Andrew is an author who has recently contributed a title to Tin Man Games' Gamebook Adventures series on iOS and Android.
TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF
Whilst I work in market research as a developer and analyst for a living, my passion has always been for writing and games design (like you!) -My academic background is one of entomology and statistics, but didn't pursue this further as I didn't want to be an over-qualified PhD who couldn't find work… Although as it transpired at the time, I didn't find work anyway and so jumped on the IT bandwagon in the late nineties and have worked in this area every since.
HOW DID YOU GET INTO GAMING?
Um… Probably not long after I discovered oxygen haha, I was playing games. By the time I was seven or eight, I was already making my own, and by ten I was running role-playing games clubs… Although I'm thirty-seven now, I really don't think I've changed much since then (for better or for worse!); and yes, my life continues to revolve around writing and games.
WHAT IS IT YOU FIND SO APPEALING ABOUT GAMING?
Where to begin? Well put it this way, I don't spend a lot of time in the "real world" because to put it bluntly, it bores me. Gaming not only opens up universes of imagination, allows me to explore ideas and worlds, learn and experience new things, and challenge myself, but it's my chosen way to "relax". I often spend time in the company of friends for instance, but am renowned for being the one who always wants to play some sort of game haha. I hardly watch tv (except for the news and documentaries) and typically watch only a handful of movies a year. I'd much rather be playing a game!
SHARE A FAVOURITE GAMING MOMENT WITH US
Wow. I'm not even sure what answer to give for this, since there's so many awesome experiences from the last thirty odd years, it's hard to settle on one thing. Do I talk about the various role-playing clubs I ran in "my youth" with up to thirty members? Do I talk about winning an award at a Dungeons and Dragons convention when I was ten? Or the tournaments I used to run at the Pancake Parlour when I was about twelve, with up to twenty players? Or the live role-playing day-long battles I used to run at a nearby reserve when I was in my teens? Or the hundreds of "physical", "miniature" and "material" games I used to make and run around the same time, supported by magazines I used to write with reviews, articles and stories, and for which I ran a "class" at school in year nine? Or GMing role-playing campaigns with three separate groups of friends throughout year twelve and still managing to get top marks? Or the sixty-hour long Dungeons and Dragons sessions I used to run when I was about twenty? Or our group winning so many awards at role-playing conventions in the nineties that we had GMs start requesting to run things with our group in it? Or running a Call of Cthulhu campaign where we did nothing but eat, sleep and role-play for a whole week? Or something more recent, such as running Blood Bowl leagues that included the game creators/contributors themselves? Or running my own creations at conventions to great acclaim? Or releasing my own works to the world? Hmmm, I don't think I can really answer this question haha.
WHAT WAS THE AWARD YOU WON FOR DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS?
The award I won at a Dungeons and Dragons convention when I was ten was... "Best costume" haha. Not that my costume was anywhere near the best; I still recall the presence that one team, "The Pillage People", had when they turned up all decked out in elaborate medieval costume (on later reflection, I suspect that they were SCA members or something). I think I was given the award because the judges were impressed that I turned up on as a lone ten year old in costume (some of which had been scavenged from show-bags I think) which I continued to wear throughout the event, somewhat oblivious to the fact that hardly anyone else did!
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY PLAYING?
Sadly, I don't get nearly as much time these days as I'd like… But that's not to say I'm not playing anything (I'd need a lobotomy for that to happen). I still play in two Blood Bowl leagues for instance (both Skaven teams currently haha) and lately, I've been enjoying the Blood Sword gamebooks that I missed when I was younger (my battle strategy seems to work quite well; put the Trickster in melee with a big baddie and just defend to draw their attacks, meanwhile your Enchanter prepares a Nemesis Bolt to blast them to kingdom come). Two computer games I've been enjoying recently are Etherlords II (a modern Magic the Gathering rip-off, but done so well and better balanced), and the Elven Legacy series which I can't recommend enough if you're into turn-based fantasy battles with a decent AI challenge. My Call of Cthulhu campaign(s) have been on hold since early last year though, as I just don't have the time at the moment to run it; much to the chagrin of my players… Occasionally I'll run tournaments though; I'm known for being quite competitive haha.
