Sunday, March 23, 2025

My Other, Other, OTHER Hobby

I have always been an enthusiastic reader and a lover of books. I still have vivid memories of my elementary school library (Town Line School in Spencerport, New York, by the way) right down to the physical location of many of the books I consumed during those formative years. Thanks to my father's passion for good science fiction, there was also a decent-size home library I was able to mine as well and thus, by the time I was moving on to Junior High, I had already read dozens of books and short stories by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Richard Matheson, Jack Vance, and so many more.

Over the decades, I have continued to love reading and my list of favorite authors includes Alfred Bester, John Christopher, David Gerrold, Frank Herbert, John Wyndham, and many others, and I have endeavored to collect their published works in a variety of editions. This has led to me being a casual collector of books and one way I celebrate this is by attending the annual Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Collectors Show held here in March. While this year was promoted as the 45th such event, I have only been attending since 2002, back when it was still held at the labyrinthine Mission Hills Inn and special guests included people like Ray Bradbury, George Clayton Johnson, and Frederick Pohl.

This year, the show returned to the Glendale Civic Auditorium where it has been since 2014 and I wound up with 21 "new" additions to my collection, many of which were either impulse buys or purchases based on recent recommendations. I also grabbed a couple volumes to fill gaps in my collection or to replace badly worn copies of books I already own.

All told, I spent about $65 and I'm really happy with the stuff I brought home.

A few highlights include: 

  • Six books in the Dray Prescot sword and planet series written by Alan Burt Akers. Artist Tim Kirk was in attendance, so I was able to get him to sign one of them.
  • Flash Gordon: the Witch Queen of Mongo by Carson Bingham (the only book in this short, six-book series from the '70s that I didn't own).
  • Shot in the Dark, a collection of 23(!) short science fiction stories by a number of terrific authors including Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Jack London, Isaac Asimov, and others. It has a great cover by Herman Bischoff!
  • The Science Fiction Galaxy, a collection of 12 stories by various authors, but in a unique, sturdy, hardback format with a bright yellow cover.
  • Alien Skies by Peter Dagmar (a lesser-known SF author) - his first novel, published by Digit in the UK.
  • Atoms and Evil by Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), a collection of his stories published by Fawcett/Gold Medal.



It's a pity this show only comes once a year, but then again, it gives us plenty of time to READ a lot of these books in anticipation of the next event.

I hope to see a few of you back for the 46th annual show in 2026!

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

A "Secret" Adventure for the Sixth Gun

The Sixth Gun Roleplaying Game, the very first RPG I wrote for Pinnacle Entertainment Group, was originally released in late 2015 after a successful Kickstarter campaign a few months earlier.

Collage of Sixth Gun Roleplaying Game releases written by Scott Woodard and published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group

In 2018, after crowdfunding the Savage World of FlashGordon, my second RPG for PEG, I was contacted by Oni Press, publishers of the Sixth Gun comic, about contributing some new game material to an upcoming deluxe reprint collection of said comics.

As I had loads of notes and undeveloped ideas for the setting still lurking on my hard drive, it was easy to dip into them and find something suitable for this volume and I hoped that by saying yes to the idea, it might help bump sales of the RPG from comic fans who weren't already aware of the game.

The resulting adventure was Mimihqueh: Temple of the Dead, a sequel of sorts to the featured location's first appearance in issue #42 of the comic where the heroes (Drake, Becky, and Nidawi) hid from the Knights of Solomon and the King of Secrets in an ancient temple occupied by unliving Aztec priests.

I pored over each panel of that particular issue to pull exact details from the illustrations, reproducing an accurate map of the mysterious pyramid down to the names of each represented god in the forms of towering statues.

I came up with a unique treasure (the Heart of Tlahuillo), statted up a few choice enemies, and penned a short adventure suitable for a single session of play (perfect for a convention game or a one-shot with friends).

Accompanying the adventure was a selection of relevant rules pulled from the core book, a posse of six pre-generated characters originally created for the Sixth Gun Companion, and a short comic from Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt that introduced all those characters to the world of the Sixth Gun.

