#189 – Chat with Matthew Balent (Live at Wagoncon 2025)

Breakfast puppies?

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

You're listening to the Glitter Boys. The Glitter Boys.

It's Friday, May 2nd, 2025. It's the first day of WagonCon, and the Glitter Boys are taking some time before all of the events begin to have a special chat with, uh, our very special guest, Matt Fallon.

Hey, glad to be here.

Welcome. It's fantastic to get you on, especially having somebody in person. That's the first in-person Palladium-adjacent interview that we've done.

Yeah, and it's great to have you here. Thank you for literally flying all the way across the country to join us.

No, it's been so far great, and thank you guys for the wonderful review, your previous podcast of the Valley of the Pharaohs. I really— heartfelt thanks, really appreciate your comments.

Yeah, they are—

they were heartfelt comments. Yeah, yeah, it's a fantastic game.

Thank you.

It was, uh, it was something that I still am thinking about, the alternate reality where this took over D&D and we all are playing Egyptian games, not European games, Western European games.

Well, the, the interesting thing about that point of view is, uh, one of the people that I game with regularly back in North Carolina where I live There's a couple guys that I met through, of all things, Boy Scouts, because my son and daughter were in Scouts and his son was in Scouts and we were both serving as Scoutmasters. And I found out that he ran a D&D game. So I said, hey, I used to do D&D. And he said, yeah, come over, we play like every Saturday or whatever day it was. I went over there.

Yeah.

And I said, yeah, I used to do D&D and stuff, game books. And he's like, oh. And I told him I did, like, Valley of the Pharaohs, I did Weapons and Armor. He's like, oh. And he pulls out a copy of Valley of the Pharaohs. Oh my, wow. So he was, he was, he was, he was really— I was astounded that he had a copy, but he was astounded that he actually met the guy who wrote the thing.

and invited him to his Saturday game.

Yeah.

Yep.

That's wild. So, uh, so he, he, he ran a, a 5e campaign, and I hadn't played Dungeons Dragons since Advanced Dungeons Dragons, which was before 2nd Edition or whatever. I mean, we're talking way, way back, because I just moved out of that genre. I didn't really care for it, although that's everybody cut their teeth on it, but it's just I moved beyond it in my 20s. And so I started playing in this game, and, and, uh, you know, he was talking about Pharaohs, and, and I said, you know, that came out in 1983, and this was 2023. And I said, oh, that's 40 years ago. So he pitched the idea because he follows a lot. He's a, he's a big role-playing person, even though he focuses on D&D. He's a collector. He has all of the books from all of the different editions.

Oh.

And he also collects— he has some Palladium stuff, um, and some other, you know, other manufacturers' books too. But he was a big D&D guy, and, uh, he follows things on Kickstarter, and he's backed a lot of Kickstarter projects. And a lot of role-playing games nowadays get their origin on Kickstarter. And so, he said, hey, you've got a name, you've got a product, why don't you do a Kickstarter? You know, it's like, yeah, make hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like, yeah, right. So, you know, that initially planted the seed in my mind. And so, I talked to Kevin about it because, you know, the copyright is owned by Palladium Books.

Mm-hmm.

They're the original publisher. And he really, you know, he liked the idea. He had no problems with me doing it. I mean, there's no financial expectation from him or his company. So it's like, here, go with it, you know, just let me see what you're gonna do. You know, he was very supportive of it. And so that's kind of the genesis of the idea of redoing the book. Because the initial product was a failure by all measure. It was a box, which was a bad decision at the time. But within the box, the original idea was to have 2 books, to have kind of a game rules book that the players would— like a player's guide equivalent, and then like a world book, which would be more the game master stuff and things like that. And then the various maps that we did of Egypt and the different temple complexes and pyramids and stuff like that, which ended up in the final So that was kind of the original idea. But, you know, thinking back on it, I don't know what the hell I was doing in that. 1983, I was trying to graduate from college. I was 5 years into a 4-year degree. And it's like, you know, I gotta get out of here. I gotta, you know, get out of college at some point in time. And, you know, I was doing this work for, for or Palladium. There's other— you know, I was helping him with production and stuff on, you know, layout and keylining of products and things like that, going to conventions and stuff. And so it was just a bunch of other things going on in my life that we set a deadline for this project. And as that deadline came closer, it's just not enough time to do everything that we really wanted to do. So it turned out only to be a single book. not as much information background. We didn't even have an adventure or a scenario that people could, could play through. And then the fact that it was in a box and shrink-wrapped, you know, pick it up and look. Yeah. People couldn't look at the artwork, which really, back in the initial days of Palladium, that was what sold Palladium's products, is they had high-quality artwork that just didn't exist in most other games at the time. Even TSR, their artwork was very, very— what's the term? It was hot and cold.