CAN YOU TELL US WHAT YOUR FAVOURITE GAMES ARE?
Favourite role-playing game has to be Call of Cthulhu. I've played a hell of a lot of different systems, but this still beats them all (IMHO) for its elegant simplicity (even material written in the very first edition can still be easily run with the latest edition; unlike Dungeons and Dragons for instance that I gave up on soon after 3rd edition came out), the way the system supports the ideas/world implicit in Lovecraft's writing (and others of the "Lovecraft circle") and the fact that the adventures written for it are about "story and atmosphere" not "dungeon-crawls to accumulate loot".
Favorite tabletop game probably is Blood Bowl, although I'm not particularly experienced in a great number of them (Blood Bowl was cheaper in that it didn't require so many pieces, the games have a definitive end-point and you can have leagues and ladders, and best of all, you can do permanent damage to your mates' best players that affect their team ever after!)
I've also spent a lot of time playing Magic the Gathering over the years (soon after it came out, I traded a dual-land for five swamps as I was playing black at the time; whoops!), and the computer games that come to mind that rocked my world over the years are the SSI "Gold Box" series (Pools of Radiance et al), the Mario Party series, the Resident Evil series and the Space Quest series. Oh and I have to mention Turrican I and II for the C64; man they were awesome!
I should also give credit to Dungeons and Dragons (even though I'm pretty much just 1st/2nd edition and usually set my campaigns in Greyhawk), since I did spend, er, the better part of twenty years playing it. My attic is full of boxes of the stuff, that I should probably sell on ebay or something haha as it's just collecting dust now.
WHAT WAS THE LAST GAME YOU PLAYED?
My party died in the second Blood Sword book I was playing last night. Damn you Witch-King, I shall have my revenge!
Not as much as perhaps I should have done by now (typically I've been too busy making and playing games for that). But yes, I'm starting to get "some runs on the board". -This includes two published fiction novels now (The Dark Horde which is a supernatural horror and Evermore: An Introduction which a kinda biography with fantasy elements), a digital gamebook (Gamebook Adventures: Infinite Universe which is a sci-fi comedy/parody), editing and design for the first four Gamebook Adventures titles, and many drawers full of other writing and game designs… Some of these should see release one day (and are being worked on now, but still probably a while away from release). There's also the odd article/story I've done here and there for role-playing or writing publications over the years, but nothing worth saying much about really.
I set out to create something that was the “spiritual successor” to the Space Fighter gamebooks I wrote as a child. And in deciding to take on the sci-fi genre; both because it was something that (Gamebook Adventures) fans were asking for and something I wanted to do; I decided that my take was going to be “stupid or wacky sci-fi” rather than hard, serious or gritty sci-fi. So time travel, faster-than-light interstellar journeys, laser weapons, space ships and aliens were all going to part of the humorous mix; never mind whether the scientific consensus deemed it plausible or not, it’s a gamebook after all right? And so the emphasis was to be on fun not scientific plausibility.
But in working out how I was going to execute the story, I grappled with the problem of just how do you set a story in an imagined far-future where the character understands the world but the reader doesn’t? For example, in a “typical” fantasy you don’t have to explain what a sword is, what a horse is, what a tavern is, even what dwarves and orcs are etc. But in a sci-fi world where there is no “typical” sci-fi setting, you have to explain everything for the sake of the reader as there isn’t much in the way of “established norms” of the genre. -The sci-fi universe of Star Wars is completely different from Star Trek for example, which is in turn completely different from Foundation, which is completely different from Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
So my solution was to have the character come from our world and time, to be projected into the far future. This way you can justify explaining the world in the narrative as it’s new to the character as well as the reader. So away I went, creating an epic sci-fi tale and got to about 500 sections before I had a “creative crisis”. I considered that not only was my story “too epic” (in that it was taking too long to actually get to the “real story”), but also it took too long to get to the actual sci-fi bits, and consequently readers might drop off before they got to this… So after cutting out some 250 sections (they may return in another form someday), I re-engineered the story so that you were still a character from our time, but now you actually started in the far future in the midst of sci-fi action. How did I justify this in the narrative? Easy: Your character begins with their memory having been erased such that you have no memory of your past, how you got there or even who you are. Much of the way I initially began the gamebook would still be used by virtue of travelling back in time to re-experience your past. It was these elements, combined with the story being very very loosely based on the first Space Fighter gamebook I wrote that was called Rebel Base, that basically provided the crux of the story… Well sort of, I kept embellishing it with ever more crazy ideas as I’m inclined to do haha.
