MORBIDGAMES

So there we are, my world discussed in 5 posts, for better or worse. I hope those of you reading these pages have found it useful and if you have any questions or would like me to expand on anything I mentioned, by all means please feel free to comment on the related posts, here or send me an email via the submission page.

So what’s next for Morbidgames? Well I still have ideas for the world of Ave Molech, but nothing I’ve felt is solid enough to be a standalone project or even enough to really add to the game short of adding to the errata page. You have seen or heard of some of the other projects I started working on and then shut down, primarily Alice Wonderland and Dijinitech (actual spelling keeps changing in my mind and on paper, and, uh, online text).

After Ave Molech I started writing these silly little journals from the point of view of Alice, though my Alice had more in common with American McGee’s Alice than Lewis Carroll’s Alice. It started as a joke, then evolved into an InDesign Template and then got to the point where I seriously considered building a world around this. But that’s not what I wanted.

I ended up scratching this idea because I didn’t want to rehash any previous Wonderland items. So I began writing a story about a lady for hire named Alice who’s Sister Mabel, a stripper, is killed by a man known as the White Rabbit. The story was designed to loosely mirror the original story, so that when Alice comes out of the first room in the rabbit whole and is greeted by the Dodo and other animals, instead she comes out of a nightclub recovering from a binge into the middle of a Gay Pride parade. However, I ended up scrapping this as well because of four things.

The first was Looking Glass Wars began to get popular, or at least it was showing up in my Google Alerts more often. The second was that American McGee mentioned in a game magazine that he wanted to make another Alice game in the next couple years. Then the Sci-Fi channel did an Alice remake as well as Tim Burton did a remake. If you haven’t noticed I’m not a fan of doing what everyone else is doing or what the popular thing is. So I shelved everything.

You might think I’d go back to Dijinitech, which my idea for was to be a political space opera. The idea, and again you’ll see many of my common magic and tech mixing themes with this was to create a faction based role playing game. The galaxy was super high tech, and the main story based around the idea that this one planet with an immortal supernatural ruler (I termed him the Phoenix King) who pretty much ruled his world in peace due to annihilating any opposition comes into contact with a friendly democratic and very advanced alien race.

At this point magic and technology are essentially equal, because it wouldn’t matter if you use nanobots to shoot fire out of your arms or if you use a spell, the result is the same. That said, these high tech aliens share their technology with these supernatural beings and welcome them into this federation of planets type of group and everything is copasetic.

However, two unrelated planets begin a resource war with each other that escalates and one of the Phoenix Kings ships are caught in a cross fire and destroyed. As a result the Phoenix King annihilates both planets involved in the war, as well as sends out assassins to commit genocide on any living members of either race.

While this coupe-de-grace ultimately creates a stable universe again, the democratic groups then begin come to the defense and harbor the two races in danger as they see this as completely unnecessary and overly brutal and eventually turn against the Phoenix King and his followers. The result is you have those who side with the Phoenix King, those who side with the Federation and then those caught in the middle.

I still like my story outline and at some point I might flesh it out more, but I’m not that big of a science fiction guy. Sure I love my movies, but when it comes to books, I’d much rather read and write about fantasy related things. Of course, I don’t want to convert the story to a fantasy world instead of a high-tech world since I already have a fantasy series.

So what about Gaslight Demons?

A while back, to generate more interest in all things Morbidgames, I started looking for other writers to work with as far as either writing stories based on Ave Molech or new worlds that my existing user base might like to check out. The result was hundreds of submissions to my email, all of which I read, though few I responded too.

Eventually I came across Gaslight Demons by Gloria Weber, and I was amazed. She was a great writer, with a fantastic story and I loved it. I knew from the moment I finished reading it that I had to get it out to other people. Unfortunately it hasn’t had the results I had hoped, and I’m honestly not sure why.

Part of me wonders if it’s due to not enough interest in Gaslight fiction, or if the marketing channels I use, albeit RPG heavy, may not have enough interest in this. In either case I’m still trying to work out some marketing tactics that will hopefully increase the sales on this.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I’m a big fan of helping other writers and I don’t’ take a commission of my own for putting the book out there. I like to think that if enough people come and by the book that they’d be interested in the other writings under the Morbidgames Publishing flag and check out Ave Molech.