#219 – Talking BtS with Steven Dawes

Breakfast puppies?

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Ruh-roh, Raggy!

You're listening to the Glitter Boys, right?

You're home alone late at night. There's a loud thump at the door. You get up out of bed, you grab your licensed edition Legend of Greystone sword, walk across the room, open the door, and roll for initiative. We're here today to talk about Beyond the Supernatural, the dark, conspiracy-driven, Cthulhuan background gaming setting for the Palladium It is really everything you want it to be about horror and classic horror that comes across, all set in the mechanics of the Palladium gaming system. Here with us in the audience— wait, not the audience. Here with us as part of the cast is Stephen Dawes, one of the authors of one of the Palladium Beyond the Supernatural books and a big supporter of Palladium Beyond the Supernatural. Stephen, why don't you introduce yourself?

Well, it sounds like you said it all, but yes. Uh, for those who weren't listening to Buckley here, yeah, I'm, I'm Stephen Dawes, a longtime fan of Palladium books in general. I started playing, uh, uh, when I was about 15 years old, which means it's been like about 36, 37 years I've been doing this, uh, Palladium shtick. So I'd like to think I know a thing or two about it. And in particular, while I played all the games over the years, uh, you know, my wheelhouse in the last several years has been Beyond the Supernatural.

That's great. So you're saying about 36, 37 years ago, what brought you into the Beyond the Supernatural or Palladium in general? If you started with one of the other products, how did that all start?

My intro to Beyond the Supernatural was a complete unexpected accident, and I love telling this story, so strap in, we're going for a ride. But now seriously, uh, you know, like, like most, like most folks back in the '90s, I cut my teeth on D&D with my best buddy. Arnie, and we were both like a couple of comic book geeks hardcore at the time too. So one day Arnie surprises me with a TMNT and Other Strangeness book. You know, he's like, dude, the Ninja Turtles got their own game. And, you know, so I was like, cool, let's check this out, Dad. You know, so he brought a book. After playing it a few games, I was hooked. I mean, I was hooked something fierce. And I was like, I've got to get my own book. So I think it was, yeah, my 15th birthday, which was like in January. You know, I get birthday money and I decided to blow it on going to the, uh, to the The Dragon Slayer is our local hobby store, still around no less. So shout out the Dragon Slayer. Anyway, I go in with the intention of picking up the TMNT book more or less like he did, and where they had them set up, they were kind of like sitting on these shallow racks, and there was like a book or two behind them as they were more or less trying to shoehorn all the spare— every book they could, even if they were all kind of sitting behind each other. So I see the Turtle book, you know, prominently displayed like it's been waiting its whole life for me, and I collect my book, I clutch it off the wall, and behind it Is the book that I might not have paid, you know, 2 seconds notice of, but then I realized I recognized the style of artwork. And the reason to this, my mom is a hardcore old-school horror nerd herself, vintage horror gal. I love my mom. She's great. Way ahead of her time. In many ways, she still is. I recognized Richard Corben's artwork from all the comics and such, you know, the Eeries and things that she used to read and then I read back in the day. And I was like, huh. So I looked at it. Huh. That's, this is a Palladium Books book and it's all about modern day horror. I never actually considered running a horror game, but it was, it was all just all the wheels were turning as I'm thumbing through the book. I'm like, you mean to tell me that I could be thumbing through all the, uh, and going through all this, this horrific monster stuff in an RPG setting? Totally set me up. So really I only meant to get the TMNT book, but I actually got both books that day. And that's, that's how the history was made.

Let's talk about that cover for a moment. That cover, we had Kevin on doing like a retrospective talking about the various games that Palladium did throughout the stages of their existence. And when we talked about Beyond the Supernatural, we gave a good long chat about that cover. That's a fucking amazing cover.

Just, oh yeah, the guy with the gun and his look of, oh fuck.

Everything that's happening there is wonderful.

So say, yeah, that, that, that, that cover gave me 37-some-odd years of Palladium goodness, thus, you know, so far and running. So yeah, it's an amazing cover.

