Paul St John Mackintosh is a jolly stimulating chap. He has many imaginative ideas, and he has strong opinions; he has written all sorts of interesting stuff, and a conversation with him never bores. Last year he added to his CV with a brand new RPG game based on the works and ‘world’ of M R James. We wanted to talk to him about this, but then we drifted into a much longer and serious conversation about weird and horror fiction, so we’re doing this interview in two halves. Or in halves, basically. Why we needed to say ‘two’ is beyond us.
Today’s offering is therefore Part One, all about the Monty-inspired game and what Paul’s up to in general…
MONTY AND ROLEPLAYING
greydogtales: First of all, we’d like to talk about something in which you’ve recently had a lot of involvement – gaming. Were you a gamer in your youth, or is this a later development? And what formats do you prefer – board games, online RPGS or tabletop RPGs?
paul: I had a brief adolescent period of RPG playing while still at school, back in the late Seventies and Eighties when the first games that really defined the field – Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, etc. – were first coming out. Then that went into abeyance literally for decades, although I’ve played PC games enthusiastically and pretty much relentlessly. I rediscovered RPG gaming only in the past five years or so – principally thanks to writing and reading Lovecraftian and weird fiction. Pretty much through random Googling, I discovered that roleplaying games had advanced intellectually and creatively by leaps and bounds over the intervening decades, and that some RPG creators and writers were producing horror fiction as good as, if not better than, many weird and horror writers who were saving themselves entirely for literary and genre outlets. Plus, the whole field has dipped far more deeply and widely into cultural, historical, intellectual and literary sources than it had when I first encountered it. So I’m very happy and comfortable to be part of the reborn RPG scene.
Additionally, since we’re going to be talking plenty about weird and Lovecraftian fiction in a separate article, it’s my view that the current resurgence of both (if they’re not one and the same) owes far more to Call of Cthulhu and roleplaying games in general than those who only work the literary/genre fiction side of the street are aware of. For all the work done by Arkham House and the scholars diligently striving to confirm H.P. Lovecraft’s literary status, it’s not just their work that got Cthulhu plushies into almost every home, and made tentacle-waving gods and Deep Ones cliches of popular culture: it’s also the influence of a classic roleplaying game.
Call of Cthulhu was one of the earliest of the great pioneering vintage of RPGs, appearing in 1981, and it’s worn astonishingly well, remaining only just behind Dungeons and Dragons in popularity. (Perhaps All Things Lovecraft would have risen to their present eminence without CoC, but somehow I doubt it.) A sad proportion of its players admit to never having read a single work by Lovecraft; but I do wonder how many Lovecraftian fiction writers, editors, critics and publishers have never played Call of Cthulhu? I believe the cross-fertilization and the mutual debt deserves to be fully understood and acknowledged on both sides.
greydogtales: What attracted you to the basic concept of roleplaying games – the interactions with others, the problem solving, or the chance to inhabit a different character?
paul: It’s always been imagination: the opportunity to create different characters, different settings, different worlds. I’m a huge devotee of imagination itself, sui generis, as a creative faculty, almost regardless of the media it works with – whether “imagined fantasy” or “taken from life.” RPGs allow me an immensely fruitful, stimulating, and purely fun way to exercise that faculty.
That said, what I tend to enjoy most in RPGs is the opportunity to tell stories – both individually and collaboratively with other players. Any writer or critic who is concerned about the tyranny of the authorial voice should spend a little time playing or running RPGs. M. John Harrison has opined that: “the reader performs most of the act of writing” – that’s never been truer than in RPGs. A writer of RPG scenarios is essentially creating a scaffolding for collective improv, which comes alive at its best with the engagement of really imaginative players who create and contribute just as much of the final creative realization.
As it happens, my rediscovery of RPGs was facilitated by the fact that the hobby took a big turn into “Narrativist” versus “Simulationist” systems. In other words, the rules and mechanics of RPGs, first derived from pure tabletop wargames that attempted to simulate the dynamics of real combat, were revised and reconceived to support the dynamics of storytelling and narrative instead. It’s like the difference between sitting in an airline pilot training flight simulator, and sitting through a screening of Top Gun. There’s still something of a split in the RPG world between devotees of the two approaches – although of course both have their merits and are mutually interdependent. But you can guess which one really played up [sic.] to my talents and enthusiasms as a writer.
Also, the RPG hobby has entered an indie period where a huge number of fun and fascinating ideas are being worked on by creators outside the mainstream, using self-publishing and online community resources. Concurrently, the whole hobby has grown immensely more inclusive, socially aware, LGBT-focused, and generally coming out of Mom’s basement – despite shrill objections from the Neanderthal old guard in some quarters. That’s a trend we’ve seen in genre media across the board (no pun intended…), and RPGs, like comics or PC games or genre fiction, have emerged far stronger for it.
