PART II: A
SEATTLE SATYR IN THE WORLD OF DARKNESS COURT
VoS: What’s your involvement with White Wolf, Onyx
Path, and the World of Darkness?
That short
question has a very long and complicated
answer. I’ll just give you the relatively simple version of events – it’ll
still keep us busy for a while.
I’d been a
professional writer for around two years when my college friend, roommate, and
gaming buddy Bill Bridges went to work for White Wolf in 1992. At the time, as
he left our home city of Richmond to take on the Werewolf: The Apocalypse Line Developer position, I asked him to
keep me in mind when he began hiring writers for the line. He did, and my first
projects were the Valkenburg Foundation
sourcebook and the original Book of the
Wyrm, both of which I began working on during the fall of ’92.
Between those
first assignments and the summer of 1993, I became a regular author for the Werewolf line. I created the Bastet for
the original Werewolf Players Guide, wrote two stories for Drums Around the Fire, did the Black Fury Caern for Book of Caerns, and accepted contracts
for the Black Furies Tribebook and
the planned sourcebook for the Technocracy, back while the original Mage rulebook was still being written.
At the time, my
life was a mess. I’m not going into the details here, but I needed a major
change. That summer, I got it. Returning, in May, from a soul-seeking trip with
an old friend in San Francisco, I told Bill that I wanted the Mage Line Developer job. He tried to
change my mind – Mage, at the time,
was in a state of creative chaos – but I insisted. And so, as soon as the
edited manuscript was completed, White Wolf sent me a copy of it, with
instructions to give them my impressions – what I liked, what I didn’t like,
what I planned to do with it if I got the Line Developer job. Having spent 10
years as an actor, I knew I was being auditioned for that job. And so, I took
two days off from my work at “Virginia’s Largest Shoe Store” (a job that,
incidentally, I loathed with every fiber of my being), read the text, wrote
around 26 pages worth of material – which included a bunch of sourcebook
proposals and an outline for Technocracy:
Progenitors – sent it all in, and waited…
…and waited…
…and waited.
I got a call to
come down and interview for the job at DragonCon 93. That was the first time I
saw the original Stone Mountain offices, and the first time I met anyone from
the company other than Bill and Andrew Greenberg, who I’d also known from
college. I hit it off with pretty much everyone, had a blast, and left feeling
like I’d scored the job.
So I waited…
…and waited…
…and waited.
By mid-August, I
was certain that I had not gotten the job. GenCon 93 was coming up. Mage would be released at that
convention, and three days from the con I was working at the shoe store,
miserable, convinced that someone else had been hired instead. I would be
trapped at that shitty job forever, stuck in a life I had hated so much that I
was literally suicidal at the time.
And then I was
paged: “Phil, call on Line 4. Phil, call
for you on Line 4.”
It was Stewart
Wieck, offering me the job. I was literally bouncing up and down, trying not to
let my voice show just how existed I was. Within minutes, I was getting hugs
from my soon-to-be-former co-workers, calling my dad to borrow money for the
plane-flight, and making arrangements to leave the next day for Atlanta, from
which we’d be leaving to go to GenCon.
That was a crazy
time. My then-wife, Cathi, and I had already agreed to divorce; our roommate
Jane Palmer would be taking over my part of the rent. Less than 24 hours after
the phone-call, I was standing in Ken Cliffe’s office as he handed me the first
copy of Mage: The Ascension – the
advance proof of the finished book – and told me “It’s all yours. We don’t have
the slightest idea what to do with it.” I rode up to GenCon with Kathy Ryan,
and we talked, bonded, argued, brainstormed about Mage, and sang along with her tape collection all the way to
Wisconsin.
The story of the
next five years is far too long, complicated, and frankly off-the-record to
discuss here. Put simply, it was joyously insane in every way you can imagine. That
was one of the best times of my life, but also so intense that I felt burnt out
by 1998. We worked hard, played hard, and were pretty hard on ourselves and on
one other. In addition to roughly 10 books a year for Mage itself, plus a few more for Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade, I was freelancing on every other White
Wolf line except for Trinity. (I’m
not into SF, so that series did not appeal to me.) For a variety of reasons, I
had begun working at home, coming into the office once or twice a week for
meetings. My standards had risen so high by that time that I was writing almost
everything myself, and rewriting pretty much everyone else I hired for Mage those last two years. As far as I’m
concerned, those books – The Orphans
Survival Guide, The Technomancer’s
Toybox, Sorcerers Crusade, Bygone Bestiary, The Book of Mirrors, and many others – were among the best Mage books ever released. By mid-‘98,
however, I was physically and emotionally exhausted from working on stuff that
belonged to someone else.
