#177 – Chat with CJ Carella

Breakfast Puppies.

This podcast contains adult language and content and is meant for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Hey everybody. The Glitter Boys are in town.

Welcome back, dear listener, to another exciting, very special episode of Blossom. I mean, the Glitter Boys. We are joined by some brand new people today. First off, as anybody who has listened to this for a while, you probably know that I'm Nathaniel or npc. And then we've got our. Our previously newest co host.

Yes, I am the late. I am the last to have survived the Gauntlet.

Well, the Gauntlet has unfortunately claimed another. We will probably talk about that a little bit later, but for now we're bringing on our newest co host and.

I'm Matt Buckley, one of the board members for Wagoncon, which I'm very, very humble for all the great PR you guys give us. Longtime Palladium fan, been role playing since the mid-80s and super excited to be here as a possible long term guest host.

We do have a very special guest joining us remotely today. If you are a fan of Palladium, as I'm assuming you probably are, if you've already made it past the minute mark of listening to this episode, you'll know this name. Please introduce yourself. Special guest hello.

I'm the symbolic voice coming from the Dark because of camera issues, but my name is CJ Carella and you may know me from such books as Pantheons of the Megaverse, Night Spawn, also known as Nightbane, Courtesy of Todd McFarlane. But we can probably go into that and several other Rift books as well as some fiction more recently.

And once again, cj, thank you so much for joining us. I'm super excited to have you here.

My pleasure.

Nightbane is in my top five of all games. It that game, I got into it shortly after it was released and it changed the way that I looked at horror gaming because it wasn't was a game that came out. You know, there was a lot of other horror games out, Werewolf and Vampire and all of that, but so many of those were focused on just internal squabbling and being the monster. Whereas Nightbane's like, yeah, you're the monster, but you're awesome. What brought you into Palladium and specifically what brought Nightbane to happen?

All right, well, to make a long story short, I had been reading a lot of Riff's books back in the day, back in the late 80s, early 90s. A while back I had some ideas for books. I contacted Kevin Sinbidam. I sold him on Pantheons of the Megaverse. That was the first book and after that, I did a few more books, and then he invited me to join the Palladium staff in Michigan, which I did. At that point, they were trying to get a big license that didn't pan out. And I told Kevin, well, I have some ideas for a project, and what if we did something sort of like Clive Barker's Night Breed Monsters, but with an emphasis on what I would like to call heroic horror. Where you have a horror setting, you have monsters, it's pretty bleak, but the characters actually are taking a stand against the things that go bump in the night, even if they also are things that go bump in the night. So it was like the idea of the monster as a possible hero. I mean, they're hated by the general public because they are hideous and hard to look at, but they are still people. They still care about their loved ones, perhaps even humanity in general. They're trying to do something. Not everybody, of course. You can always have room for characters who are only out for themselves or just trying to survive. So that was the. My main concept. And from there I had a lot of things, obviously some influence from World of Darkness and stuff like that. And when I ran my game, I actually mixed Night Bane with the World of Darkness. Kind of like cobbled the whole thing together. And it was a lot of fun because people didn't have to play just Nightbane characters. They could maybe throw in a vampire or whatever.

Nightbane, for those who are unfamiliar with it. Listeners. If you go back through our catalog, we definitely have a few episodes on the series. I know we've covered the first book. We've taken a look at the Nightbane Occ itself, and we've even looked at the first two of the world book or source books that followed. Those being between the Shadows and Nightlands. They are, as C.J. described, heroic horror. That's a great term. I've actually never heard that before, but it's perfect. Yeah. There's very little that feels more awesome than rolling on the night bank tables. You come up with such a random just conglomerate character of all of these abilities that you have to figure out. Okay, how does this look? Because I've rolled. I am made fully of crystal, but I'm also a bear. But my arms are chainsaws and I've got a jetpack.

Okay.

And I'm bleeding sores all over my face. Wait, what?

Yeah, it takes some work putting everything together. Yeah. I remember the characters. We had like a Spike Werewolf and the Spike Angel. Those were those. Those both had long, illustrious careers in my Campaign. And then we had, like, a bike centaur type who was also a lot of fun.

Yeah. Whenever I'm describing nightbane to people, and they're like, wait, what? No, you're the monsters and you're the good guys. Really?

Yeah.

And there's worse monsters who want to take you out really quickly and. Oh, yeah. And the world hates you. They're like, I, I, I don't wait. But it's really cool because you're randomly rolled and you have no idea what you're going to get. And I think today, like, if it came out today, I think AI The AI Video or picture creators, I have to start doing nightbane characters again and punching them into AI and see what it generates because I'm a horrible artist. I'm a horrible artist. But like, like what you just said. Give me a picture with a motorcycle and this and this and this and just see what it does. That'd be kind of hilarious.

Oh, yeah. I end up giving the IA some twisted scenarios to play with.

Oh, God.

Next thing we know, the AI goes insane.