It’s also simply a question of purpose and focus. Games are meant to entertain. Fine, Thomas Ligotti, no less, has declared that “literature is entertainment or it is nothing,” and I heartily endorse that. But it’s even more comforting to be writing a game without various headfucking concerns that you ought to be doing justice to your inspiration, or saving humanity, or rejuvenating the language, or Getting Famous, or crusading for the insulted and injured, etc etc. The solipsistic fantasy of the Lonely Agonized Creative Struggle gets a lot more ludicrous when you’re rolling dice.
greydogtales: As we mention in the introduction, the major project you undertook last year was development of an investigative RPG relating to the disquieting world of that classic author of the supernatural, M R James. What was it that spurred you to take this on?
paul: Ironically, it was a kickback against the dominance of Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraftian horror in RPGs. You’ve got all the great legacy of folk horror, and of the classic ghost story by James and his peers, and yet in RPGs this stuff was either under-represented, or twisted and nerdtroped into Lovecraftian modes to make it palatable to gamers conditioned by CoC. I thought the great tradition of horror deserved to be enjoyed and appreciated on its own merits, rather than distorted through a narrowly Lovecraftian lens. So I went ahead and wrote Casting the Runes, using the investigative type of game system that’s been developed to tackle these kinds of stories effectively, and the whole thing slotted into place so neatly that I’m still amazed that no one tried it before. I offered it to a game publisher, and got signed up almost immediately, even though it was my first time writing an RPG game.
greydogtales: How did the process differ from your previous literary projects? We presume this was a much more complicated business.
paul: Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that different. I tend to incorporate a lot of research into my writing anyway, so the detail-crunching was remarkably similar. Plus, by the time I got around to writing Casting the Runes, I’d already digested the game system so thoroughly that I could adjust to it almost without thinking.
There’s one more part of the process that is absolutely worth mentioning for the benefit of writers everywhere: RPGs pay more. Not always, not more than a major book deal, but I certainly found I was netting bigger PayPal transfers for my RPG writing than I ever did for my weird fiction. That may be a reflection on my relative writing skills, but I do suspect it’s about the financial dynamics of the respective media. RPG players will happily fork out $15-20 for a PDF-only version of the latest reasonably popular game, and substantially more for hardback and printed versions. It’s not unknown for deluxe editions of well-regarded games and supplements to sell out at three-figure cover prices. With that kind of money driving the RPG industry, writers can sometimes benefit quite well from RPG writing – I certainly recommend it as a potentially lucrative alternative to screenwriting or blogging.
greydogtales: Are M. R. James enthusiasts commonly game players, or do you feel more that you’ve drawn other gamers into the MRJ ‘world’?
paul: In my experience, many Jamesians (or Full Montys, or whatever you want to call them) are as much strangers to RPGs as many Lovecraftians are to Call of Cthulhu. I suspect that the traffic between gamers and readers is about the same in both directions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more horror RPG players were aware of MRJ already. Monty is a classic after all, and RPG playing is still far less popular than plain reading.
MACKINTOSH AND WORK
greydogtales: So, you now have a fairly wide-ranging back catalogue, and number of roles – poet, writer, game developer, journalist. Are these roles equal, or do you yearn for one to be paramount?
paul: I look on those all as subsets of writer, and I want them all to flourish as reflections of that. The few times I’ve held one up above the others have turned out, in retrospect, to be big mistakes, so I’d rather keep pushing them all forward, and see how they work out. That said, I’d love for them all to be picked up equally and appreciated equally, rather than one or other gaining such prominence that people start to define me by it, and leave the others languishing in the shade. But that’s not my call.
greydogtales: On one specific strand, you have the second of your inventive ‘ghost adjuster’ tales coming out in Occult Detective Magazine soon. Playing around, or planning a series/cycle of these?
paul: Oh, I definitely want to churn out a cycle of Ghost Adjuster stories. Those tales allow me to tackle a few topics I’m really engaged by – the modern status of Scotland, the Caledonian Anti-syzygy (a.k.a. the Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy that Scots struggle with), the reality (or not) of human consciousness, etc. It’s not the only type of occult detective story that interests me, but I’ve certainly got a few outlines in my mind for that series that I plan to work up into full stories eventually.
greydogtales: What next for Paul StJohn Mackintosh? Do you have new projects or new ideas for your work that you’d like to share?
paul: I’ve currently got one dark urban fantasy novel half-written, one science-fiction-ish novel of oneiric unreality just begun, and a bunch of half-written short stories I want to get around to finishing soon. I have one completed historical novel I want to find a publisher for, as well as the first novel in that urban fantasy series. I’ve got one sonnet cycle of poems based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot and one cycle of modern Scottish supernatural ballads that I’m trying to find publishers for. On the RPG side, I’ve got one more complete game I’ve just about finished for a game publisher, and another under development. And I’m sure that more inspirations, ideas, and projects will keep bubbling up from the creative stinkpot of my brain. So I don’t expect to get a rest any time soon.
greydogtales: Many thanks, Paul, for joining us again.
Paul StJohn Mackintosh lives in France and works in Geneva. His writing can be found at his Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Paul-StJohn-Mackintosh/e/B00CEH18BM/.
His RPG Casting the Runes can be found at: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/334163/Casting-the-Runes-Occult-Investigation-in-the-World-of-M-R-James.
PART TWO of our interview will follow along on here in a while, when we’ll be discussing the nature of genre, Lovecraftian themes, storytelling, and all sorts…
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