YOUR GAMEBOOK ADVENTURES STORY (INFINITE UNIVERSE) IS AN EPIC STORY, HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT WRITING/DEVELOPING IT?
170,000 odd words is pretty epic for a gamebook haha. When asked a similar question by the renowned "Lloyd of Gamebooks" I said:I set out to create something that was the “spiritual successor” to the Space Fighter gamebooks I wrote as a child. And in deciding to take on the sci-fi genre; both because it was something that (Gamebook Adventures) fans were asking for and something I wanted to do; I decided that my take was going to be “stupid or wacky sci-fi” rather than hard, serious or gritty sci-fi. So time travel, faster-than-light interstellar journeys, laser weapons, space ships and aliens were all going to part of the humorous mix; never mind whether the scientific consensus deemed it plausible or not, it’s a gamebook after all right? And so the emphasis was to be on fun not scientific plausibility.
But in working out how I was going to execute the story, I grappled with the problem of just how do you set a story in an imagined far-future where the character understands the world but the reader doesn’t? For example, in a “typical” fantasy you don’t have to explain what a sword is, what a horse is, what a tavern is, even what dwarves and orcs are etc. But in a sci-fi world where there is no “typical” sci-fi setting, you have to explain everything for the sake of the reader as there isn’t much in the way of “established norms” of the genre. -The sci-fi universe of Star Wars is completely different from Star Trek for example, which is in turn completely different from Foundation, which is completely different from Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
So my solution was to have the character come from our world and time, to be projected into the far future. This way you can justify explaining the world in the narrative as it’s new to the character as well as the reader. So away I went, creating an epic sci-fi tale and got to about 500 sections before I had a “creative crisis”. I considered that not only was my story “too epic” (in that it was taking too long to actually get to the “real story”), but also it took too long to get to the actual sci-fi bits, and consequently readers might drop off before they got to this… So after cutting out some 250 sections (they may return in another form someday), I re-engineered the story so that you were still a character from our time, but now you actually started in the far future in the midst of sci-fi action. How did I justify this in the narrative? Easy: Your character begins with their memory having been erased such that you have no memory of your past, how you got there or even who you are. Much of the way I initially began the gamebook would still be used by virtue of travelling back in time to re-experience your past. It was these elements, combined with the story being very very loosely based on the first Space Fighter gamebook I wrote that was called Rebel Base, that basically provided the crux of the story… Well sort of, I kept embellishing it with ever more crazy ideas as I’m inclined to do haha.
ARE YOU WORKING ON ANY GAMING-RELATED PROJECTS AT THE MOMENT?
Yeah three at the moment, plus two more in the "potential pipeline" depending on a few different things (but let's not say too much about that yet hey?) -Two of the current projects are Gamebook Adventures related, and another is an iOS game based on one of the games I created circa 1990. It will be awesome to see that game released but there's a way to go yet, so I'll stick to my habit of only talking about things once they've happened; you never know what can happen between now and then ;)
DO YOU HAVE ANY WEBPAGES OR SOCIAL NETWORK ACCOUNTS WHERE FANS CAN FIND YOU?
My (main) website, with a blog, extracts, reviews etc is:
You can also follow me on twitter: @BrewinEvermore
…And if you're game, I have a facebook group that is mostly comprised of my facebook friends where things can be a bit crazy sometimes:
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