Yeah. Yeah. Vuckly. I would hold off on that.

What could go wrong?

Speaking of the art, though, how closely did you work with the artists? How hand in hand were y' all when you were doing the creation? Was it mostly like you told them what to do, or was there, like a back and forth happening here, like, oh, yeah, what if we put chainsaw arms on this bear or something?

Well, in some cases, Kevin was using freelancers, so basically he just gave them some basic guidance on what to do for mood pieces. But there were a couple of staff artists, like Vince Martin, especially, that I worked with, basically in the same office. So I would just call him over and say, vince, I have this idea. And we would just bounce a few things back and forth, and then he come up with a few sketches, and I would say, yeah, this looks great. And then it would go in the book. Most of the art in Nightbane, I think, was Arcade Post and a couple of other people, so I didn't have as much. But we gave them a good idea of what we were going for. I think we might have sent them the tables, too, so maybe they tried to roll a few things. But yeah, but I think mostly it was more general, more generic. The wrist box. I had a lot more input with the artists.

R.K. post's work was. Does he go by R.K. or does he prefer Randy?

I call him R.K. but, yeah, I mean, I don't think I actually met him. So we mostly corresponded Via email. So I'm not sure what he would like to be called in person.

We'll go with rk. That's what his signature tends to say. So anyway, my first exposure to RK was in the Shadowrun second edition book.

Oh yeah.

I did not go from D and D into vampire. I went from Palladium fantasy to Shadowrun. That was my evolution of gaming. And seeing there was one piece that he did in the Shadowrun second edition book that just had a guy holding two guns and a pin that said suck cheese shark face, and I fell in love. But he also did a lot of the World of Darkness stuff. And it's funny you say like you combine elements of the world of darkness there, because I see it. I totally do. Especially like his first edition vampire stuff. We've said it before, RK's ability to take different shades of black and make them pop. It's wonderful.

Oh yeah, he's amazing.

Yeah.

Very talented guy.

So which was the first Rifts book you worked on?

The very first one was freelance submission. It was Pantheons of the Megaverse.

Did you write all of that?

Yeah, that was pretty much me. Yeah.

That's a fantastic book.

It's an amazing.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun. You know, I've always been fascinated by mythology and interestingly enough, the very first gaming book I ever held my hands on was called Deities and Demigods.

Oh, was it one of the original editions where they had all the ones. Yeah, with the Moorcox stuff and the.

Yeah, Cthulhu and Elric. And he had all those stats and I didn't know what they meant, but I was like, oh my God, there is Hercules. And Hercules has this strength. And here's Cthulhu and he has 160 hit points. And I'm like, I need to know what this is. I played D and D at that point. I just picked the book at a friend's house and I was perusing, right. And I was like. And that kind of was what got me to D and D and. And then another God manual got me into Palladium. So kind of like a circular element there.

So D and D then. Was that your first actual with the dice, with the rules tabletop role playing game?

Well, I dabbled a little on D and D, but the very first game I played was actually Gurps.

And I think was Gurps Martial Arts. One of your first actual being a writer, publishing for gaming?

Yeah, that was the very second thing I ever published. I ever had published the first One was an article that led to the martial arts book that came out in Roleplay magazine.

Oh, that's a callback.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Back in, like, 1988 or something. Like. Or 89, I think.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm old.

Not much older. You're just making money at this. Before we were.

There's gray in these beards.

Oh, yeah.

There's not much but gray in this beard.

Yep.

You did some freelance work here and there. Came on board with Palladium. First big project was Pantheons. Before you got Nightbane out the door, were you mostly just doing bits and pieces here and there, or were you, like, a major contributor on projects pretty quickly?

No. Yeah. By the time Nightbane came out, I had already gotten, like, three or four books under my belt. I had. I had the Pantheons then. I did. I think Mercenaries was the next one. And. And then it might have been South America. And I kind of jumped. When I jumped to Palladium, I did something else. I'm forgetting which book specifically. But then. Then I did Night Thing.

South America is something that we've also gone on the record praising many times. It's. It is a fantastic book. It takes the. The reader through this world. It introduces these factions, and it does something that you almost never saw happen at that time is when it introduced the factions. It also included a section on what those factions thought about the other factions. And that right there as a game master, which is immediately, oh, my God, I can work with this.

It became, for me, as a game master, something that I expected books to have from that point forward, because you got to see all the political stuff that was going on in this region, and all of a sudden you're like, I don't have to think this up myself. I can. But it's great to see the author's feelings on how the, you know, how does the Silver Republic feel about these empires of, you know, DB Basically mutants. You know, what's the. As to what are the Atlanteans doing? You know, how's this all work and that. Senior CJ Seeing your ideas on how this political structure would work and this not microcosm, but in this kind of isolated continent was really, like, really awesome to see.