And, and one of the things about the covers for the Palladium books, because we talk about this a lot, is how much, how visceral they are with your reaction. You see those covers and you're like, wow, and it gives you all sorts of ideas. And you just kind of hit it on the head. A lot of the Palladium books, one of, to me, the only biggest downside for a lot of the Palladium main books is you don't need much else. Just the Beyond the Supernatural first edition book, away you could go, like, for a long time just with that book. That's not a great business model, but from a value, it's incredible.

Quick sidebar too, since I get this question all the time online, for those of us listening today, I'd like to point out Everyone loves asking, the monster on that cover, it's in the book, right? And I can tell you, I do have confirmation that that is— yeah, from Corben's own writing— that that monster is not in the book.

That's pretty common.

That was actually something he made from hand, and he specifically wanted to do that because he really wanted to get into all the detail and the art in it. Because you notice it's like got all sorts of like bumps and boils, and you know, it's a really highly detailed monster. And yeah, rather than taking something out of the book, he wanted to make something unique. So for those of you wondering, no, the monster is not in the book, but there happens to be rules in the book, you know, in BTS1, that you can make it if you really wanted to, and you can make it however you want to.

A whole generation of Rifts players from the '90s can sympathize with this, being brought in by that amazing Keith Parkinson cover, only to find out that that is— wait, what is this? Where is it? It's not in the book. Nothing there. It's just a cool picture. Nope.

You had to wait till Atlantis came out.

Um, funny sidebar to that too. The one that hit me the hardest with Rifts was the Larmak. You might know what I'm talking about, the reptiley alligator-y looking thing. His illustration showed up in like 2 or 3 times before he finally showed up in one of the Coalition War books. And I, I about, I about lost my crap the day because I didn't know it was coming and I was going through the new book one day and I was like, holy crap, it's here. It's a Larmack. They do exist. And I was just losing my mind. So yeah, I get it.

That's the one where he's chewing on a cigar in most of the pictures, right? And wearing like a hat.

That's the Grackletooth. Oh, that's the Grackletooth.

Oh, I'm thinking of the Grackletooth, not the Larmack.

Okay.

Larmack's kind of a pudgy looking alligator-y. Well, he's not so much. He's reptile-y and has the big jaw. And usually you see him depicting like guzzling down Psy-Cola and whatnot. You'll know it if you see it. It's— yeah, but, um, the first— it was like years before they finally got their own write-up.

But he—

but it showed up in like 2 or 3 different places in the, in the various Rifts books until then. Just kind of kept me, you know, on my toes waiting for it.

So let's, uh, let's, let's move forward in history. You've started a little website for Beyond the Supernatural that has, uh, gotten a lot of traction.

Oh yeah.

I have to ask, what year did you open that door on that originally?

You know what, honestly, it was almost something that started by accident. I started that, I think it was about 2010, when I— after I burned out hardcore in the business finance industry. There were years there I was a stockbroker and financial, working fraud departments and things. Eventually, I just burned out, something hardcore, and I stayed way too long. And when I went back to school, I was like, I wanted to try something new. And back in 2010, the internet was still kind of in a place like, maybe I can get online and start a website and kind of build this thing from scratch kind of a thing. So I went back to school and then they're like, all right, so the first thing we need to have you all do is build your own website. And I was like, oh crap, what do I want to write our website about? I was like, oh well, and I think it was the case of I had my book in front of me, I was like, maybe I can try building a fansite as my school project. And in the end of it, it just, it kind of never died. The house is, you know, still stands erect after all these years. So there you go. It basically started by accident.

Yeah, I remember tripping across it like, God, so long ago.

For those of us not in the know, what website are we talking about?

Oh, we are referring specifically to houseofbts.net.

Yes, the the flickering light in the darkness during the dark years for all of us BTS fans.

