The game takes place on the campus of a tweedy New England University in 1919 (a year I chose so that I could easily acquire public domain art to illustrate it – and to tie in with the whole Lovecraft thing, I suppose). This is more accident than intention, but that’s how it turned out. It’s a game that was definitely au currant for the 2004-2005 Forge crowd – stake-setting is front and center, it is GM-less, and it has a tight thematic focus. Two friends and I formed a company, Bully Pulpit Games, to usher it into print. Between the Game Chef draft and holding the perfect-bound book in my hands were months of playtesting, editing, and layout. The Roach was published about a year later and has enjoyed small press success (about 750 copies sold to date). Their experience was a powerful motivator for me, a real epiphany, and I set out to refine the design and publish it post-contest. It wasn’t tested and it wasn’t refined, but it worked well enough that a group with no connection to me played and enjoyed it. I didn’t exactly succeed, but the first draft (and that’s all any Game Chef entry ever is) of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach was playable – barely. My only goal was to finish the contest with a functional game. I didn’t really know what I was getting into. It was my first time in the contest, and I wrote a game that pulled equally from my love for Lovecraftian horror and my everyday experience working at a University. Nixon’s City of Brass, and Paul Czege’s Bacchanal. A lot of fun games saw the light of day as a result of this contest – Nathan Paoletta’s carry: a game about war, Clinton R. In 2005, the ingredients were Accuser, Entomology, Wine, and Companion. The Game Chef contest challenges designers to build games based on specific “ingredients” in a week or two. Game Chef is always a fertile ground for new games. The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a dark comedy of manners, lampooning academia and asking players to answer a difficult question – are you willing to swallow a soul-eating telepathic insect bent on destroying human civilization? The Shab Al-Hiri Roach For the project Jason is telling us a bit about the design process that went into The Shab Al-Hiri Roach RPG. The Horror Eassay Project continues this week at Flames Rising with game designer Jason Morningstar (who just won a Diana Jones Award for Grey Ranks).
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