Well, thank you. I mean, I think I first saw something like that in the. In the vampire book, in the original Vampire, they had, like, a very tiny blurb at the end saying, like, oh, yeah, we think these guys are so and so and blah, blah, blah, like the Gangrel don't like the Nosferatu or Whatever. So I mean, to me that was inspiring. And I mean for world building, you definitely want to have an idea of what the tensions are going to be, especially if you're going to have characters from different areas or backgrounds or as you travel through them. So world building has always been one of my passions. So I like to try to think about like, okay, where do they get their foot? How are they paying for all of these things like that? You know, basic things that end up showing up in the book. But I try to at least keep them in mind as I'm creating things.

Yeah, well, the stuff in South America too, I think just takes it to a next level of awesome. Like with the NAZCA lines coming to life and fighting aliens, how just. It's so cool. You can just picture it in your head, anime style, really. Just these drawings coming to life bigger than the frickin planet and just punching alien ships out of the sky.

Well, it had pre Rift's Earth's history in it, right. These aliens showed up before and got their butts just handed to them and they left. And then they show back up and they're like, oh well we can do this. And they run into. What do they run into? Right? Killer satellites in space. And then they run into a micro meteorite field and then a third of their fleet ends up on the planet and they're like, okay, we finally made it. Wait, what, what is going on here? And like the way you wrote that, I could just feel myself being the. Is it not the cure? It was basically that group of kind of anthropomorphic dog guys who were like, this is horrible. Why did we do this? This was a really bad idea. And I felt like you probably had a lot of fun writing that.

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I really. I mean Rift is. The main thing about Rift is it's so much fun. I mean the first book really got to me and then the one that really made me a big fan was Atlantis. Yeah. Because there was so much cool stuff in there and the Atlanteans and the tattoos and the artifact weapons and. And yeah. And that it was overpowered. But I loved it as a player and even as a game master because I want my players to be over player characters to be overpowered. So I can throw really nasty stuff and they can handle it because they're big boys.

Yeah, yeah.

But of course that led to a lot of people hating on my books because they are. They tend to have over be overpowered.

We were, before we started, we were talking about that And I've had that argument before, and especially South America. It is isolated in Rift's Earth. Intercontinental transportation is not really a thing. So if everything in South America is about the same level, that works really well because you know how powerful you're going to be. And you're going to be a Flame Panther and you're going into an archon Esper you're going to like. And it all works so well together. And I think people kind of, because of the way Rift is, a lot of people will pick it up and drop it in the middle of North America.

Right.

And an ATL7 3D 6 by 10 laser rifle doesn't really work real well if you're in the middle of the juicer uprising.

Yeah, it could work, but I mean.

It'S great for ghetto building construction.

I. I did run some of the numbers when we did the South America one episode, and I don't think it ended up being all that overpowered. I mean, some of the stuff in South America too was. But again, godlines coming to life, punching aliens out of the sky. Like, you got to be a little powerful for that. Yeah, makes sense.

Why have the Splurgarth not colonize South America? Well, there's your answer.

They can't. They tried.

And of course, if you wanted overpowered, you also had Faze World.

Yeah, I love, I have a soft spot for Faze World. I really love it.

When I talked to Kevin about it, I said, listen, I want to do Star wars and Star Trek, but if Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were writing.

Them and, and maybe dropping some acid.

So that was my elevator pitch.

I think you nailed it.

I think you really nailed it there.

I mean, honestly, cj, you might hold the title for the most overpowered class in the game with Phase Four. And you know what I'm talking about.

You mean the Cosmonites?

The Cosmonites.

Well, I mean, if you want to play Superman of the Suit or the Silver Surfer, those are your guys.

Yeah, exactly.

Yep. And that's fair. People read comic books.

Yeah.

And they come to tabletop games and they like, I want to be that. It's like when we were talking to Kevin in a previous discussion about the Indiana Jones RPG and why it kind of failed was because, you know, people would come to it and everybody would want to be indie. Right. But that, you know, that makes sense. But if you take something that's as broad as a whole setting, and that setting is based upon things like Superman and Batman and the Green frickin Lantern, it's people will come down to the table and they want to be that.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is like really role playing has a huge power fantasy element to it. I mean, sure, you get the theater kids who want to play tormented vampires, but your average nerd wants to leap over tall buildings and blow stuff up and really let go and, you know, move away from their lives and have something, you know, make them feel good about who they are, what they're doing. And I mean, I think that's what I like to provide. And yeah, so I mean, I tend to be overpowered. But again, I think nobody can beat the game master. But the only thing is you just have to be careful how when you allow something, you would need to keep that in mind in the background and make sure it doesn't derail the rest of the players stories or the game itself.

You say nobody can beat the game master, but some people are determined to try.

I have your cat. So I had a question for you because you're also an author and you have just mentioned how much you enjoy world building. When you're approaching world building, which you've done a lot of both in your, you know, writing and in your RPG work, Do you have a common inroad that you start your world building with or is it whatever got your juices flowing for the project and you build from there?