In all honesty,
I’d become hard to work with, and didn’t trust anyone else to handle Mage correctly. My career outside of
White Wolf had stalled, and I wanted out even though I was terrified to leave.
A layoff that September made things clear for everyone involved, and by mutual
agreement I left the company’s full-time staff, staying on as a freelancer
while helping Jesse Heinig finish up the Mage
books I had in progress at that time. Mike Tinney opened the ArtHaus imprint,
and I continued to lead the Sorcerers
Crusade line as a freelance Line Developer and author. Jesse and I worked
well together, and things looked good until mid-1999, when I got fed up with
the World of Darkness and distanced myself from White Wolf in order to restart
my career with projects of my own.
During a long
period of creative recovery, I wrote music articles for Atlanta’s Creative
Loafing magazine, tried hashing out a fantasy trilogy called The Chronicles of Coldhaven (it was
terrible, and I abandoned it), and eventually formed Laughing Pan Productions
in 2001. By that time, I had taken my nickname “Satyr” as my full-time name so
I could have an identity beyond “that guy who used to do Mage.” Teaming up with my now-former business partners Matt Wood
and Kevin DiVico, we merged LPP with Smoke, Mirror & Muse Productions,
releasing the board game Goth or Gauche?,
the card games Plunder and Horrific: Terror in the Cards, and the
RPG Deliria: Faerie Tales for a New
Millennium. That last project helped me find my creative stride again, and
I also began writing for newWitch magazine in 2003, the year that Deliria appeared. That’s a whole saga in
and of itself, and it took me on the road between 2003 and 2005 in what seemed
like an endless crawl of conventions and festivals.
It was, as I
recall it, a White Wolf party at GenCon or Origins, 2005, when a beer suddenly
slid up to me as I was sitting at the bar. Rich Thomas was behind that beer,
and we started talking. Both of us had done a lot of growing up since our
wilder days at the Wolf, and we agreed that we wanted to work together again.
By that time, I had also co-written the Revised
Order of Hermes Tradition Book for Bill Bridges, and so my I considered the
old wounds to be ancient history. Justin Achilli had gotten me some free copies
of various New World of Darkness books, and I rather liked what I saw. In 2006,
I developed and co-wrote World of
Darkness: Changing Breeds, and considered coming back to White Wolf after
all. I’d quit LPP by that time, and Deliria
was in limbo. My career as a journalist and short-story author had picked back
up but wasn’t paying many bills, and so the idea of doing World of Darkness
stuff for a paycheck seemed like a really good idea.
When CCP
purchased White Wolf in 2006, I essentially shrugged and went back to my own
career. At one point, a TV producer offered to hire me to rip off Vampire: The Masquerade as a reality TV
show. I declined. Forming a new company with my partner Sandra Damiana Buskirk,
I took a Deliria sourcebook, Goblin Markets: The Glitter Trade out of
limbo and released it along with a bunch of other projects like Ravens in the Library, the webcomic Arpeggio, and the forthcoming RPG Powerchords – Music, Magic & Urban
Fantasy. That, too, is a very long story. Over those last few years,
however, I began learning about the long-term effects of our work on Mage. When I created my Facebook profile
around 2009, people all over the world wanted to be my virtual Friend. As I soon discovered, a bunch of folks had
grown up on Mage, and had taken its
themes into their real lives, which is yet another
story. By the time Werewolf 20th
Anniversary Edition rolled around in 2011, however, I knew that I had to be
part of that project. Considering that I’d gotten my big professional break
with the original Werewolf in ’92,
how could I refuse?
We had already
begun talking about a Mage 20th
Anniversary Edition when CCP essentially dissolved the remnants of White
Wolf at the end of 2011. Within a few months, Rich Thomas formed Onyx Path
Productions, and the rest is obvious. He and I began laying groundwork for Mage 20 in late 2012, and I signed
contracts and began working right at the cusp between 2012 and 2013. I formed a
creative brain-trust and oversight committee, recruited some of my favorite
collaborators from the old days, and got to work. That project wound up being a
LOT bigger and complicated than we
had expected it to be, but Rich has given me what I had back in the old days: near-total
creative freedom. Now, after a year of hard work, we’ve got a finished draft,
with revisions in progress and a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. From
the look of things right now, I’ll be heading Mage: The Ascension for quite a while more.
VoS: The Classic WoD “concluded” in 2003, and a new
WoD appeared in its place. Now, there are those who might say that the
continuation of the Classic WoD is a cash-grab. But longtime fans would say that
the “conversation” involved with the CWoD had not ended, and that the new efforts
in that world are picking up that conversation where it left off. Would you say
that the “conversation” has plenty of life left in it yet, and that both the
old and new World of Darkness can exist at the same time, with equally valid
artistic integrity?