I I realized yeah, there was nothing else really for it for BTS out there in the world, and I yeah, I decided to keep it running. And like a dummy, you know, I I am so I demand a certain amount of I don't know je ne sais quoi maybe, but I refused. To, uh, you know, go with the— like back in the day when they had all those hardcore heavy-duty advertisement websites where you can build a site but there's like, it's just completely walled up in advertising. I didn't do that, so I've been paying out of that thing out of pocket and by house guest donations, you know, for all the years that it's been open. So you can come in, see a nice clean website, get the information you need, and you won't see one freaking advertisement for anything that's not Palladium related. It's, it's Glorious. But yeah, that was, it was honestly, it started out of accident as an accident and I've been building onto it ever since. And yeah, the Discord, I won't say it's super active, but we, you know, we get a decent supply of folks coming in and out and, you know, we're where people can discuss their questions and BTS theories and so on and so forth. And I can, I can throw out questions to people and get thoughts and ideas. It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's a wonderful little community of all these houseguests who have managed to survive the experience of coming in and out of the house. And not everyone does. So count your blessings.

When I met you for the first time was at one of the Palladium open houses. And you did something in your games at a convention that I had not seen before. You keep a panel of PCs for players to play and you keep them annotated and updated for the things that happen to them in your games that you do at conventions. And I believe you keep that updated on BTS, or at least you used to. I don't know if you still do this.

I still do that to a point. And yes, all the, every pre-gen that I bring to all of the games at the open house or even like the local gaming conventions.

Yeah.

All of my, all of my pre-gens are available on the, at the house. You can, you can go to the website and basically download every PDF if you want. And yeah, periodically I will update them with new information or, or, you know, as you know, I guess it's almost kind of like, you know, it's one of these weird things where I realize, you know, I kind of, I can fine-tune the characters sometimes where I realize, you know, this character is working, but better for this. Or it's like, you know, I really— or like, you know, a couple of years ago, uh, when the Rifts Manhunters— now I think the PsyOps or Coalition PsyOps— had, uh, has a whole new series of, uh, psychic abilities that are feasible for the, uh, the characters. I kind of added in some stuff, you know, basically, you know, just to expand on the varieties. And so yes, I do update them periodically, and I do note, uh, on the site what, you know, when they're being updated. And because every one of my, you know, because I'm kind of nuts like this, I do keep notes on the character sheets of when they were last updated. So you're not sure if you got the newest one, you can either look up the one you got or just, you know, download it anyway and find out. But yes, I do try to keep them up to date and, and, you know, fine-tune them on occasion.

And I know as a player, I found that really interesting because the characters had a lot more life that way and they kind of, oh, this is a living story. But also, you know, every once in a while I noticed, oh, so A bunch of people played this character and made the same mistakes. So now, now it's reflecting in those mistakes. The characters, oh, a trauma. Okay. I wonder where this happened.

I will share one little secret backstory history because most people probably don't know, didn't know this, but I was an idiot when I made my first round of pre-gens. One of the first of them was, uh, what was the physical psychic, uh, Dimitri. And because I was having— I completely thought it'd be just kind of a funny thing to do. I didn't think about the consequences of my reactions. I gave him basically access to like a mini chain gun in the back of his trunk. And naturally the PC or the guy who was playing him thought it was a great idea and grabbed this mini chain gun thing. And as soon as we saw the main bad guy for that adventure, he just Swiss cheesed the guy. And kind of really kind of ruined most of the, uh, most of the enthusiasm. So my very first modern update was taking away the chainsaw from that, or the chain gun from that, from that particular player character.

So there you go.

Sometimes I update it just because I realized I was an idiot when I was making them.

We've all made that mistake.

Yeah, we, I've done it numerous times and someday I'll learn, but today is not that day.

I think we've talked multiple times about the pre-gens for conventions. You really should playtest them a little bit because you find those interesting things that you're like, oh, it's no big deal.

Oops.

Oh well.

And you know what? Like I said, I do kind of realize that some of these get made. It's like, yeah, I need to change that. Holy smokes. I know I've changed some of them. I've almost been like, I've had a few cases where it's like I would almost go back to go back to formula, if you will, and almost like completely redesign the info on him, you know, keep what bones I could. So, you know, as I realized, you know what, yeah, some updating is necessary. So yeah, I kind of learn it as it's all thrown in my face generally.