Well, it varies. In some cases, I start with the character and then I kind of build the world around them. In others, I think about the world from scratch. Like for instance, when I did like my superhero series Armageddon Girl, the fiction work that actually started as a role playing setting I was going to do for Eden Studios. So I created the origins of the superheroes and the basic world history as a setting. And then I introduced the characters into it for things like Artland's Justice. I actually had the main characters in mind and then the world kind of built spread out from there. So it really depends. Sometimes it could just be an image, something that evokes something in you that gets you going. And then you start building around it. And sometimes you have to backtrack because since you weren't thinking about the big picture when you started, you kind of have to make sure that the big picture is actually there and it doesn't fall apart if you look at it from a different angle. So it can be tricky. With Nightbane, Night Spawn, I had the basic concept of the monsters, and then I created an opposition force and then the whole shadow takeover of the world.

How do you keep your notes on such things. What's your method of keeping all of that information together and relevant to the other information?

Well, when I was younger, I just basically ran on memory. Just, I had a pretty damn good memory. Now that I'm getting older, I just try to write things down and have, like, big world files with. With ideas because otherwise I know I'm going to forget them.

Fair?

Fair.

Yeah.

So you mentioned Eden Studios. I know that there's a few games from Eden that have your name on them, which are the ones from that studio that you're the most proud of.

Witchcraft and Armageddon were my original creations for them, and, I mean, witchcraft was my world of darkness, basically the way I would have done it. Instead of creating incompatible universes for five, 10 different races, I wanted everything to fit in the same cosmology. And everybody knows that if you want to play a werewolf and a witch, you can, because you know exactly where they're coming from, how they intersect and what their powers are and so on. You don't have to worry, because God forbid, when you try to play a werewolf in a vampire game, it just does not work. Oh, it's a mess.

Been there, done that.

Heaven forbid. Someone said, can I play a mage?

Yeah. No, no, no, that was me.

Get down the feet.

That was always me. I want to play the mage in the vampire game. And everyone's like, no, that's not fair.

We'll kill you.

What about the Wraith? Okay, go cry in the corner.

I mean, I'm sorry, but, yeah, the first. Yeah, don't get me started on Grace. I read it and I was like, what can I do with this?

Great Wraith was a great game that had nothing to do about the. With the rest of their game life.

It was really interesting, but, yeah, it just didn't fit at all. Everyone's like, what do I do?

Yeah, you might as well have a world where there's only vampires or only race or only werewolves, because they really don't fit with each other. So that was my thing. And Armageddon was like my big, like, you know, throw in the kitchen sink, have, like, angels and demons. Fight Cthulhu Nazis.

Yep.

So that was.

I want to personally thank you for Witchcraft, by the way. I have used it over the years as a gateway drug of sorts to get many people into role playing. It's like, oh, you like this or this or this? And I can take whatever pop media they like and find the parallel in witchcraft to get them their access point into role playing and it's been very helpful.

Awesome.

I don't know how many people there's a direct line between them watching the craft and then Jacob getting them into role playing field.

Cj, you're using the game as intended.

That's awesome.

The first taste is free.

Yeah, yeah, because I, I, I, I, I tried to see how many different horror movies I could fit into one setting. Like, like you want Jason and Freddy. Okay. They're there, you know, and so on. You want wolfing? Okay, sure. Throw them in. You want to play wolfing? Yeah. All right.

So, so that was with Eden Studios. Does Witchcraft. Was it part of the Unisystem line as well?

Yeah. When I started the game, I also had to devise the system for it. So I designed the system and the world.

Wait, wait, you designed Unisystem?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, you. Okay, yeah, no, I didn't know that either.

So don't feel that.

So you're responsible for all flesh must be eaten too?

Well, only indirectly, because I did. I designed the system, but they wrote George. And I forget who else wrote the actual book, but the rules were there.

That's why your name is tagged on all of the unit system books and Drive Thru. Okay. That suddenly it all makes sense. Yeah.

Very solid system. By the way, one of my more favorite from a mechanical standpoint, systems.

Thank you. I mean, I tried to do what the things that I liked in our gaming systems and kind of call them together and try to make something that would let you play a normal human or a superhuman being and kind of fit it. And beyond human, which never came out, was supposed to be the one system to bind them all kind of thing, but unfortunately never never came out.

Of all of the Palladium books you've done, which is your personal favorite, the one that you, like, look at and go like, this is the one that I'm most proud of.

It's probably a tie between Nightbane and Faze World.

Yep.

Because I had the most freedom to do whatever I wanted, whereas the other books, I mean, I was still working in somebody else's playground.

So of the Nightbane source books, or at least the first two, how much of that was you and how much of that was like outside input?

The first one, now I'm forgetting the name.

Between the Shadows with the Astral Plane and Dreamscape.

Right. Yeah, that was all me. And the Night Lens was sold me. And I had nothing to do with any of the other books.