Yeah.

They had some good artists and then some were like somebody's girlfriend from high school was drawing this kind of quality, really not professional quality stuff. And Kevin being a professional artist, That was his number one thing, is he had to have quality artwork in his products.

I have mixed feelings on a lot of the early TSR artwork as well. I feel that, like, in some of the editions there's some fantastic stuff, like that really dirty, grungy stuff from Dave Trampier is some of my favorite gaming art of all time. But then, yeah, a lot of it is just kind of— it was like Notebook Doodles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was, uh, I mean, really, that was a selling point of Palladium's products from the beginning, from his very first book, Mechanoid Invasion. You know, I don't know why we were thinking that it was a smart idea to put things in a box and shut it off from the consumer, if you will. Uh, I mean, that, that was a big contributing factor to its, uh, Poor sales. But it was always a product that I really liked. I enjoyed working on the book, even though one of the things that made it such a challenge is back in the day before, you know, there was a time before the internet and before the World Wide Web where you actually had to go to the library and check out a physical book. and then take the time to read the book because there was no searching.

Mm-hmm.

And one of the reasons why the bibliography on this game is so large is I worked at a library at my college, and so I had access to a lot of these. And a lot of it was— it's not like I read all of these books from COVID to cover. I would be looking for specific pieces of information or seeing what the book had to offer. And I might find a cool, oh, this is a really cool idea, or a cool description of something, or, here's a neat map. Let me make a photocopy of that page to give to the woman that we had who was doing most of the artwork, a lady by the name of Mary Walsh, who had done the original Weapons and Armor book illustrations. So that's why there was a wide variety of those. But if you had to look for things, you couldn't cross-reference.

Right.

And one of the things I was thinking about as I came— was flying out here on the show, I mean, part of the reason my original intention was to do what we called a historical role-playing game. And what was meant by that was Pharaoh's was based at a specific point, at a specific place, and on Earth.

Mm-hmm.

It was not a fantasy realm. It was during what I would argue with anyone is the greatest civilization that the human race has ever created, at least to our present day. They were a very rich civilization. They had thousands of— by the time of the game, 1500 BC, they had existed for over 2,000 years before that. which is an incredibly long period of time to develop their culture, their belief system, a lot of— just a lot of interesting things about them. And so, I wanted to keep it what I call historic because I didn't want to have, okay, here's a group of elves wandering around, and, oh, here's a group of dwarves, and those kinds of— what I would call like Eurocentric ideas out of it. But part of the downside of that is I was maybe a little too narrow in my focus, in that I only wanted stuff that I could find direct references to within Egyptian source material. So they— I mean, Egyptian— in ancient Egypt, there's like, from what I've read, they have over 2,000 words for demons.

Yes.

A demon is more like— if you could draw a comparison, or at least I do, to Japanese Shintoism, where you have the idea of a kami, which is a spirit. And that's kind of the same idea that the ancient Egyptians had, where there was a spirit or what they would call a demon. And that, I think, is more of a Western term that's been applied Yeah. To translate the word. I don't think originally back, if you talk to an ancient Egyptian, they would have that same connotation that we do. It's just a supernatural being or supernatural entity force that could be anywhere. It would be in a mountain. It could be in a funny-shaped rock. It could be in an old tree. It could be a bend in the river or anything like that. could have a spirit. And so, there was lots of these discussions that in the material I would find that talked about these demons, but they didn't— like, okay, here's a demon that's the equivalent of a D&D umber hulk.

Yeah.

Or, here's an equivalent to a D&D, you know, giant scorpion, or stuff like that. So, I didn't really put those in. the original book, there's a few demons that they mentioned, a few of them, but I couldn't even find the original names of them.