Anyone who
thinks we’re just soaking our old fans for cash can kiss my furry satyr ass.
It’s really easy to look at what we do, from a distance, and then think that
we’re just in it for the money. That view, however, is poorly informed at best
and jealously malicious at worst. We all work hard at what we do, and the money
ain’t that great. There are much easier ways to make a buck. Those of us who do
this, do it because we love what we’re doing and cherish the people we do it
for.
(For an in-depth
look at the process involved in crafting an RPG, check out the links referred
to below.)
As I said
earlier, the World of Darkness is satirical fantasy aimed at opening eyes and
minds. That’s not tied to any specific decade; if anything, we need such satire
now more than ever before. Real life has become so damned bizarre that the oWoD
seems polite in comparison. Twenty years ago, Pentex was satirical; now it’s a
fucking business plan. And so, from an artistic standpoint, we need to reflect
the world we have today, through the lens that appeared in the 1990s but which
is, in reality, timeless.
In a way, the
original World of Darkness was very much a ‘90s phenomenon. By the turn of the
millennium, it really had started to
look and feel dated. Although the issues we were addressing back then really
are still important today, the whole angsty-teen apocalyptic vibe got tired. I
was sick of it when I left White Wolf; Deliria,
in many respects, was a counter-argument to that Gothic-Punk gloom. But yet, as
you said, there really were a lot of “conversations” going on underneath the
Sisters of Mercy façade. A big part of our creative mission has involved
catching that Classic WoD vibe while updating its style for the second decade
of the new millennium.
One of the many
strokes of genius that Mark and Stewart brought to the World of Darkness
involved timeless archetypes: the predatory Vampire, the raging primal
Were-Beast, the arcane Magus, the yearning Ghost, the enigmatic Faerie, and so
forth. Those archetypes speak to essential human realities; their fashions change,
but their appeal remains intact. Hell, if anything, those archetypes have
become more popular since the ‘90s – look at Harry Potter, Twilight, and their many imitators. Mainstream media is doing now
what we did 20 years ago, and our influence on things like True Blood, Blade and Underworld is obvious. Through those
archetypes, we continue to address what’s going on once the story ends. Old
World of Darkness and New World of Darkness are essentially holding the same
“conversations,” even when the “voices” they use have superficial differences.
Speaking
personally, I like the nWoD. It’s much less cartoonish, more ominous, far more
intimate than the sprawling and occasionally goofy excesses of the ‘90s WoD.
And yet it lacks the mythic feel and cosmic resonance of the original WoD. It’s
less subversive, more dedicated to personal terror than to socio-political
commentary. In certain instances, I feel that’s more effective – I prefer Changeling: The Lost over Changeling: The Dreaming. The
presentation of the newer books is more polished and professional too, and
though I feel it lacks the anarchistic weirdness of the earlier material, it
lacks the sloppiness too. For better and worse, the nWoD is crafted by skilled
professionals, while the oWoD was banged out by hyercreative kids with passion
to burn and Big Things to say while we burned it.
Can those two
lines coexist? Of course they can. The trick for the oWoD people – myself
included – involves keeping the passion of the earlier work while reflecting
the current era at a higher level of quality than what we often achieved
before. The nWoD folks, meanwhile, need to keep that slick intimacy alive while
bringing more passion and imagination to their games. From what I’ve seen so
far, it looks like everyone’s hitting those goals.
VoS: Do you have any advice for new game designers?
Actually, yes. I
have a series of articles on that subject, originally published in newWitch
magazine several years ago, and now reposted on my blog. You can find them at:
PART III: MAGE’S MEDIA INFLUENCES
VoS: What are some of your favorite movies, TV shows, comedians,
and musical artists? And how might they have influenced your work on Mage?
For starters, I
prefer artists and shows with something important to say. “Mindless
entertainment” doesn’t really do much for me. A sense of passion is also vital.
Especially given the vast landscape of art and entertainment we can access
these days, I have no time or patience for stamped-out commercial product. I’m
not saying that I don’t enjoy big-budget spectacles or slick productions – I
rather like Lady Gaga, and The Avengers
is one of my all-time favorite films. To get my attention, though, there’s gotta
be more going on than a big CGI budget and a by-the-numbers script… and,
speaking as a creative professional, crap that goes no further than slick
spectacle really pisses me off. I work fucking hard at what I do, and I’m
annoyed by folks who get Hollywood paychecks for scripts that wouldn’t pass a
Screenwriting 101 class.