Okay, well, those just happen to be the best three not to put down the later books because they're also really good and really useful. But those three books are a very fine trilogy of gaming books. When we talked about Nightlands, we gave it solid praise. It tells you everything that you need to run in the Nightlands in a way that there's enough there for a game master to put in enough openings for the game master to put in their own stuff. But if they're running out of ideas, every single page is dripping with inspiration. And it's rare that a sourcebook of a game, of a mainline game does that.

You succeeded. You succeeded very much so.

The Swordbearers normally when I run Nightmain, so my philosophy is the game is called Nightbane. You should play a Nightbane because the tables are most of the fun of making a character. Seeing what you're going to get now, you know, you could be the flying crystal chainsaw bear standing next to. I just look really hot. You can make something work with that. But. But the Swordbearers, I consider an exception to that rule. There's so much to work with there that could. That can take this character to be a true zero to hero scale like it has that you start as Luke Skywalker. You could be some complete random chump out there and then you are called to a greater cause by this great weapon. And it's. That is the foundation of so many fantasy stories, so many sci fi stories, and it's timeless and I'm really glad it was in that book.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean that's what gaming is all about. I mean, just inspire people to tell a story through their character and have fun and blow things up.

It kind of detour. Not detour, but change topics a little bit.

Go for it.

I wanted to talk about your writing because you. I was saying the Warp Marine series, I stumbled upon it. A good friend of mine found it and recommended it to me. And he said it was by this author that he hadn't heard of really. And he had read the whole series. He was super excited. And when I looked at the book and I saw it was yours, I was like, wait, C.J. writes. Writes novels. And he's written a lot of novels and he's multiple series. And I was kind of blown away. Cause I had, you know, I have all this great fondness for all of your gaming material, but I didn't know you were an author. And I just blasted through Warp Marines and then Bicentennial and Outline justice. And I haven't read some of the others, but they're on the list and warp Marines to me was like, this is faze world. This is like someone wrote like an alternate phase world. And I'm like, this feels so awesome, you know, like. Yeah, I mean it's, it's. And humans aren't. Don't have the best tech, they don't have the best grit, they don't have, you know, like they're really beaten up. But they can do this one thing that terrifies everybody else.

Let me guess, breed like rabbits?

No, they can actually go through their FTL version by themselves. And they jump. They're like teleporters that jump ship to ship. So they're warped marines. So they warp over to the enemy ships and beat them up on their own ships. And it's like. And all the other species are terrified and so terrified that they g up on the humans. And I'm like, this is an amazing setting. And I'm like. I half statted out how I would run this game, right? You know, you're a Warp marine battalion or company or whatever. And I was wondering where did. I mean, I could see glimpses all over the place, but where did you come up with this idea specifically? And did you model the wars off of anything in history and Earth? Because some of them feel very, I don't know, maybe Crimean War or maybe even like some Roman stuff. Or was this all kind of like out of your head?

No, I wouldn't call myself an amateur historian, but I do read a lot of history and war Marines was a combination of different things. The whole war Marine idea is actually inspired by the way the Romans fought war at sea. They fought, the Carthaginians, had this huge fleet. The Romans were a land based army. So he said, you know what, we're gonna build a bridge and we're gonna drop it on their ship and they want to march our soldiers and kill them. And so the Corvus, that little device that became that was the inspiration for the whole warp teleport thing. It's like, oh, here we're gonna bypass. You have all these advantages. And we're gonna cut through them and cut your throat.

Yeah, and. And were the, were the puppies like the Archons? Were they the good version of the Archons from South America too? Because my visualization. Because in the series, one of the few species that help humans are the puppies. And they're good, okay, because they accidentally helped everyone else discover the Earth. And so they felt bad that they had basically opened the door to the aliens showing up and trying to kill us. And so they became one of our few allies in the series. Or was that kind of like you just taking an anthropomorphic dog person and running with it in this new, interesting way?

Yeah, it was kind of like a joke. I mean, like, also the puppies had like a pet creature that resembled humans. Yeah, they did, like, mutual. Like, each side feels of the art as if they were pets. So it was like a cute little double game of, like, love. So even though, I mean, they do try, they like each other a lot, but they're still not 100% allies. The whole political thing is very much inspired by, like, early 19th century colonialism, where it's might makes right. And, you know, treaties are only as good as the ability to enforce them.

Right. Yeah, that's really. Enjoy that series. I've actually reread it a couple of times, so. Excellent job there, sir.

Thank you. Yeah, those were a lot of fun to write. Yeah, people actually, a lot of veterans were telling me, were asking me where it served, and I said, no, I didn't serve. I just talked to a lot of veterans and tried to absorb what they tell me. And really that's what a good writer tries to do, is they need to be able to get into the heads of many very different people and try to at least understand where they're coming from. Even if you don't agree with them or you would never be able to do what they do, at least try to get into their.