Hmm.

Because again, I, you know, the sources I looked in, I couldn't find them. And I subsequently found the names of them and I correctly labeled them in the new book. But originally, it's just the time factor really limited the amount of effort that we could put into the project. Because Kevin was, even towards the end of this book, his eyes were on his roleplaying game, which had been his— that was the whole driving force behind the existence of Palladium Books, was getting his roleplaying game out. And so it wasn't like we could put this off another 6 months or something.

Right.

It was either we got to do it now, Or it's just not going to happen.

So I have a quick question. Well, okay, not a quick question, but a question. You just, you know, you were just talking about how long Egyptian history as a civilization or series of related civilizations, depending on how you want to settle that argument. Why did you choose the period of Egyptian history you did?

Well, the big reason was that was the time when Egypt was expanding its borders actively. Now, they had always been down in Nubia and subjugating that part because that was a big gold-producing region. That's where Egypt got most of its gold, most of its wealth from, was the Nubian area just to their south.

Right.

Yeah.

But during this period, they were actively going into the Levant, into Syria, into even all the way up into Anatolia and running into these Hittites and other civilizations, some of whom they were able to overcome and some which resisted them. And so I thought that was a much more dynamic time period than, say, an Old Kingdom or a Middle Kingdom kind of setting. I also felt that, you know, again, we're talking 1450 BC during the reign of Thutmose III. Even if you started the Egyptian civilization at 3500, you know, you've got 2000 years prior to that. How many generations is that? How many rich folks been buried in the ground, have tombs?

Yeah.

So in terms of if you want to run this game as just You know, you're a group of thieves plundering tombs. You've got thousands and thousands of opportunities to do that. So I wanted it to be a time period where you had a very significant past already, so that there would be ruins and tombs and things that had gone on and forgotten knowledge that—

Right.

It all depended on what the game master and the players wanted to emphasize. But also, because Egypt was expanding, they were in contact with the Minoans and the Phoenicians or their equivalents back then down into Punt in what I think is— Punt was located in modern-day Somalia and in Yemen.

Okay.

that part of the world today. But also, Egypt had been around for so long, it was the center of the universe as far— if you were someone who was seeking enlightenment or knowledge, if you came, you were even from India, or you were from some of the proto-Greek states, and you were someone who wanted to expand your knowledge, Mhm. or even China, you would go to Egypt at those times because they had a very storied past. They had very— they were very advanced medicine and advanced mathematics, maybe not as advanced as some of the Babylonian concepts, but still they were doing a lot of the same stuff. And that was the place that people went. I mean, they were a very rich culture. And so, getting back to your main point, it's mostly because of the expansion.

Mm-hmm.

And I felt that that would be a more interesting area, 'cause, say, you wanted to play a group of soldiers that was on a campaign going into modern-day Israel and Syria and Lebanon and those areas in the Levant, you know, you could play that kind of game. Or if you were gonna be sent on an expedition into the south, into Central Africa, you could do those kinds of games. And in the newer version, in some respects, I've discarded some of my, I'll call them prejudices, and not sticking so much to the historical stuff. I mean, the primary thing is the various races that I've introduced that I did not want to do in the original game. As far as races, you could be like a different ethnic group or something like that. You could be a Nubian or play—

A Greek.

a Bedouin-type character from the desert, but you were gonna be a human. There was no rules for you being a partial human kind of character. But I kind of like the idea of having the different types of characters, and I think it fits in well with the overall belief system of the ancient Egyptians where they depicted their gods as either anthropomorphic-sized animals or just full animal-type beings. And I think it adds an interesting twist to the game.

How did you decide which races to add to the game? Because you're like—

Yeah, that's a good question. Because at first I thought, well, you know, I mean, there's probably 20 I could have it, easily 20, if not more. But I thought about it and it's like, well, number one, I wanted to get this project done within a reasonable amount of time.

Yeah.

Because it's like, I'd probably been working on it before I launched the Kickstarter in the beginning of the early part of 2024. I wanted to have a significant amount of it done because I didn't want to launch a Kickstarter and then, hey, remember me? 3 years later, you're getting your you know, you're getting your product. I didn't want to be one of those kind of creators. So I got about 75% of the game done before I did the Kickstarter. So I had to limit myself. Obviously, probably one of the most famous or recognizable Egyptian gods is Anubis.