My favorite
artists and media include that sublime quality we talked about earlier. And so,
my favorite films include movies like Casablanca,
Ink, The Fountain and Spirited
Away. (As the credits rolled when I first saw The Fountain, I turned to my friend Ben Dobyns and said something
like “Thank all the gods that SOMEONE in
Hollywood still has an imagination and the balls to use it.”) I’ve always
been fond of silent movies (I grew up on old-school horror flicks) and
so-called “foreign films.” In college, I minored in Cinematography, and I used
to teach History of Animation and Language of Film at the Art Institute of
Seattle. As a result, I’ve got a pretty decent grounding in cinematic
storytelling techniques and the evolving history of film. I appreciate audacity
too, and so my favorite directors – Terry Gilliam, Akira Kurosawa, Joss Whedon,
Katherine Biglow, Spike Lee, Darren Aronofsky, Werner Hertzog, Quentin
Tarantino, Peter Greenaway, Julie Taymor, Luc Besson, Craig Brewer, Guillermo
del Toro, Ken Russell, Spike Jonez, David Cronenberg, Zhang Yimou, Edgar
Wright, Kevin Smith, the Hughes Brothers, the Wachowskis, and so on – combine
an awareness of technique and cinematic language with the willingness to kick
an audience in the balls occasionally. Even certain “event” filmmakers – notably
Stephen Spielberg, James Cameron, Ridley Scott and Francis Ford Coppola – continue
to command my loyalty even when they make shitty films because there’s
something more than mere spectacle going on in their work. I endeavor to bring
those same qualities to my own.
And yet, I also
cherish the anarchistic quality of avant-garde weirdness and fucked-up horror
flicks: Liquid Sky, Repo Man, The Machine Girl, The
Re-Animator, Koyaanisqatsi, Dead Man, Blue Velvet, Punch, Hardware, Titus, Meshes in the
Afternoon, City of Lost Children,
Gothic, π… no list of my favorite films would be complete without those
titles. Movies where offbeat artistry collides with those other elements – as
in Pan’s Labyrinth, Night Watch, or the horrific French film
Martyrs – make me very happy indeed.
A list of
“essential Mage movies” would have to
include the following films: Ink, The Fountain, Roshomon, Strange Days, Hero, Inception, The Matrix, The Crow, The Prestige, The Man With
the Iron Fists, Ghost Dog: The Way of
the Samurai, Run Lola Run, Repo Man, (the original) Robocop, V for Vendetta, The Fifth Estate, Ghost in the Shell, Donnie
Darko, The Doors, American Beauty, Minority Report, Night Watch,
Brazil, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Being
John Malkovich, Cosmopolis, Cloud Atlas, The Truman Show, Prospero’s
Books, Spirited Away, The Baader Meinhoff Complex, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Julie
Taymor’s The Tempest, the first two Terminator films, the (fairly terrible
but very Sorcerers Crusade) 2011
version of The Three Musketeers, and
the documentaries Rize, Koyaanisqatsi, The Corporation, What the
[Bleep] do We (K)now?, and Manufacturing
Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Most of these films are not “mage
movies”; hell, many of them have no “magic” to speak of. The themes, ideas and
images within these films, however, are very Mage… and the fact that most of them came out after I had finished
my run on the series shows just how much the concepts within Mage have become part of popular culture
since that game first appeared.
Speaking of “shows,”
I’m not much of a TV fan myself. My partner Sandi and I don’t even have TV
reception or cable – if there’s a show we want to watch, we get it on DVD and
watch it without commercials. I loathe the “perpetual crisis” mode that TV
stations use, and avoid it whenever possible. Still, I do enjoy the following shows, several of which exerted some level
of influence on Mage: Spaced, Game of Thrones, Veronica
Mars, Rome, Deadwood, Carnivale, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Daily Show, Key and Peele, Behind the
Music, The Deadliest Warrior, Xena and Buffy of course, the 1990s La
Femme Nikita, and perhaps my favorite TV show ever, the late, lamented Firefly. (Damn you, Fox – damn you
forever!)
As someone who
came of age during the heydays of Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Mad magazine and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I appreciate satire with an angry
edge and a sense of socio-political absurdity. That sensibility may be most
obvious in my treatment of the Technocracy in general and the Syndicate in particular,
although – the Syndicate aside –
Mage’s overt satire comes more through Brian
Campbell, Bill Bridges and Kathleen Ryan than through me. These days, I favor
satirists who take a straight-faced approach – Sarah Silverman, Sacha Barton
Cohen, The Onion, Stephen Colbert,
and Key and Peele – to the ridiculousness around them. Even so, the righteous
fury of Chris Rock and Henry Rollins always has a welcome place in my heart. I’m
sorry that Bill Hicks didn’t live long enough to give us his observations on
the current era; if he had done so, though, poor Bill probably would have
spontaneously combusted from apoplectic rage.