The resulting section devoted to the RPG runs 26 pages in that oversize collectible volume and if you're a fan of the setting and you can get your hands on a copy (it is still listed on Amazon and I occasionally see them on eBay for reasonable prices), it is very much worth it!

Cover art of Volume Five of the The Sixth Gun oversized deluxe collection

I intend to reach out to a few people to see if I can at least share the adventure with you all at some point down the line. 

Watch this space, amigos!

Sunday, March 9, 2025

We're Only Making Plans for Kubla

As I've mentioned in previous posts, KublaCon (now known as KublaCon PRIME) held each year over Memorial Day weekend, is my absolute favorite west coast game convention and this year I am once again returning as a "Special Guest." 

At this point, I have not been contacted about appearing on any panels, but as a special guest, I always feel compelled to at least run a few games and make myself available for conversations, signings, or whatever the convention asks of me. 

This time around, I am running an adventure for the Sixth Gun Roleplaying Game for Savage Worlds as well as a Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds adventure as part of Savage Saturday Night

The Sixth Gun RPG based on the critically acclaimed comic series by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt, was the first setting I wrote for Pinnacle Entertainment Group and this particular adventure titled Happiness & Contentment is one I originally wrote and ran at GenghisCon 42 back in 2019! As it has been a few years since I did anything with the setting, I thought I'd blow the dust off this scenario, update a few things, create some sexy bling for the table, and present it to players once more. I'll be running this one on Friday at 2:00pm and it's Event #43 if you're interested in giving it a whirl:

"After a long, hot trek through the desert, a small town in the middle of nowhere is a welcome sight indeed. But something is definitely amiss in Contentment, Arizona! This is an adventure for the official 'Sixth Gun Roleplaying Game' written by your GM, Scott Woodard, and based on the long-running, award-nominated Supernatural Western comic series created by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt."
Poster mock up for an adventure for the Sixth Gun Roleplaying Game to be run at KublaCon Prime 2025 

For Savage Saturday Night, I'm running Crypt of the Everflame for Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds. This adventure was originally published for first edition Pathfinder® and then lovingly converted to Savage Worlds by my friend Chris Valentine. I played it at Gamehole Con 11 last year and had a great time so I thought I would slip behind the GM screen and offer it at KublaCon! This is a pretty straightforward dungeon crawl, but it offers a number of challenges that should make for a fun four hour session. Find it on Saturday night at 7:00pm (Event #98):

"The young heroes of the town of Kassen are ready for their coming-of-age ceremony, an old tradition in which they retrieve a piece of the eternal flame burning in the tomb of the town's founder. Yet when they arrive there, they find only the corpses of their fellow townsfolk, dead bandits, and mysterious animated skeletons. The Novice heroes must brave the traps and perils of the Crypt of the Everflame, discover the source of the corruption that has awakened an ancient evil, and defeat a menace that seeks vengeance against Kassen and its people. This is a Savage Worlds conversion of the original first edition Pathfinder® adventure."
Poster mock up for an adventure for Pathfinder for Savage Worlds to be run at KublaCon Prime 2025 

Other things you'll find me doing at KublaCon are assisting with the almost legendary Friday Frenzy Flea Market and the Sunday KublaConAuction. I've been helping out with the auction at this con for the past few years and I can't imagine NOT participating. At some point in the future, I'll be sure to talk more about my relationship with game auctions. 

For more information about KublaCon, check out their site, their Facebook page, and their Discord server and I hope to see some of you at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport at the end of May!

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Eighties! I'm GAMING in the Eighties!

Last week, I wrote about my teenage discovery of the horror roleplaying game, Chill back in the mid-1980s. This got me thinking about all the other RPGs that I experimented with around that time and the more I thought about it, the longer that list grew!

This was the during the so-called “Dark Times” before the internet (yes, Billy, some of us grew up before the advent of the "World Wide Web") where one learned of new games via various publications, word of mouth, rare local conventions (we were fortunate to have an annual one in our area), or just by reading blurbs on the backs of shrinkwrapped boxes or flipping through books on the shelves of your friendly local game shop. If a game looked or sounded interesting, you simply took a chance and bought it or, if you were lucky, you signed up for a session at a con to experience it for yourself, hopefully at the hands of an experienced game master.