Mm-hmm.

Is one. So I have to have a dog-based character. So that was one. And then you have Horus and Thoth are 2 other, and Ra. Those are 2 other or 3 other really recognizable— everybody probably in the world who knows anything about ancient Egypt would recognize these figures. So there's your bird people, you know, you gotta represent those. Everybody knows Bast.

Right.

So you gotta have a cat. Creature. Plus, the Egyptians loved cats. So it's like, you gotta have a cat creature. So that was the third one. And then from there, it was kind of like, well, I really like the crocodile, Sobek. So it's like, yeah, you gotta have a bruiser, the crocodile guy who can just, you know, chomp on anybody if he really wants to. So I added that one. We gotta have a snake. Yep, snakes. You have to have them. And after the snake, there's a famous one of the tomb paintings. I think it's a tomb painting. It might be one of the copies of the Book of the Dead. I don't remember right off the top of my head right now. But there's a depiction of these primordial gods, and they're frog-headed and snake-headed. So it's like, okay, I had the snake-headed guys. So these other creation gods, let's make them frogs. Plus, my daughter has always really liked frogs, and she actually, uh, created— she got into playing D&D at her high school and created a race, a frog, a frog people race for her D&D game. So I told her, I said, yeah, I kind of like your idea. I'm going to put frog people— in mind. And then the last one, I think that's— let's see. And then the last one is the cattle-based people. One of the— I mean, and this is a common— I mean, the cow is a common, common god in many, many cultures, especially in Africa, as a protector, as a nourisher.

Mm-hmm.

as a mother figure. And so, and it was in ancient Egypt, so I had to put in a cow or a cattle type race as well. And so that's what I kind of decided as the, the starting ones. Subsequent to that, and I have been thinking about doing a supplement, and I'm thinking about at a minimum, I'm gonna add a ram. Okay.

Oh.

Because Khnumu is another very high deity in the Egyptian pantheon. And I gotta put in a Set, even though nobody really knows what the Set animal is.

I've read multiple people have proposed that it might be an aardvark.

I was thinking that, you know, what it looks like to me is there's— and I believe these exist in Africa, at least on the Serengeti— is there's a species of anteater Right. They have this really elongated nose, which that— now the ears are totally wrong, uh, that offset that you see in depictions. The ears aren't right, but that long nose reminds me of this anteater. But I just, you know, it's like, why would an ancient people deify an anteater though?

So here's what— could it be a thylacine? Could it have been a marsupial, an apex predator marsupial that went extinct? Which is why it's so hard to find any reference of the animals, because a lot of the creatures were real animals.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, could it have been some weird— one of the few that made it off Australia, you know, that disappeared from the record completely? Because there's so many animals and creatures that have disappeared completely. I mean, and there's some aspects of the, the marsupial predators in Australia that are weirdly similar. But I mean, that's a crazy idea.

And I mean, that's a very interesting idea. The only thing I will say, though, is the worship of Set is extremely ancient. It goes back to before, in what they call predynastic, and even before that. So it's a very ancient— I mean, that doesn't mean that your idea is not a good one. I'm just saying It's not like some of the other gods that were just localized and then became, you know, maybe a pharaoh came along in some later time period from this city, and so he elevated this local god to national status.

Right. He's an alien.

Yeah, he's from Atlantis. He's an Atlantean.

It's interesting, your evolution going from what was going to be a very historical, we'll say a hard historical role-playing setting.

Yeah.

Um, and then 40 years later you've added a fantastical aspect.

Yeah.

You could double down and add Atlantis. You could add, you know, something like that.

Well, I mean, I've been thinking about that too. I mean, one of the aspects I, I, I'm fascinated with, uh, the, uh, Anunnaki Which are from the Assyrians?

Yes.

Aren't those the Sumerian gods?

Or Sumerians?

Well, they're from the Syrian region. Okay.

Yeah.

But you have Sumer in there, you have a couple other kingdoms in there. Technically, the Hittites were partially in Syria, and there's a lot of crossover with the gods in that area.

Yeah. So I've been thinking about those because I mean, getting back to the game that we've been running and where you are from, Memphis, they did have temples to foreign gods in Memphis.