I could write
whole books on the place that music has in my creative process. That subject,
in fact, has inspired my forthcoming series Powerchords
– Music, Magick & Urban Fantasy, my short-story collection Tritone, and an ongoing collection of
essays and articles that I often report on my blog at http://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com.
As a kid, I grew up on Motown, classic soul, and ‘60s folk and psychedelic
rock; came of age with old-school heavy metal and hardcore punk; and acquired
my interest in lyrical mysticism from King Crimson, Jethro Tull, the Doors, and
Rush – all of whom left their mark on Mage.
I used to DJ at my high-school and college radio stations, facilitated at
various freeform ecstatic dance groups, and played bass guitar in about a
half-dozen bands over the years. I always write with music playing, and that
music, in turn, influences what I create.
A “short” list
of artists who’ve influenced Mage would
still be ridiculously long. The most obviously influential bands from the
“classic Mage” era include Rush, the
Doors, White Zombie, Patti Smith, Oingo Boingo, Kate Bush, Killing Joke, Ministry,
Concrete Blonde, Faith and the Muse, The Changelings, Dead Can Dance, Ozzy-era
Black Sabbath, Henryk Gorecki, and the spectrum of darkwave artists whose music
was an intrinsic part of the ‘90s White Wolf experience.
In the years
since then, my tastes have migrated more toward world-fusion techno (MIDIval
PundiZ, Suns of Arqa, Shpongle, Hilight Tribe, Cosmosis, etc.); postmodern
classical (Phillip Glass, Jocelyn Pook, Tan Dun, Kronos Quartet, George Crumb,
and the like); dark/ black ambient soundscapes (Caul, Lusmord, Dark Sanctuary, Coph
Nia, Alio Die, Rajna, Desiderii Marginis, Endura, Atrium Carcerai, pre-Semantic Spaces Delerium, and similar
artists); “ghost-country” (Neko Case, Earth, Brandi Carlile, Grinderman, the
Voodoo Organist, late-period Johnny Cash, that sort of thing); neo-shamanic
polyculture fusion (Kan’Nal, Soriah, Niyaz, Delhi 2 Dublin, Shiva in Exile, Afro-Celt
Sound System, Master Musicians of Bukake, etc.); neopagan, faerie-punk and
neo-medievalism (Wendy Rule, Tori Amos, Faun, Omnia, Corvus Corax, Hu Dost, the
WiccaMen, and so forth); and the symphonic metal subgenre I call “Viking Chick
Kaboom” (Nightwish, Epica, Leaves’ Eyes, Where Angels Fall, the SLoT, and
similar bands).
These days, certain
“old-school Mage” artists – most
notably Killing Joke, Patti Smith and Concrete Blonde – remain at least as
influential as they once were, if not more so. And a crop of newer artists –
especially Miyavi, Macklemore and Lewis, Lady Gaga, Canibus, Bats for Lashes, Lorde,
Susheela Raman, SJ Tucker, Anathema, Archive, Sleepin Pillow and Florence + the
Machine – have seen constant rotation during my work on Mage 20, and will probably continue to influence the line over the
coming years.
Wrapping up this
interview (finally!), I’d like to urge everyone who reads my words – in any
venue, and preferably all of them – to keep looking for miracles and new
experiences. Watch for those “miracles just out of sight,” and never forget
that you have the power to change your world, often in ways you might not
expect until. In her song “Mandolin Holy Man,” SJ Tucker tells us “Sometimes
you do good that you never see.” I’ve been fortunate enough to see a bit of
what my work has done for the world at large. May all of you – Mage fans and otherwise – dare to change
your world, and have the good fortune to someday see what your influence has
done.
Cheers!
VoS: And there you have it. Thank you again, Mr. Brucato, for your time and answers and I will be on board as the journey goes forth. For those interested in the project, you have time left to get in on the Kickstarter...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/deluxe-mage-the-ascension-20th-anniversary-edition?ref=live
In case you missed it, Part one of the interview with Satyros Phill Brucato is here.
There's also an interview with Rich Thomas, the guardian guru of Onyx Path here, about the continuing World of Darkness and being a game company in the 21st century here.
In case you missed it, Part one of the interview with Satyros Phill Brucato is here.
There's also an interview with Rich Thomas, the guardian guru of Onyx Path here, about the continuing World of Darkness and being a game company in the 21st century here.