So moving forward in the history here a little bit, when did you start submitting to— I believe you first were published in the Rifters.

I was.

And when did you first start doing that and how did that go? How did that build into the Creature Feature?

That roughly about 2005, 2006 era. Um, I, I was one of the lucky ones who went at the very moment I heard that BTS 2 was coming. I, uh, pre-ordered it like immediately, and basically I got one of the advanced copies that they get from the printer. So I, I can only assume, you know, because according to Kevin and such, that would have meant that I was one of the Basically one of the first ones to get a copy because I preordered that early. But I, you know, I looking at looking inside the book, and for those of you aren't familiar with it, the LaszloSociety.org site was it was basically a live online community of where where people can interact as player characters and pre-gens and whatnot, and kind of carry out their their character stories and adventures and whatnot. And I jumped in on that right away. I thought it was great. You know, the the LaszloSociety.org was yeah, I I had like. 3 or 4 characters like put in pretty early that I was imitating through. And it caught the attention of Wayne, Wayne Smith, you know, the guy who's doing the Rifter. And he was telling me, you know, hey, I'm really loving your stuff that you're doing on this site. And we kind of got to talking and we've kind of, we kind of got to be pals. Wayne's a pretty cool dude. And one day he's like, so to let you know, one of the upcoming Rifters. So we're, Kevin is releasing a preview of one of the creatures coming into the Tome Grotesque. And the catch to this is, if you'd like to write something to kind of add to the Rifter, I'd love you to consider doing it, being as you're doing a great job with the org site. The catch is you've only got a week to do it. And writing really— writing was another one of those things that I kind of enjoyed it, but I never really took it serious enough to truly get into trying to write and to really be a writer. And most of my writing experience was I grew up in a cinephile family. So I wrote reviews for movies and books and such all the time. But writing a review and writing a writing an article are two very different monsters. So I I really sweated and flubbed my way through basically writing an adventure based around the Gormaglut, which was the creature they're referring to. And I submitted it in. They loved it. They they posted it. And that I I had such a great time doing it. You know, this is you know this is great. That, um, you know, then a month or two, I think a sourcebook or two later, I, I wrote it. I wrote my first monster attempt with it, which was really different from the rest of them in The Skin Thief. And then over time, uh, you know, I started bringing in more stuff. I was also a fan of Dead Rain, which kind of a, a kind of a quasi-interesting sidebar, my first actual canonized published anything was the impersonator zombies from Dead Rain. Yeah, I, uh, that, you know, they, uh, Kevin loved it. He made it a monster, and, and I think it was Dark Places was the sourcebook it came out in. And, uh, yeah, so I, I was just having a blast writing this stuff. And then, and then eventually I started submitting more and more that roughly around 2020 or so, uh, Kevin and I got to talking one day, and I was bringing up, you know, Kevin, I think, you know, I have got enough, there's enough material in all the Rifters that we could probably, you know, compile a lot of this and add on some extra notes and details to make a, uh, to make a sourcebook. In fact, I think, you know, it could be called Creature Feature. You know, there's a lot of monsters, a lot of extra info and updating that we could put into this book. You know, what do you think? And Kevin loved it. So I went through and dug up all the old Rifter articles that had monsters and various info on it. And as an extra bonus beyond these expanded updated versions of all these monsters, that Kevin and I and such kind of worked on together. I did an updated, expanded version of The Squatter, which was the, uh, which was that adventure that I wrote for the Gormaglut all those years ago. And even though the Gormaglut was planned to be in the Tome Grotesque, uh, because of all this and all the excitement, it actually got added into the Creature Features. So I got a lot of sentimentality to the Gormaglut for that reason. And ultimately, yeah, that's what led to the birth of that particular creature. And yeah, and there you have it.

So you're simply a 14 to 16 year overnight success, right? That's how you'd put that? Yeah, more or less.

Yeah, I don't know about success, but I successfully got a sourcebook out there. So we'll put it that way.