Right.

They weren't just exclusive Egyptians. And so it's not un— it would not be an unlikely occurrence that you guys would have run— your characters would have run into these foreign ideas and foreign deities, because Memphis being such an ancient place and such a large city at this time, And it was a place where people were coming from all over the world to learn and to, you know, trade and relocate, all that kind of stuff. So, I've been thinking about them. And, you know, there's all of this stuff in the news now about these French— I don't know if they're archaeologists or researchers, but with their radar technology, and they discovered, you know, all of these shafts under the earth, which I don't really, from a scientific point of view, don't really believe that any of that is actual. But I like the concept.

Yeah.

You know, was it Cayce, Edward Cayce, or one of those guys who proposed that the Atlanteans were the precursors of ancient Egypt and that sort of thing? And I look at it, even though it's considered, you know, fantasy, and no modern historian would really give any of those credence, you know, it's like, hey, Right. Why not? If you want to play a game that has that, great. You know, it's role-playing. Who am I to say? I'm just giving you some context and you take it where you want to take it. And then some of the ideas are kind of cool. I mean, even in this book, I kind of lay the groundwork before— I call it the City of Ancient Times. And it's a city that exists where, partially where the modern Giza Plateau is, because everybody knows the Hall of Records is underneath the Sphinx, right?

Right.

Right. You know, even though Zahi Hawass laughs at you.

Yeah.

That's where it is. And there's a little door you can go down through that, you know, everybody knows that it's down there. But, uh, so I'm thinking about embracing that kind of idea. And that's another thing I've been thinking about in a supplement is possibly going into that idea of this. And me, in my mind, it's not an underground city. In my mind, because the entire Egyptian world was magic, it's a multidimensional realm.

Mm-hmm.

So, yeah, you might go down under the earth into something, but you're gonna enter a realm where, as far as you know, you see the sun, you see buildings, you know, Who knows where you really are? You're in some multidimensional place.

So I very, very recently have been, because of this game, diving through a lot of Egyptian history, either watching things from the Great Courses or reading some books published about it. And I most recently learned about— see if I can remember how to pronounce this— Akhenaten.

Yeah, yes, Akhenaten.

And the city that he built that would eventually become known as Amara.

Yep.

It sounds like it could make that perfect kind of— why this weird one-off city to gods that no one ever really recognized except for a period of time?

Yep.

That's this great adventure potential.

Oh, yeah. And it's kind of interesting, you know, his wife was Nefertiti. And I just saw— I watched some special about— there's a very famous bust that's in one of the German museums in Berlin that was discovered in a dig there. And there's controversy that they think it might even be a fake, but I don't think it's a fake. But very iconic picture that if everybody's— anyone sees that picture, they know what it is. It's like looking at, you know, the Mona Lisa.

Exactly.

It's one of those pieces of art that the human race has created that is has become an icon. But she was Akhenaten's wife. And, you know, he decided that, okay, the only god is Aten, which is the sun disk. All the other gods are subservient or are aspects of him. And some people say he's the first monotheist. I tend to think, if you think about it in more baser concepts. It's kind of like what the King of France did to the Templars. Hey, these guys got a whole lot of money. I need money. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna call them heretics and burn them at the stake. So it's the same kind of thing existed in ancient Egypt.

Right.

The temples were the center of power. They had been around for so long. They owned a lot of the— even though technically the king owned all of the property, the temples really were the owners, the real owners. They owned all of the land. They had all of the wealth that was produced by the land. And so here you go. You got a king that's, you know, I want some money to, you know, do my thing. I don't have a way of directly doing it. So let's come up with this idea. And then all of these guys got to be subservient to me because I am the voice of the one God.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I don't know if there's any real evidence of that in any historical record. I kind of doubt it. But it's happened many times throughout human history, the same kind of thing. And it's not out of the realm of possibility that that's what happened. And then, You know, once he was gone, and I believe Tutankhamun came— was the next pharaoh after him, his son— he went back to the old one. You know, he wanted to play king.

Dad was a little touched. Yeah, we're good.

That would make a really good— like, because Akhenaten built this city out in the middle of freaking nowhere that was then abandoned after he died.

Yep.