I was fortunate that my circle of friends were all interested in roleplaying games alongside all our other shared hobbies including filmmaking, improvisational comedy, cycling, and exploring the dense, mysterious woods that surrounded our small village of Spencerport in Upstate New York.

Together we played first and later second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (our Basic D&D days were already behind us when we became friends), but we soon began to dabble in a number of other RPGs, sometimes learning and playing a particular game just once or twice before deciding that it didn’t suit us and agreeing to move onto something else.

Throughout the ‘80s, I played, ran, or at least owned and read through all of the following. This list is by no means complete. (I still own (and in some cases still play) those titles marked with an asterisk):

  • Tunnels & Trolls (1975)*
  • Bunnies & Burrows (1976)*
  • Gamma World (1978)*
  • Villains & Vigilantes (1979)*
  • Top Secret (1980) (later Top Secret/S.I. (1987))*
  • Call of Cthulhu (1981)*
  • Stormbringer (1981)*
  • Star Frontiers (1982)*
  • James Bond 007 (1983)*
  • Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game (1983)
  • The Adventures of Indiana Jones (1984)
  • Arcanum (1984)*
  • Chill (1984)*
  • Marvel Super Heroes (1984)
  • Middle-Earth Role Playing (1984)
  • Paranoia (1984)*
  • Star Ace (1984)*
  • Time Master (1984)*
  • Toon (1984)*
  • DC Heroes (1985)
  • Doctor Who Role Playing Game (1985)*
  • Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game (1985)
  • Sandman – Map of Halaal (1985)*
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness (1985)
  • World Action and Adventure (1985)*
  • Ghostbusters (1986)
  • Ars Magica (1987)
  • Star Wars: the Roleplaying Game (1987)
  • Talislanta (1987)*
  • It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show (1989)
  • Shadowrun (1989)

Looking over that list of 31(!) titles, I can’t help but find myself a bit puzzled by some modern-day gamers who started their journey with the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons and have yet to try anything else beyond that despite now living in a world where there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of tabletop roleplaying games out there, most of which are available via download from sites like DriveThruRPG! I’ve heard every excuse in the book, but that’s a topic for another time.

If you have any questions about any of the aforementioned games, feel free to reach out! I have vivid memories of almost everything on that list and would love to share stories including the time I was running Chill for my friends in my parent’s basement and our table was suddenly invaded by a cascade of newly-hatched baby spiders! 🕷

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Adventures into the Unknown

It was in March of 1985 when I first discovered a certain tabletop roleplaying game that would forever change my life, and no it was not Dungeons & Dragons!

At that time, I was a pimple-faced teenager attending the annual SimCon gaming convention on the campus of the University of Rochester in my home city of Rochester, New York when my wide eyes fell upon a boxed game casually displayed on a wall in the dimly lit dealer’s room. The evocative cover art by the late, great Jim Holloway depicted a hapless explorer bedecked in Victorian attire and gripping a glowing lantern turning to face an approaching threat within a fog-laden cemetery.

The game? CHILL: Adventures into the Unknown released by a short-lived publisher known as Pacesetter Ltd out of Delavan, Wisconsin.

I asked to examine the shrinkwrapped box and found myself positively transfixed by it. I adored the cover art, I dug the grotesque font used for the simple five-letter logo, and I digested each word on the back of the box with ghoulish delight:

“Fear runs down your spine like ice water. Pressing your shoulder more firmly against the door of the rotting cottage, you hope that your strength can prevail against the beast that hunts you. It lurks somewhere outside – waiting, watching. If only someone else had been sent out into the night, into the swamp to battle this creature.

“All has been quiet for two hours now. The monster wants you to believe that it has given up, gone to hunt less wary prey. But you know it can't be far away, for the night is silent as a grave and the air is fitted with a deathly CHILL.