Well, I know that's a lot of us. I mean, your name on a book is pretty cool.

Hey, you know what? That is like one of the coolest things. Every now and then I still look at the, you know, the COVID of the book and I'll, yeah, by Stephen Dawes and Kevin Sembida, you know, with my name in front. It just, it just makes me smile.

So we were talking before, um, when we were setting this up, there's kind of an interesting item in the Creature Feature that we really didn't see or don't see in a lot of the Palladium books. And it kind of dovetails into what we were talking about before. which is you actually have a pre-gen in the Creature Feature, which doesn't fit. It's not a creature that's gonna attack you. It's actually a pre-gen for players to play. Tell us, how'd that come about?

Yeah, that was completely unexpected because, you know, through the Discord on Creature Feature and on the Facebook page and such for the house, I was asking, I just kind of asked these random questions. Hey, you know, if I have some extra space to shoehorn some stuff into the sourcebook, what would you all like to see? And the most common response came back was they're like, we want pre-gens. And at first, again, I even wrote it out at once, like, pre-gens of monsters? You know, I, I didn't, I didn't get what they were asking. No, no, we want NPC pre-gens. No, really? In Creature Features? You know, in my experience, it's best to give them what they want, you know. So I actually designed a pair of pre-gens. Uh, one of them is Colton Cole, who is the, uh, the guy that's on the front cover of Creature Feature. Uh, who represents a physical psychic. And I also created, uh, yeah, Janice Freeman to represent the, the sensitive side of things. And not only is she a pre-gen in the book, uh, both her and Colton kind of get their, their names kind of get peppered throughout the, the, the creatures and, and notes and such throughout the Creature Feature book. So it's like, so really they are pre-gens, but they also kind of have some history and lore. In particular, like Janice and the Demas are pretty intertwined in that book. So yeah, it was requested and I delivered.

Yeah, that's kind of cool. I mean, that's not a big thing for Palladium. You don't see a lot of full-fledged pre-gens. I know when I read them, I was like, wow, this is— I could just take this as a GM and just use this in games if I wanted to run them. Beyond that, delving into the Creature Feature a little bit, There was, there was one that kind of jumped out at me that was kind of like a Frankenstein kind of analog, but not quite. And, uh, I know you and I talked about it a little bit. Brawling Joe, uh, is kind of like, I'm like looking at Brawling Joe, you're like, wait a second, kind of an interesting monster to just throw at people. It's like, is it a, is it really a monster? Is it not a monster?

I Maybe. The Brawling Joe, the history and Brawling Joe is probably— I feel like that he's going to be destined to be like everyone's favorite monster that I will probably ever design. I get more feedback on the Brawling Joe than like anything I've done in that whole book. And, and the, and the amusing bit of that is that when I, I, I had no intention of the Brawling Joe becoming a, a, a thing. I, it was kind of one of these situations in my home game where I kind of had something like a mafia, you know, mobster type antagonist going on. And I'd realized, you know, I need to have some kind of monster that would really work alongside the, you know, the, this mobster mafia mentality kind of, uh, you know, uh, kind of mob boss looking thing. So I, and when none of the monsters were working out, I was like, okay, so, well, I, what I need to do is need to come up with somebody that's, that's like really good at fisticuffs, which again, you don't see that in monsters because they're mostly like tooth and claw characters. or, you know, monsters and what have you, going fisticuffs really wasn't working. So I kind of, you know, I made him that he's all about having the big fists. And then I really— I love the idea of these— of this creature with giant fists. So I also gave him like basically like big Popeye forearms. And when I realized, you know, I didn't want— I wanted the attention to be mostly based on the fists. And so when I designed him, I more or less basically just kind of have like a ghoul character with these giant Popeye arms. And, you know, sometimes he gets joked and they call him the Popeye ghoul. But the long and short of it, yeah, the, the, the Brawling Joe are, are just these creatures that are more or less like living embodiments of physical beatdowns and fisticuffs. They're not interested in clawing and biting people to death. They want to beat the absolute snot out of things. You know, that, that's what they're all about. And people and my, my players at the table just love this thing. I, I had no ambition of this thing ever probably ever coming back again. It was just kind of a one, a one-time monster that I designed and didn't really think much more of it. But they all loved it so much that, you know, I brought one back again later and he kind of stuck around. And it really— when I came to writing the, uh, the Creature Feature article in the Rifter that kind of became the precursor to the sourcebook, I threw the ball of the Brawling Joe in that and everybody just loves it. So yeah, what started as a pure accident has kind of become really one of, you know, like everyone's personal favorite monster that I designed thus far.

