not gonna be solved, because people will always be able to work around it, whether they have Teamspeak or whatever. And we couldn't put any communications blocks in, but we didn't really want to. But, with the limits on beneficial power-casting and limits on summoning, it's at least going to be a hassle to totally go with people you shouldn't be working with.

The other thing is, it's going to create an environment that is more segregated, which is how the fiction goes. And honestly, when they brought me in, they told me "We need to create a world where everybody hates everybody, for good reason, and anybody can attack you at any moment...and that's fine." And I have described it in the past as The Lord of the Rings meets The Road Warrior.

It's really cool. As soon as we started talking about the Lore Server, it generated a lot of interest, and a lot of people have been talking about coming back and checking it out. We are really hoping that the numbers will move up, and we can do more stuff after this. Because again, we didn't really have time to dig into the balance issues for every faction, but I'm hoping we can do that once it's up.

MI: Obviously this is a huge change for the Shadowbane world. Will you be running any promotions to try to draw peoples’ attention to it?

SJ: Actually yes. Through Fileplanet we're offering a 25-day free trial for new accounts. (Check it out here. - Ed.)

MI: Moving on from Shadowbane for a bit, I hear you have a book coming out in September.

SJ: Maybe...Jumping back across the pond to pen-and-paper land, there's a book I've been working on for a long, long time. It's probably going to be my big Call of Cthulhu magnum opus, and I can't claim full credit for it. What I essentially did was, I wrote a second edition of the Miskatonic University guidebook, and again, if you don't know Lovecraft and you're not sure what that means:

Lovecraft created a bunch of fictional towns in Massachusetts, and in one of them he created a fictional college. There are about five or six of his stories, where the protagonists are all professors from that college. They end up sending a scientific expedition to Antarctica, or to Australia, and so Miskatonic was a name he kept dropping.

And the thing about Lovecraft was that he corresponded with all these other authors, including Robert E. Howard, the guy who invented Conan, and Robert Bloch, the guy who created Psycho, and all these other people. So they all wrote stories that used some of the names and the places. And so there are a lot of stories where Miskatonics is name-dropped.

So what I did was, essentially, I took everything - There was a book that Chaosium had done about Arkham, the fake town where it is, that had a lot of write-ups about the university. I took all of that material. They had done a whole book, the Miskatonic University guidebook - I took all of that material. And then I took everywhere that it had appeared in a scenario in other books. And then I took every bit of fiction that I could find that touched Miskatonic. I lumped it all together, and where it didn't fit, I tried to find ways to make it fit - there were priorities that I gave to some over others. And then I sprinkled it here and there with ideas of my own, and it's going to be a big 250-page book. It's going to have the layout of the place, the history of the place, lots of professors, adventure ideas - If you're going to run a game here, this is how you should do it. I'm very proud of it. And I hear that it's coming soon. At this point, I believe it's just artwork that is standing between the book and release.

Oh, one other thing I should mention. The old management of Wolfpack, and Ubisoft both since the acquisition, have been very kind to me and to the other designers. And so, as long as it's not a computer game, it doesn't interfere with my contract to them. So I should mention that I'm doing this pen-and-paper thing on the side and they know about it, and they were gracious enough to let me do it. And I thank them for it.

MI: I was actually going to ask about the acquisition. Can you tell us some of the big changes you had to deal with, etc?

SJ: The biggest thing is a feeling of stability. It’s taken some getting used to. Being a big European company, they move at a different pace than we were used to moving, us being a little startup. So there are times when we're in a hurry and they're not, but that's alright. Our benefits got a lot better. The management changed also. But overall, I've been very pleased. They've been very content to not interfere with everything we do. After the initial acquisition, we had a plan for dealing with Shadowbane's troubles, and they stood back and let us do that. This includes the Vorringia map, the shrine system, new architecture, epic mobs, all that stuff.

And it's funny, when you're an independent studio working for a big publisher, you can get into a lot of arguments about things. And whenever the arguments happen, they remind you who's pulling the strings. But when you're a member of the family, it's very different. So I've been nothing but pleased.

MI-80: I understand you have a big project under development, anything you can tell us?

Sam Johnson: Yes. We are working on another project, besides Shadowbane. I think this much is known. It is in preproduction right now. This involves going all sorts of places and presenting things to people, getting either the thumbs-up or thumbs-down, going back to the drawing board, moving on, etc.

Since this is in the preproduction stage, the weight has been on design, because you know, you dream up the thing first. That's why I said my duties have been divided, and I haven't been able to work on Shadowbane full time. I can't tell you what it is, but that's what's going on.

MI: Do you have any idea when you will be able to talk more?

SJ: I would expect...that by E3 next, they will have made an announcement, but I can't talk anymore before that.

MI: Along the same vein, how about Shadowbane 2?

SJ: Yeah, I know...

MI: I'm sure you were expecting that.

SJ: Okay, I'm going to follow the lead of Ashen, and say that I can neither confirm nor deny. What I will tell you is: The fans aren't the only people who would be really happy to see that. So trust me, we hear you all, and there are a lot of us thinking the same thing. But I can neither confirm nor deny anything about it.