Into their heads of your fiction. I also was very recently exposed to it because when I was looking to set this up, my brain's just like. Nightbane. Nightbane. Nightbane. Nightbane. And some rifts, but. Nightbane. Nightbane, Nightbane. And then. Okay, well, you know, we've got CJ lined up for chat. I'm gonna kind of do a quick dive into some of his other stuff. And it's like I had the same response, the same reaction that you did. Buckley of Holy shit. He is prolific on the fiction scale. So I grabbed the first one that looked kind of interesting. And I have to say both thank you and God damn you, cj. I avoided successfully for years the lit RPG genre and the isekai genre. I've avoided them both. And now I'm.

But you've avoided it. But you have a six book series right now.

When I. Yeah, when I. When I first heard of, literally, I said, oh, come on. And I've read a couple of books and I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ, I can't read this. So I got a Couple of good ones. And that kind of like grabbed me and then it kind of like triggered something in my head and I was like, you know, I can do this. And I went and I did.

I picked up a book called God Killer Mode and I devoured it in a day and a half. I stayed up way later than I really should have reading, then immediately grabbed the next ones and finished those and now I want more. So I started the Eternal Journey series. I'm hooked. There's enough mechanical stuff in there for somebody who just wants to really dive into it. But there's also really good characters. I am invested in these characters lives. I want to know, are they going to get together? I want to know. It's just how this person's getting more powerful and you do it in fascinating ways. The characters don't go anywhere I expected them to. For example, never before in my life have I said this series was good. But then the clown appeared and that's when it got way good. Good job.

That's a fun thing. Thank you. I mean the thing with Literpig is that since it hasn't been beginning to become more accepted by mainstream media, I know like BAME Books is beginning to release progression fantasy books because they sell so well. I mean that's. Eventually people follow the money. But the problem is most of the people who started were essentially amateurs. They weren't paying too much attention to both the world building and the characters. So I tried to, I mean I approach it as any other book I would write. I concentrated on making decent characters and good world building. And of course, since it's called Game Rules, I mean, I can also exercise my game developer muscles.

How much of the Eternal Journey is like in your mind, a workable system?

It wouldn't be a workable system for like a tabletop just because there's so much stuff going on. I'm envisioning you need to run an engine like World of Warcraft to run it really because there's too many variables. So it'd be very difficult to actually play it with dice.

I've noticed some of the lit RPGs that I've read. There's three or four series that I've read. Some of them are heavily. This is a computer game that people happen to be in and you can't really get away with it because you could never do the math.

Well, let me rephrase my question. How much of that system have you envisioned? How coherent is it? Or cohesive? That's the word I'm looking for. How cohesive, consistent would you say that is? Could you take something like that and maybe if I got a good programmer or two, we could turn this into something?

Yeah, I mean, I think you could do it because, I mean, I do try to keep things consistent so the progression is something that makes sense from the world's point of view. So, yeah, I think in theory you could create make an Eternal Journey mmorpg or even an RPG and computer RPG and let it loose.

Is this a side project, Nathaniel, that you're interested in?

No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not my area of coding at all. But I'm just fascinated. I love seeing mechanics like that next to a story when that story has mechanics. So I'm like, okay, well, I wonder what the next level of these classes actually looks like. I'm sitting here thinking, how far has he got this? Because he built these characters lives. Can we get a character sheet for every level? How far? I'm just curious. You clearly put a lot of thought into it.

Yeah, I mean, the system part can be a lot of work. And I mean, it almost got away from me in those books. And I'm actually writing a new series now where I've made it a slightly simpler version so it'll be easier to develop as it grows. Although I'm also throwing a cultivation system, so that's gonna keep me busy.

So, like fantasy farming?

No, like the martial arts cultivators.

Gotcha.

Yeah. Which is. It is a general sound, but it's also being adopted into lit rpg.

So I'll have to look into that because I'm hooked now. Thanks. And Damn you, destroying NPCs.

Kindle list, one author at a time.

No, you joke. I'm serious.

I know. I know full well.

Ever since I grabbed the first three books on the God Killer series and they're on my Kindle now, I get nothing but lit RPG recommendations. It's just.

Yeah, the algorithm.

I'll have to send you a couple.

Please.

One has 12 books in it right now.

Oh, okay, hook me up. Just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

I know. I'm being mindful of time. I did have one question for you, CJ. One of the things in the LitRPG, and I know this is podcast about Palladium, but I had a question for you. Some of the authors that I've read about, the only thing they don't like about the LITRPG or progressive lit genre or Isekai, kind of all gets very related, is kind of the speed at which the readers want you to publish because they want to see the next book immediately. Do you feel that pressure to like publish as quickly as possible or. Because it sounds like you develop. I haven't read those ones. I need to. Sounds like you're developing a lot more story than some of the RPG books out there. Some of the early ones anyway, which are almost like garbage in, garbage out. Just, just write, you know, words.