And of course, for me, uh, each of your monsters in the Creature Feature has— have great little quotes. And the Minister James Magnum's quote regarding Brawling Joe, and that's the character in both the games I played with you, I gravitated to that particular character. And it's a really fun way of kind of, I think it was 5 years apart in the games that I played with yours, but still kind of dropped me right into the setting and right into the thing. It was so great.

That is actually, yeah, not, not everyone catches that either. But if you pay attention to, yeah, I do try to put like a quote from, you know, from a, from a character of some sort at the beginning of all of my monsters. And yeah, pretty much every one of those quotes comes from a pre-gen that you can find, you know, on the house website. So that's, Yeah, not some, some people pick that up, some don't.

So now we've kind of come up to almost contemporary. Are you working on anything else right now or, or ideas or things you can talk about or, or, you know, things you can't talk about and, you know, we'll, we'll tell you we'll edit it out, but we won't. I mean, we will. Absolutely. Right.

What I can say is right now I'm in a stage of kicking around various stuff. I'm anticipating, and Kevin and I are talking that in the near future, as the Beyond Arcanum starts coming more to fruition, he's working on various stages of it now. I'm supposed to basically start getting the magic rule sets and such for BTS that he's working on, and I'll be playtesting it with my local group here. as well as submitting, you know, my own thoughts and ideas and such and see what sticks with that. But beyond the, uh, you know, once the magic rule— once the rules, uh, for the magic system has come to light and is, you know, firmly established, I have plans of what I'd like to— I'd basically kind of like to come out with a series of like smaller sourcebooks, you know, to various themed monsters. And kind of what I mean by that, there's a— there is a lot of— there's several Dead Reign sourcebooks that are only about 60, 70 pages. I forget the the exact page count. But in theory, you know, I, uh, I, I could— I, I have enough stuff that like one of the one things I would really like to tackle is to take another look at entities and ghosts and spirits and such. Yeah, in the very— in the nature of how, you know, through the lens of how Beyond the Supernatural and how Palladium themselves see them. Because, yeah, one of the things that I've always found really intriguing about how ghosts and entities and such work in, in, in Palladium format You know, most, most people or most books and such treat them as like, you know, they're the ghosts or the living souls of people wandering around kind of a thing. That's not the case here. You know, there's this really interesting discussion and explanation of how, you know, of how there are these haunting entities that pick up on the, the, the, the PPEs and psychic impressions left by other people and whatnot. And there's, there's a lot more of exploration that I feel that can be done with that. And I've even got a couple of things, you know, written up in bits and pieces. And I, yeah. Again, I don't want to get anybody's hopes up, but just know that right now I, you know, I, I do have the— I, I have that book and I kind of have the bones of a GM and Player's Guide to BTS that I've been kind of building bits and pieces to that I would one day like to see come out, which coincidentally, once that comes out, if the pipe dream comes to fruition, I would love to see an expanded upon and updated, uh, version of the, the victim character classes from BTS 1. Yeah.

Yeah.

Everybody loves the victims. I did that numerous times in the day. I would love to see the victims come back. I mean, obviously more work, you know, there's more explanation and kind of some work on how to make it happen. So yeah, that's, you know, I basically just expanding on all the lores and the types of monsters and things that are out there is really ultimately, are kind of my ultimate goals, just kind of fill all the, kind of plug the holes that I see.