MI: How has your experience with tabletop, PnP, and everything affected how you work with things like Shadowbane?

SJ: In every way, honestly. The reason I got the job was because Warden and Scorn knew that I could tell a good story. We've gamed with each other a lot, and in three or four years of working closely with Warden, we've only really disagreed once or twice.

MI: Can, you tell us what those were?

SJ: One of them was the concept of centaurs. I wanted to take a different route with their culture, and he was really into a specific vision, and he was like "It's my game!", and so I had to step back and be like "It is your game."

The other one was with the Channeler write-up, and that one it wasn't really a disagreement, it was just hard to hammer out.

Oh yeah, but I'm going to give you a specific answer to your question now. There are two things that really formed how I wrote the lore for Shadowbane. One was my education as a History major. And that was the biggest thing that really turned a lot of people on when they read it, and also mystified some people. Basically the idea is that every historical document is biased. Nobody knows what happened unless they were there, and even then they don't really know.

So when inconsistencies started appearing in the lore, when people started giving different versions of the same event, a lot of people were like "Hey!" and I was just like "Dude, that's how it is."

At the end of the day, we all have to decide what we believe. And I think that's truer now than it's been in awhile. You know, is the war in Iraq a necessary evil? Is Karl Rove a great guy or a jerk? At the end of the day you just have to decide. And the more you know about history, the better informed that choice can be.

MI: Well, that time of the interview has come. My friends wouldn't forgive me if I didn't talk to you a little bit about vampires (and kidnap/torture you for secret info about the chance of SB2).

SJ: Man! I don't get it. I mean, I never ever thought that the question I'd get asked most would be "Was it you who made vampires? It must have been the marketing crew!" It's like, no it was me actually.

MI: Well, my first question is, why do you think that so many people reacted so strongly?

SJ: Well, it's funny; I've never seen something that so galvanized people. There are people who really love it and people who really hate it.

I think a big thing is that the vampire stuff gets tied into that goth, angsty stuff, and you're either into it or you're not. I think we also tried to do something different stats-wise, and everybody had balance concerns on that. I think for the most part we've hammered it out though.

Another thing, the whole notion of the undead invasion had really been part of the lore since the inception of it. If you look back at some of the first stuff we did, the druid write-up drops a big hint, because the cycle is out of balance.

So for the second expansion, we knew we had to have a new race, and it had to be undead. There was also a mandate at that point that they wanted to try to make the game more visually appealing. So we didn't want an undead race that looked like Eddie from an Iron Maiden cover. So we were like: Vampires then. And the hole in the lore had already been placed there. If they seem an ill fit, then I probably did too good a job at disguising the fact that they were going to come.

Again, I'm sorry if there are people who don't like them. But again, with the new Lore rule set, you don't ever have to group with them if you don't want to. Join the temple, and the only way you'll ever see them is on the point of your sword.

MI: Hypothetically speaking, if there were to be a Shadowbane 2, what is the biggest thing that you would change?

SJ: You're luring me very close to a pitfall here. I'm not saying that there is or ever will be a Shadowbane 2, but the two biggest lessons that we learned from Shadowbane: One, you've got to make it easier for the people that are the glue of the community: The guild leaders. In Shadowbane, it was very hard for guild leaders to keep everything running smoothly, and also hard to make sure that the people in your guild are really the people in your guild. We learned that lesson.

The other thing was something that I'm partly to blame for: The richness and diversity of the settings. At times it was too rich and too diverse. I don't know that we needed a dozen races and 17 factions. I would much rather have had six (factions) and have each of them have their own building set.

Now, I'm not saying to reduce the customization options, because that's one thing that I think we did very well. But because a lot of the variety was so broad, it was hard to make any one facet of it deep, and I miss that a lot.

MI: Lets lead out of the heavy-duty stuff a little: Music and Movies, talk to us about your tastes.

SJ: I'm a geek first and foremost, but I'm into just about anything. I will say that I did not hate Star Wars Episode 3. I rather enjoyed it, but I'm also glad that it's over. I will freely admit how far the second trilogy fell from the first one.

MI: Do you think George Lucas has gone crazy?

SJ: I don't think he's gone crazy. He just achieved his goal, which was to put himself in a position where nobody could ever tell him what to do, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Sometimes you need somebody to stand back and say, that's a bad idea. It's definitely his vision though.

But I also liked the second and third Matrix movies. I get knocked a lot at the office, because when it comes to movies, I'm easy. A movie has to go a long way to really lose me.

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And so there you have it. We certainly extend our most sincere thanks to Sam for taking time out of his busy gaming schedule (he ended up winning the Cthulhu tournament), to talk with us. We hope you now have everything you ever wanted to know about Shadowbane, Meridian, Cthulhu, and Lore. And if you still want to know more about the chance of Shadowbane 2...stop by my basement and talk to Sam sometime.

/EVIL_LAUGH.