They were, they were like kind of like creepypasta. But with gaming, you know, it's like there is a lot of like. Which is interesting because you do get a lot of cool, maybe kind of raw talent that's getting into writing, which I appreciate. But yeah, I mean literally you, you kind of want to be publishing quickly. The Cocktailer books. I started using the Amazon Vela program that lets you do like a chapter a day. And that was interesting because that led me, that put pressure on me that every at least like five, six times a week I needed to produce a chapter which actually speed up my writing somewhat. But now that program is done, I'm actually thinking of releasing my next novel first on Patreon as a serialized novel and then release it on Amazon again. Because the pressure, like you have to have like five chapters, six chapters every week. It's like you don't get lazy and it can be helpful and. Yeah, but people want their books immediately. Yeah. And a lot of people won't buy a book if you don't have the second book, at least as a pre order. So you want to be on your feet before you release something.

I am kind of that way. I want to know that there's something to get invested in. One of our listeners on our Discord community had mentioned something very similar. Have you looked into Royal Road?

Yes.

Okay.

I actually am reading a couple of books there.

Oh, nice. I'm pretty, pretty tied into the way in my ebook reader I can make all of these notes and stuff. So I haven't quite checked out Royal Road yet, but I've been. So many things now seem to be on it that I'm getting tempted. Yep, it's real.

I mean I've actually toyed with maybe releasing something there first, so. And maybe use that to bring people to a Patreon kind of model. So I'm exploring that. Royal Road seems to be very popular. It has a lot of big name authors. I mean, well, big name now started out there.

Still on the topic of fiction, what are your personal favorite books or maybe a genre. But if you've got like a series that you're like Man, I could read this 80 times.

It's tough because I read a lot. I mean, now I'm kind of like on a liter PG stick. But before that, I always say, like one of the first authors that really got to me was David Drake. He wrote Hammer Slammers. Yeah. Military. And he also wrote a lot of very good historical horror science fiction stuff. And that was a huge inspiration to me. There was a short story collection called from the Heart of Darkness and I would say that a good chunk of that is in witchcraft. This like, because it brings. It's very. It mixes like, you know, these eldritch horror kind of things, but it also adds like the horrors that humans inflict on each other with a very detached, almost journalistic style. And it has a huge impact when you. When you read them. And that's something that inspired a lot of the stuff I've done. And of course Hammer Slammers inspired that mercenary group in. In South America and the. And the renegade coalition army mercenaries.

I just put that together. Oh my. Yeah.

There's so many tanks.

Yeah. Or more. More to the point. Like even just kind of the structure. Yeah, I can see it.

Yeah.

Bring it back to Risk by way of fiction.

Honestly, keeping that in mind will change the way I look at those areas. Should I bring a campaign back there?

I mean, when I first encountered that, my first thought was, oh, good, finally someone is doing something with tanks. That's reasonable.

Yeah, I've always been a fan of tanks. I even wrote some rules for Tanks for battle tech where the tanks were kicking the mix asses as they probably.

Would in real life without the artificial hamstringing of the rules put in there. Like, oh look, a motive hit.

You shoot them in the leg.

Right. You know, on the one hand, I can totally appreciate that. On the other, I also have to say, dammit, cj, you're probably the reason why vehicles were so op in the BattleTech video game that Harebrained did like, it's called Battletech, but really it's the game of vehicles.

Yeah, I guess I must have said something. I also wrote that Kaiju rules for Battletech in an article that appeared on White Wolf magazine.

Yeah, that was you.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was fun.

You, You.

You have now managed to hit both one of the high points of my Battletech life and one of the low points. No, it was a great rule system. I just happened to be playing with someone who was so enamored with Kaiju.

And it was.

Go away.

I mean, it should be used sparingly, especially in battle Tech where the whole idea is, you know, you're fighting mechs in a. In a fairly well thought of balanced game and you throw giant monsters. You throw giant monsters into it. It's going to make a mess of things.

It sounds just like Rifts.

Yeah, well, that's Pacific Rim. Pacific Rim, yeah.

Yeah. Pacific Rim has kind of like, yeah, what the hell, let's do this. Yeah, kind of attitude.

Yep.

Yeah.

So gaming wise, when you run and when you play, do you have a particular style of game, if not a particular game in both categories that you find you love the most? Like what you run, what you love to run the most, or what you love to play the most?

Yeah, I run more than play. I mean, right now I'm not doing much because I had to move states and I'm no position to have a gaming group. But until recently, I ran games regularly for years. I mostly like to like mix and match things. My longest running campaign was a Cyberpunk 2020 slash Shadow Run slash World of Darkness game.

Oh, that, that like gets me in the. With that weird series by Icarus Games, I believe was the publisher who did the vampire horror take on Cyberpunk 2020.

And.

That'S speaking to me in a big way because I ran a crap ton of that back in the day. Yeah, no, it was. I can see it. And I would love to see it in your hands.

Yeah. So that was a ton of fun. I like mixing and matching. I like grabbing other people's games and stripping them for parts and then bringing them into my campaign. Hammer them into my rules. One thing I used was the uni system. I used to convert all kinds of game systems and put them all in some weird melange of stuff. I had one game where one character was an old Tremere vampire, another one was a Green Lantern and. And then another one was a former space marine from 40K that got transported to this world complete with his power armor, which then got enchanted men to become even more powerful. So yeah, it was just crazy kitchen sink kind of thing.