So you kind of touched on one of the really interesting aspects of Beyond the Supernatural for those that haven't played it, and it's how PPE and, and magic works in this system. And it's one of the few games that I've seen where they kind of give you an explanation on why your normal everyday person is— they may have some sort of gift, and during a normal day at work, they can't really demonstrate their gift. Or in the scientific study, you know, bend the spoon with your telepathy, with your telekinesis, and we'll, you know, give you $1,000, and you never can do it. But as soon as a monster shows up, or as soon as something supernatural happens, all of a sudden you can throw cars across the room, right?

Yeah.

And that's an aspect of Beyond the Supernatural that's— and you kind of almost touched on it there, and I don't know if Kevin's going to expand on it with Beyond the Arcanum, but how do you use that in your games? Because I— and I'm asking this, of course, a leading question because I've seen you do it, but you do it very interestingly when it comes up in your games because it's not a normal mechanic in many games.

It's not, but honestly, it's one of my favorite parts of BTS2 because, I mean, it creates a really unique vibe that actually, I mean, really makes a lot of sense in the modern-day format because I actually, I had thought about that. You know, the, the, the rules that you're referring to didn't exist in BTS-1. So, you know, and I mean, it was, it was an early book. I get all that. But, um, what, yeah, what I personally love about that is, you know, one of the whole cornerstones of BTS-2 is that, you know, mankind as the vast majority does not believe in the supernatural. And even those who think they do have no real concept of what it— how it really is. And one of the reasons for that is, is kind of like you said, uh, but, you know, psychics. And I'm, I'm all but certain— I'll give it a 98% certainty, you know, 98 works pretty good in Palladium terms— 98% certain that magic is going to work in a very similar format to how psychics work with this. So I, I'll kind of shoehorn that in. But the whole idea is Yeah, any psychic out there during a regular— during their regular everyday lifestyle, if, you know, basically they're as normal really as anyone else, you know, they're— the psychic abilities they have under normal circumstances for the most part do not exist. Like the case of a— like the case of a firewalker is a great example. You know, if you have a firewalker, you might give him You might give him a match and say, "Hey, light the match with the power of your mind," and you know he might stare at that match really hard. You know he's probably like sweating bullets, staring at it like he's never done before, and odds are he's probably not going to be able to light that match. And that's especially true if he's doing it basically under laboratory conditions, where we're either where a bunch of scientists or non-believers or a crowd of people are staring at him, but you know trying to see this happen. You know trying this they're trying to perform on. demand or whatever else is especially debilitating to a psychic, and more often than not, they just can't do it. However, in the presence of a supernatural monster, you know, something comes out, you know, some slobbering beastly thing is coming around the corner ready to eat you. Suddenly, that firewalker, not only could he light that match if he wanted to, you know, he can, he can produce fire in his hands and he can create fireballs and, and, and, you know, basically, uh, you know, cause, cause every— the things around him to heat up or, uh, or, or in some, like, one of the more impressive formats, he can basically self-combust is like one of the most impressive things they can do. So yeah, in the presence of, of the supernatural and creatures of magic and whatnot, there are these varying levels of what's basically referred to as proximity, uh, proximity equals power, where the greater the threat, uh, the more powerful the psychics become. And once that situation has been resolved, uh, within, uh, within like a minute or two later, all the, all that impressive psychic energy he had. just flushes out of him and he's back to being an ordinary dude again.

Yeah, and that's, that's a really interesting feature of Beyond the Supernatural and really fits with the theme, right? You know, you don't get cool until the big bad's there that can hurt you. And that's kind of an interesting premise in the entire game.