Oh, congratulations, now you have this mythical city.

Well, you have a campaign setting inside of your game.

Yeah.

So I'll try to dig up the citation on it. Because there has— there's very limited evidence about what you're talking about. But there is some evidence that he leveraged what amounts to levies on the temples to partially build that city.

Mm-hmm.

There's some evidence of that, and that is super cool. What's even more fun from the point of your game system is it disrupted the political structures between all the temples. And so when he went away and his son took over, the temples had to rejockey for their position and hierarchy. And unlike in a lot of fantasy settings, the temples were such a political force and not a unified political force, and they were jockeying and stuff, that that gives so much potential room to do fun stories inside.

Oh yeah. Yep. Yeah. And I mean, you know, other ideas for supplementary materials, and I think you guys mentioned it on your podcast, is I've had ideas about doing— this period of the game is right before the Minoan civilization was destroyed.

Ooh, yeah.

And there's still— we don't know exactly what destroyed them. Was it a volcano blowing up? Was it the Mycenaeans came in? Because the Mycenaeans took over the area from the Minoans. But we, you know, it's my understanding there's no real direct evidence that they came in and like conquered them or something. So that's another really interesting aspect of things is maybe doing some more stuff with other cultures. Obviously, there's the Hittites who were in direct— or the Mitanni, as they were called by the Egyptians. They were in direct conflict with the Egyptian Empire. So there's ideas there of doing books on those kinds of settings, or at least scenarios or adventures that take you beyond Egypt proper.

Mm-hmm.

You know, maybe you're going on an ocean voyage to do trading or some diplomatic mission to the Minoans and you meet the Minotaur. So you end up meeting the Minotaur because, you know, I'm thinking of that scene in 300, the movie, where the emissary from the Persians is pushed into the pit. That's an interesting—

Oh.

Yeah, yeah.

That pit wasn't actually an oubliette. It was the entrance to the labyrinth. Have fun.

Yeah. That's a cool idea.

Yeah, that's a very cool idea. That could be the start of a campaign, right? You're the emissary, you piss off someone, and they kick you off into a hole, and you wake up and you're like—

That's why you're in the Mega Dungeon.

Yeah, that's why you're in the Mega Dungeon. To go back a little bit, I will commend you on your Kickstarter because I looked it up. I pledged in April of 2024. I got my stuff in January of 2025.

Yeah.

And I have Kickstarters that I Kickstarted that are technically still going in 2021, uh, that I still haven't gotten anything for. So, um, I will say to you and anyone else who does a Kickstarter, have your material mostly done. And you stated that up front, and that's really important.

Yeah.

Because then the next one— hint hint— when you release your supplement.

Yeah, yeah, you have it. And, and that's a good point because I did get questions about— well, first of all, I was a novice to Kickstarter.

Oh, yeah.

When I did this. But, you know, you'll see a lot of Kickstarter campaigns and they'll have all of these add-ons or they'll have all these goal levels like, okay, I'll do an extra this if I get to $50,000 or an extra that if I get to $60,000. And I was asked about that. People sent me emails saying, have you thought about doing something like that? And I explicitly didn't want to do that because I wanted to make sure— I mean, granted, I'd been out of roleplaying for 30 years and out of the book production world for at least that long. And so the last thing I wanted to do was to say, okay, I'm thinking this is going to take me about a year.

Yeah.

And then it ended up taking me 2 years because, oh, I got to find a place to do dice, or, oh, I got to write another 100-page supplement, or 100 pages because I promised it. I didn't want to promise anything extra to this because I wanted to keep my initial dates that I had set out.

I wish more people ran Kickstarters the way you did.

Yeah.

I much prefer a tighter project where it's more of, more of a ransomware model almost, where it's like, I have this thing basically done.

Right. Yeah.

And if you wanna see it—

Pay me money.

Pay me money. And because I've seen so many Kickstarters go in weird directions from a fulfillment perspective because of too many add-ons.

Yeah.

And I've also seen so many Kickstarters deliver not right product because with all of the add-ons, suddenly people are trying to write things. Consistency across your writing falls apart because you're trying to jam it through.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's— and Yeah, one of the other things with me is, again, being out of the industry for such a long time, like, let's say, for example, I wanted to do dice as an add-on. Who's going to make the dice?