CHILL: Adventures into the Unknown takes the role playing game one step beyond, into the eerie realm of ghostly horror. In this box lies everything you need to create an entire world of terrifying adventure. Inside, you will find a 64-page Campaign Book, a 32-page manual of creatures, a 16-page adventure, three dice, playing pieces, a large color map and a special introductory rules folder which allows you to begin playing within minutes of opening this box.

“Cross the threshold. Venture out into the night fog and enter the world of CHILL.”

Y’see, back in the days before the interwebs, the only way to learn about new games was reading about them in publications like TSR’s The Dragon (or White Wolf from our friends across the Pond), trying them out at local conventions, or randomly discovering them on store shelves where you had to trust your eyes and instincts and risk spending your hard-earned money on the great unknown.

Without hesitation, I purchased the game and drifted off to an unoccupied corner of Wilson Commons to free it of its cellophane prison and discover what delights were contained within. There was no disappointment on that day apart from the unfortunate loss of the gorgeous red, white, and blue 10-sided Crisloid dice which I strongly believe are still haunting some dark corner of the campus to this day, buried beneath 40 years of accumulated cobwebs and dust.

It didn’t take long for me to fill out my CHILL collection with various releases from Pacesetter including a 64-page bestiary titled Things, several adventure modules, and a box of lead miniatures from Grenadier Models many of which I promptly painted to a somewhat acceptable standard.

I also had the great privilege of meeting up with the folks behind Pacesetter when I attended the Gen Con gaming convention held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin later that year. There I acquired a CHILL T-shirt, got my copy of the Vampires sourcebook signed by authors Michael Williams and Gali Sanchez, and played in a terrifying demo game run by Mr. Williams himself.

Back home, I ran several sessions of the game for my friends and wrote a number of my own adventures with titles like Ring for Nurse, L.A. Nights (years before I moved here to Los Angeles), New Years Eve, and Subway to Hell which I actually ran at Gen Con in 1986. I even adapted Ken Russell’s horror/comedy feature film, Lair of the White Worm into a playable adventure!

After an incredibly prolific couple of years, Pacesetter eventually folded. I remained a fan of the game and its setting and when it was announced that Mayfair Games was to publish a second edition in 1990, I set to putting a few adventure ideas down on paper with the goal of getting them published and hopefully securing my very first credit as a professional writer!

In June of 1991, I finally submitted two ideas to Mayfair:

1)      Airborne Horror: A Double Adventure for CHILL. The two linked adventures included The Rage of Amenemhet and Evil in Paradise.

2)      Leap Into Terror, an adventure that pitted the envoys against the legendary Spring-Heeled Jack.

Much to my surprise, I was contacted by Jeff R. Leason of Mayfair who expressed interest in Leap Into Terror! This led to a few follow-up phone calls and suggested edits, but then, sadly, everything went quiet and I later learned that Jeff had left the company and my adventure was no longer under consideration.

While this was certainly devastating for me at the time (and it would be a few more years before I would see my first professional publication), it was certainly a good learning experience and I still have everything that I wrote in my files, some of which you can see here.

After Mayfair abandoned CHILL following the publication of Unknown Providence: SAVE in New England in 1996, the game once again drifted off into obscurity, eventually seeing a third edition as well as a retro clone of the first edition (with specific references to various organizations, personalities, and noted original beasties removed for copyright reasons) known as Cryptworld and published by Goblinoid Games.

I reached out to Goblinoid a few years ago about writing some material for Cryptworld, but as of this writing, that company has also gone dark.

In 2023, my horror RPG, Pinebox Middle School for Savage Worlds (set in the Pinebox, Texas setting made famous in the college-age RPG, East Texas University) was published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. While most of the book was comprised of wholly original material, there are a few bits and pieces that I carried over from my experiences with CHILL. I suppose that was my way of finally making my college dreams of publication a reality, decades later.

And that, my friends, is the tale of how “a frightfully fun role playing game” had a significant impact on my creative life.

My Other, Other, OTHER Hobby

I have always been an enthusiastic reader and a lover of books. I still have vivid memories of my elementary school library (Town Line Schoo...