What is going on inside the heads of our favorite creators?
You may know of a slim, purple grimoire, penned by one Ezra Claverie, named 6x6x6: The Mayhemic Misssile Method (Tenscore and Sixteen Ways for Sorcerists, Witches, and Other Thaumatrophs to Defend Their Indefensible Persons), or other erudite OSR offerings such as The Crypts of Indormancy, and the Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs.
Check them out if you don't. 6x6x6 is one of the most idiosyncratic and chaotic books in a catalogue known for its chaos and idiosyncrasy.
There is also The Shadow Out of Providence, a non-RPG book for the more discerning bibliophiles out there. (Seriously, check it out.)
I'm not sure anything is going to prepare us for the madness Ezra is going to unleash with A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633. James Raggi has teased the 3 volume slip-cased boxset on Facebook, and Ezra was gracious enough to answer my questions about this upcoming work, and many more besides.
Me: Can you say anything about the inspiration for this project? And what has been most exciting for you to work on?
EC: At Gen Con in 2018, Jim Raggi was challenging people to pitch scenarios set in the Virginia Colony in 1633. I struggled to come up with weird stuff that wasn't Indians or English or folklore (i.e. you can't just stat Bigfoot). By playing "What would Blackwood/Lovecraft/Merritt do?" I came up an answer that Jim liked, then spent the next few months planning a scenario around it (and the next three years researching, writing, and testing it). As I worked, I found myself haunted by an image of the Earth splashing outward like a fluid, only to realize later that I was remembering the McDonnell Planetarium in my home town of St. Louis, a hyperboloid structure that looks like a milk-splash coming up from the Earth.
Most exciting: I'll say drawing on the nonfiction works of Charles Fort to create tables of weird stuff that happens in the skies, because Fort does not get enough love.
Me: I agree!
Me: When did role playing games first come into your life? What was it like for you to discover this hobby? Do you think they impacted your development as an artist?
EC: When I was nine, my childhood best friend talked up D&D. I felt reluctant to try something that looked so much like schoolwork, but the dice fascinated me. The next summer, I used birthday money to buy the Mentzer D&D red box at Dragon’s Lair, in the Old Orchard strip mall, Webster Groves, Missouri. My mother had just taken us to see The Muppets Take Manhattan, which opened on 13 July 1984, so I suspect that was the day I crayoned in my first set of dice.
Me: What galvanized you to start being creative in the first place? Was there a certain moment, any early memory?
EC: I always loved monsters, but one moment stands out with primordial clarity. In the old Schnucks in Hampton Village (before they rebuilt it on the south side of the strip mall), my mother bought for me a copy of Devil Dinosaur #4, where Moon-Boy and Devil, the red Allosaur that Moon-Boy rides, meet alien robot-people. This first encounter with Jack Kirby and with ancient astronauts rewired my brain. For years, I doubted my own memory of the two-page spread of the Sky-Demon as too weirdly apocalyptic to get approved by the Comics Code Authority, but some nurse bought it for her three-year-old son.
Me: What was your start in TTRPG publishing? What was it like for you to get your foot in the door? How has it been since then?
EC: In 2013, a friend urged me to submit to an open call for an OSR collection that I won’t name. The editor accepted my submission, but then I heard nothing further. Four years later, at the North Texas RPGCon, I saw the hardcover book for sale, from a different publisher. That second publisher told me that the original project had collapsed, so he had released the material under his own imprint. But the second publisher had not told contributors that the book had gone into print, and he neither compensated me for my work nor offered me a copy. By 2017, I had already worked with publishers who treat contributors much better than this scavenger, so I let it go.
Me: Who are some of your biggest creative influences?
EC: Chinua Achebe, Steve Albini, Nick Blinko, Leigh Brackett, Raymond Chandler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gary Gygax, Jack Kirby, David Lynch, Nigel Kneale, Thomas Ligotti, Liu Cixin, H. P. Lovecraft, Sam McPheeters, A. Merritt, Charles Portis, James Raggi, Paul Verhoeven, H. G. Wells, John Woo...
Me: What are some of the biggest illusions you had about the RPG industry that were shattered?
EC: My only illusion—and it wasn’t a strong one, just an unarticulated assumption—was that people whose names routinely appear on game book covers must write games as their primary living. Many that I admire have day jobs, which gives them the autonomy to make the games they want, not the games that some marketing department thinks will drive a brand’s carousel.
Me: What do you hope to achieve through the work you are doing now? Fortune? Infamy?
EC: I want to write game books that I would be excited to read.
Me: What do you think makes a great RPG book, what elevates it above the others? What makes a book really connect with people?
EC: To both questions: A great RPG book has a commitment to bold and distinctive ideas, a willingness to sacrifice part of its potential audience to that commitment, and an editor who will not put up with bad prose.
Me: Any movies/tv that have stuck with you for years that have worked their way into your art?
