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.
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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.
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.
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