And, and the one of the other cornerstones to that too, that, that why, you know, they didn't really hit this in BTS1, but BTS2 is really good point on this. Is that one of the other situations in BTS is that there is no tangible evidence of the supernatural. The supernatural, when a monster makes its way to BTS or the BTS Earth, as it were, they have to anchor themselves somehow to exist in our world. Most, more often than not, they're using animals or bugs or primordial ooze or whatever. They have to find these various ways of anchoring themselves. themselves to our dimension. And when, and when they, when they get confronted by the psychics or ordinary humans or whoever it is that takes them out, in the event of their being, uh, destroyed, you don't actually kill these, uh, these supernatural beings. They more or less, they, they disincorporate, meaning that they more or less devolve and fall apart and de— uh, you know, degenerate into the original anchored items. that they were, as the spirit of that creature is getting sent back to their home dimension, uh, where what they'll leave behind is like— some cases, you know, some of these creatures, they just kind of devolve into like big mounds of spiders that skitter off in every direction. You know, bugs is a common attribute, um, a primordial ooze. Some creatures do even weird stuff, uh, yeah, like where they— when they disincorporate, they just kind of turn into a bubble. that'll float a little while, kind of floats in the air for a few minutes, and then just pops as if they never existed at all. There is no tangible evidence that the supernatural exists, which kind of brings up to the whole point that you can tell people all you want, oh yeah, the supernatural exists, there's monsters out there, there's monsters everywhere, there's ghosts everywhere, but there's no tangible proof of it. Why would anyone believe them?

Yeah, it adds to the whole kind of mystique, the Laszlo Society and how it's like everyone thinks that they're all crazy. because there's no evidence. And that's, that's how it works. That's by design. You know, that's both meta and in-world. It's that it's supposed to be that way.

Kind of a bunch of misfits and oddballs and potential crackpots all fighting a secret war, keeping the, uh, the monsters back from getting at the rest of us. And it works.

Well, Stephen, thank you very much for giving us a little bit of your time here and sharing, you know, kind of your background and the, Beyond the Supernatural, your love of Beyond the Supernatural. And thank you very much for a book for Supernatural Creature Feature there. That's really going to help expand and is expanding the world. I know it's been with COVID and everything, it seems like the last 10 years have been very bizarre. Last 10 years, it's only been 7, right? 6?

It feels a lot longer. I hear you.

So depending on how you do the math, I think it's 2019 or 2020.

Yeah, yeah, something like that. But thank you very much, and thank you for supporting us. And to all of you listeners out there, you can come and talk to us about Beyond the Supernatural. We'll get, we'll get Stephen on our Discord. I don't know if you're on the Discord, breakfastpuppies.com/discord.

I think I'm on it, and if I'm not, I should be.

Right.

I'll rectify that one way or another.

It's, you know, there's a small group of us on our Discord that have been holding the flame for Beyond the Supernatural through the dark years and this coming dawn.

And if you want to support the podcast, you can check us out. You can go over to our Redbubble site and get a couple of throws and maybe a shirt and stickers, lots of stickers, and perhaps jump over to Ko-fi and give us a small donation. Every little bit helps us keep the lights on and keep up recording.

And if you want to grab any books from the Palladium catalog, you can of course buy them from their website. But if you choose to buy them from DriveThruRPG, which is generally, I guess these days, the biggest, if not the only major distributor of every PDF you can possibly think of. Anyway, if you want to go there, we have some affiliate links in our show notes. We'd appreciate it if you'd follow them. Don't cost you anything extra. But it kicks us like a few pennies on every purchase.

And thank you everyone, and we'll catch you next time.

Starships, magic, mystic martial arts, romance. All of these can be found in A Cloak of Blades by Isaac Sher. You might have heard my name before. I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies. And I've recently released my first novel. It's available on Amazon as an ebook and paperback, and you can get it for free if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I do hope you'll support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies. And it's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Have a good one.

Thank you.

You've been listening to the Glitter Boys, a Palladium Books fan podcast. Glitter Boys, Rifts, the Megaverse, and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambita and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order directly directly at palladiumbooks.com, and their entire catalog is available digitally at DriveThruRPG as well. Our opening music is 8-Bit Bass and Lead by Furbyguy from freesound.org. This closing music is Caravana by Philip Gross, available at freemusicarchive.org. All sound effects used are self-made or acquired via Creative Commons Zero license. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as The Glitter Boys. That's B-O-I-S. And check us out online at breakfastpuppies.com/glitterboys. And also join us on the Breakfast Puppies Network Discord at breakfastpuppies.com/discord. And if you want to help us out, please spread the word and help us build a community. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time.