EC: When I was between the ages of five and seven, a local TV station showed Hammer’s 1968 Lost Continent, and I caught about twenty minutes of it on our tiny black-and-white TV. For years thereafter, I assumed that no movie could have as many strange elements as I remembered: giant crabs, flesh-eating seaweed, Hildegard Knef, armpit-balloons and snowshoe-things for crossing “the weed,” lost-in-time Spanish-Inquisition types dressed in capirotes, and more. My first DVD purchase—this film—confirmed my memories and then some. (Now that I think of it, I can’t believe Kelvin Greene hasn’t done this as a scenario for LotFP.) And the Quatermass serials written by Nigel Kneale for the BBC. It’s like Doctor Who for adults, with the cosmic scale and darkness of Lovecraft.
Me: Tell me about your favorite book.
EC: Moby Dick. Long, digressive, and experimental, it deals centrally with the 19th-century sperm-whale fishery, my candidate for the most impressive thing humans have ever done.
Me: Has being a published author affected your life?
EC: “Being a published author” hasn’t affected my life nearly as much as have the years of work that it took me to break into various publishing worlds: fiction, scholarship, and gaming. In no case did a first publication revise my self-image or change how I paid my bills, much as I wanted them to. But publishing in different arenas did help me develop the skills I needed to get a day job as a ghostwriter, which I much prefer to the majority of jobs I’ve held.
Me: Do you think art in general or RPGs in particular have any responsibilities in this day and age?
EC: A work of art (including RPGs) should first be good at its ostensible task—telling a story, rendering a scene, simulating a challenging situation, whatever—and only then do anything else as a distant second. Nothing ages faster than an attempt to be relevant to one’s time.
Me: What do you think is the most awful death you’ve encountered in a particular historical period?
EC: For 6x6x6: The Mayhemic Misssile Method (Tenscore and Sixteen Ways for Sorcerists, Witches, and Other Thaumatrophs to Defend Their Indefensible Persons), I did research on unusual ways to get killed in real life, like getting crushed in a human stampede, getting slashed by leaking hydraulic fluid, or getting dissolved by hydrogen-peroxide fuel in a crashed Nazi rocket-plane.
The worst source, in terms of its sadness and its pulverizing detail, was Loss of Signal: Aeromedical Lessons Learned from the STS-107 Columbia Space Shuttle Mishap. But those deaths are mercifully quick, and most of us will die slowly in hospital beds, which I consider worse.
Me: Any favorite RPG heirloom? First set of dice? D&D woodgrain boxset?
EC: My hundred-sided Zocchihedron has traveled with me since 1986. (Thank you, Josh Boelter.)
Me: What is your dream TTRPG job? Does it even exist?
EC: We play games (and read novels and start bands) to escape the instrumental sphere of bureaucracy and the exploitative sphere of capitalism, and I suspect that a day job in the gaming industry would just embed me more deeply in both. If a company hired me as a house writer, they might require me to sign a non-compete agreement, or a contract that transferred to the company the copyrights of my works. (If this sounds not so bad, read up on Jack Kirby.) I would have to pretend to care about things like the spring re-brand of dwarves or the new cover sheets for TPS reports.
I would not mind seeing my books sell well enough that the royalties paid my bills, but I’ll settle for royalties helping pay for my hobbies.
Me: What is THE RPG book you WANT to write? The one that will change the world.
EC: Predictably, I want to continue a loose series of scenarios set in my homebrew setting, which first saw print in Crypts of Indormancy (Melsonian Arts Council, 2016). In winter 2024-2025, the Melsonian Arts Council will release Witch War to the Vale of Forbiddiction… and Beyond, which will contain three scenarios, two sets of rules for generating witch hunts, and over sixty new monsters.
Me: What was the hardest book/project for you to finish?
EC: The hardest game book was A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633, because of its length, its complexity, the historical research, and my own fear of failure. I had tried for years to break into Lamentations of the Flame Princess, so I dreaded blowing the chance.
The hardest non-game book was the monograph based on my PhD research, Copyright Vigilantes: Intellectual Property and the Hollywood Superhero. It was under contract in 2022 when I realized that you can’t publish your way into a tenure-track job that does not exist; structural changes to universities, like the shift to contingent faculty labor and the gutting of the humanities, had turned North America into a wasteland of part-time grunt work, and I’d had enough of living in Mainland China. I finished the monograph in the knowledge that it would get me maybe $200-500 in royalties over about a decade. (University presses don’t have the profit margins to pay well, so they still depend on the tenure and promotion system to provide incentives to faculty writers.)
<Quint>Anyway, we delivered the Bomb.</Quint>
Me: Can you describe any odd aspects of your creative process?
EC: I jot ideas on sticky notes and other scraps, then throw them somewhere on my desk, and every few months I sort through the heap. The “good” ideas recur on multiple notes. In my rage against forgetting, I repeat myself.
Me: Do you have any great failed projects?
EC: The
novel that I started writing in 2005. I stopped when I realized I was
still clearing my throat after sixty pages. Then I lost it.
But ask me again this time next year. I may have some new ones.
Me: What’s your personal favorite work you’ve ever done?
EC: 6x6x6: The Mayhemic Misssile Method (Tenscore and Sixteen Ways for Sorcerists, Witches, and Other Thaumatrophs to Defend Their Indefensible Persons). It started as a d20 table, then bloomed into d100, and then into d216, with illustrations in appalling full color by Yannick Bouchard. Nothing exceeds like excess. [guitar squeal]