Yep.

I don't really want to go to China.

Nope.

I want to try to find— I think it's Chessex in the UK, but I don't know anything about that. I would have had to take the time to contact them because I don't have a staff. It was me. Right.

Me.

One guy did everything except the artwork. I mean, I did none of that. I drew one thing in the book, and there's a little map of the Mediterranean with the trade routes of the Phoenicians. That's the only artwork. Oh, besides the maps of the temples, there's a few like dungeon-y kind of maps. I did those. Anybody can do a dungeon map, I think. But yeah, the artwork was not me. But that was the main reason also, that I did not want to have to get into finding out, getting bids, and then, oh, we can't. You know, you're a little guy. I know we promised you a 2-week or a month turnaround, but guess what? Screw you, it's gonna be 6 months. I didn't want any of that kind of— Yeah.

Pray we do not alter it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I, I will, I will say, as, uh, as we've been, uh, WagonCon has been using Chessex for our dice. With our badge, you always get 2 free dice. And Chessex is one of those companies, similar to what you just described, they're very strict on their commitments. You have to order 3.5 to 4 months before your thing, and if you— there's no rush option. It's just like, nope, here's your options, here's your things, dink. They will show up almost to the day when we tell you, but it's gonna be 3 and a half, 4 months, 5 months, whenever we tell you.

Yeah.

And they're very strict about it. So you copying that same idea and keeping your scope, as a project manager in my real life, I commend you for controlling your scope.

Yes, yes, yes. That was great work. I mean, the one, you know, the one really, frightening thing that happened during this project was, you know, I reached out early on to Kevin at Palladium because I wanted to use— get his suggestions for printers. Now, I had done some research online, and there's a lot of print-on-demand type places where you can go to. I even looked at Amazon.

Yeah.

As a potential printer of the book. But most of them, they're going to charge you a very high rate and, you know, I mean, let's just say what it is. This is not replacing— the income from this is not replacing my real job.

No, no, no.

You do not do it for premium games as much as you do— No, no. And I mean, yes, there are Kickstarters where, hey, I just made $200,000.

Right, yeah.

But I had no illusions. I mean, I was not disappointed in the Kickstarter amount. I mean, my goal was $5,000, which was basically to be able to pay for the artwork and most of the production costs.

Mm-hmm.

And I ended up with $7,000. And I'll admit, I paid a lot more for the artwork just because the stuff I was getting, I really liked, and I went back and got more. But getting back to my original point, the only real risk I ran into is I got a quote from Kevin's printer, and he was— his rep he was working with had stage 4 cancer.

Oh.

And he ended up passing. And he had told me when I spoke with him, which was like the middle of 2024, he said, Matt, don't wait until December and try to get your books printed because everybody wants their stuff before the end of the year. And so I had told him, I said, I guarantee you I'll have this to you by the first week of November. And he passed right around that time. And there was some kind of turmoil with the company. And I tried to get with them And because I had an actual quote from them, a job number and everything, but I just couldn't get in contact with them. And I had a convention that I initially announced this project at a convention in Philadelphia called PAJ.

Yep.

And I announced the project at PAJ, did the Kickstarter shortly thereafter, and I promised that I would have the books by this past page, which was January of this year, 2025. And so when I started not getting calls responded to, I was like, well, I got to go to plan B. And so I went with a print-on-demand printer, and they were good. They did a very good job. They're more expensive than I was originally quoted. But at least I got the books and I was able to fulfill the time schedule that I had for myself. But that was the only, you know, that last little bit of heartburn on this that had me really concerned. And I'm planning to go back to using Palladium's printer when I'm ready to do reprints, that sort of thing, because their pricing was significantly less than what most print-on-demand places are.

So before Valley of the Pharaohs though, you were working on the books of the weapons?

Yes. I got into D&D in 1975. I was 15. You know, the original— I bought a box. You know, I was originally a wargamer and played board games and kind of branched into miniatures. And TSR put out a game called Tractics, which was a set of rules for miniature armored combat. And I was a big World War II nut, played a lot of a game called Panzer Blitz, which was a board game based on the Eastern Front in World War II. And so I saw this— You know, back in those days, you'd get catalogs of stuff.