I have no idea what Kevin saw in C.J. and why he would hire him to work on Rifts.

Cj, have you ever heard of or even played a game created by a chat forum? And that game is called Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 seventh edition.

No, but that sounds like fun.

It is. Someone took White Wolf, World of Darkness D and D Warhammer Rift and a whole bunch of other concepts and then smashed them together in one game and it's insane. Yeah, I think you would dig.

Yeah, that's definitely my jam.

Yeah. Dungeons the Dragoning 40k.

Though, if you look to your. Your roots. Gurps.

Yeah.

In many ways was the original generic universal role playing system. Right. So that makes a lot of sense. That's. You know, and Palladium is very much the same way. And you know, and it keeps going and you're. You're writing throws so many aspects from different things into the same universes and says let's see how this works and really builds some amazing worlds and stories and. Yeah. I have always enjoyed all of your writing, be it in role playing form or novels. It's always entertaining to see where your story is going to go and where we're going to end up if we have any idea that we thought where we were going to be at the end.

Well, thank you. Yeah. I mean, I love imagining things, but I also love inspiring other people to imagine things based on some of the tools I give them to let them run wild. And it's been great. I mean, my players have always been able to surprise me with their own choices and stuff. And when they're good sports and they let me put them in terrible situations, but they strive and then get. Get out of them. It comes out as a nice storytelling, story creation, group project basically. Which is kind of how I see role playing rather than being an adversarial thing like, you know, players versus gm, which, I mean, happens obviously. But I think that the other day everybody's kind of not really working together, but they're creating a story together with lots of rules.

I'd like to bring this back to both Nightbane and the God Killer Chronicles, the God Killer series. I feel like I found a number of little nods to Nightbane throughout that series. I think the biggest one for me though was the mentioning of these Dream Masters who can create Dream Realms. Was that intentional? Was that like a. Like a callback?

Not. Not on purpose, I don't think, thinking back about it, but. But I did like the whole idea of like creating like dream realms and whatnot. And I remember watching Friday 13th. No, Friday. I'm sorry. Nightmare on Elm Street, Dream warriors. And that kind of like when I was young and that kind of was an inspiration for a lot of things.

Did you ever watch the Friday the 13th TV series?

The one about the objects? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, that was fun.

I can definitely see playing that in Witchcraft.

Yeah, that definitely would have that vibe. Yeah, that would work real well with the cursed item. So. Yeah.

So, cj, before we let you Go here. I'd like to know if there's anything that you're working on now, specifically, that's, like, hot coming out soon that you are really excited about.

Well, I had an unfortunate hiatus because of a family issue, and I'm just beginning to get. I mean, I finished the Eternal Journey series, so that series is complete. Now I'm working on a new series tentatively. The first novel is tentatively called Don't Fear the Reaper, and it's Elite RPG Dungeon Apocalypse Story. And I'm still, like, thinking I'm probably going to release it first on Patreon, or I might release at least some. Or I might be using Royal Road. I'm still working on the. But it will eventually come out on Amazon, so that's the. And you can find out more. You can follow my progress on my Facebook page. CJ Carrella, basically on Facebook, which makes me sound like I'm 75, but that's where.

Nothing wrong with that.

Nothing wrong with that.

I remember when MySpace was used.

You guys got a live journal. I did have a live journal, yeah.

My GeoCities website points to my MySpace.

Great. CJ, it's been wonderful having you here with us. Yeah, I'm just holding back the inner fanboy explosion.

Well, thank you. Yeah. I mean, if you want to do it again, let me know. Okay. About Palladium that I could regale you with.

Oh, yes.

Oh, joy.

Oh, joy.

That'd be awesome.

Yeah, that would be pretty awesome.

That would be pretty good stuff.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah, that's good.

Yeah, that's good, folks. Listening. Check out the show notes included with this episode for links to CJ's Facebook and some of our choice picks of his prior work. You should read the Godkiller series and then join us on Discord and chat about anything. But specifically, right now, let's talk about CJ's fiction and how awesome Nightbane is.

And the Warp Marine series.

Oh, and the Warp Marine series, too, which I have now decided I have to get. Yeah, absolutely.

And let us not forget to hold a moment of thanks for the man who gave us the Cosmo Knight.

Oh, yes. I don't have a drink in front of me, but I will raise an imaginary toast to the Cosmonite.

To the Cosmonite.

I'm sure I drove a lot of gems to drink with us.

Absolutely. Yes, you did. Yes, you did, sir.

Thanks again, cj.

All right. 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 [email protected] 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 Cross Creative Commons zero license. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as theglitter Boys. That's B O I S and check us out [email protected] glitterboys and also join us on the Breakfast Puppies network [email protected] 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.

Sam.