Mm-hmm.

You go to a game store, they might have little catalogs. I picked up a catalog and I said, oh, there's this Tractics game, Armored Combat. Boy, that sounds really cool. And I bought a copy. It was a box that's very similar to their D&D set. It was a couple of books, 3 books in a box and some charts and maps and stuff. And so I started playing that. Well, of course, now I'm on their mailing list and you start getting a new catalog or new circulars, advertisements every 6 months or whatever it was. And I got this catalog or flyer or whatever from TSR, and it said, medieval fantasy role-playing game. Play elves and dwarves and knights and fight dragons, something like that. And it's something that I was kind of interested. I liked the medieval ages, you know, from what I knew at the time. It's like, yeah, that seems kind of cool. Let's buy a copy. I think at that time I was a paperboy.

Yes.

So I had a little bit of an income. You know, again, it was $10, and that was a significant investment. And I bought the game, and it was like, okay. I read through it, read through it again. maybe a third time and kind of got an idea, but it was very— the original game books, they really didn't describe very well how you were supposed to play this game.

Right.

I knew somebody had to be a dunce, what was called a dungeon master or game master who ran the game, but they didn't really give you many clues of how you ran a game. And so it was really kind of weird. Now, I had an older brother. This is before he went off to college. And so I showed it to my brother and he thought it was kind of cool. And then I said to myself, I think I'm supposed to draw up like a little dungeon and put monsters in it. And so we did that and my brother thought it was cool.

And this—

we didn't even have— they didn't even have multi-sided dice back then. The first time we played, I took some old playing cards, like if I needed to 1d4, I would take 1 to 4 out of the 4 suits and I had that in a stack. If I needed 1— we had 6-sided dice, everybody had those. If I needed 1 to 8, I did the same thing. I had another deck of cards, put them in a stack, 1 to 8, and 1 to 10, and then 1 to 12. Now the only thing that was kind of weird was 20-sided dice.

Mm-hmm.

And then I thought, well, let's We had a bunch of poker chips.

Mm-hmm.

And so, you know, I wrote on the poker chips 1 to 20, you know, and we would put them in a bag, you know, like a, a, a, a plastic— not a plastic bag, but a cloth bag. Then reach in there, pull one out. Oh, okay, I got a 16 or whatever. But that's how we played. And then I, I found in, you know, a diagram for what's called an icosahedron, which is a 20-sided Geometrical figure. And I said, oh, I could make one of those. So I cut it out of cardboard and glued it together.

My first set of dice— my, my dad was a schoolteacher and he had all these geometric shapes: a 4-sided, a 6-sided, 8-sided, a 12, and a 20. The 10-sided isn't a true geometric— it's a really hard shape to make. But I had all the others, and you take a 20 and you label it twice.

Yeah, I forget the term for that. Maybe it's— what they can look it up later. But yeah, 4, 6, 8, and 12, and 20, because they all have identical sides, right?

Right.

Of, uh, what is it, equilateral sides, I think?

Yeah, it's just there's a term for those kind of geometrical figures, whereas the d10 has like these Almost chevron.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yes. And I actually made it— I did the same exact thing, yeah, 10 years on, but I did the same exact thing out of tag board. Yeah. And I stole— I blatantly stole school supplies from the, uh, uh, middle school in, uh, a town on the Oregon coast.

And weren't the d10s that eventually came out really just d20s, or weren't they? Yeah, the original d10s.

1 to 10. Yeah. Or 0 to 9. 0 to 9.

Yeah, they were 0 to 9. And back in those days, if you had, like, a 20-sided die, you had to take a crayon. What I took was— I used to build models among— you know, I played games and built models. Those were my 2 passions as a young kid. And I took model paint, and that's how I did it. And I would paint it and then use a rag or something and wipe off the excess, and it would stay in the incised part of the number. But later, the dice came with crayons. But just a little while later, when TSR started selling dice, I bought a couple of sets of those dice. And just as an aside, in 2023, I sold my original dice set.

Oh.

$500 at an auction.

Wow.

And these were the ones From back— they have terms for them. This was before the Holmes set.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I had no idea there were dice people who are like— it's just like anything else. There are people who collect stamps or collect coins. There are people who collect dice. And when I was at this page convention, I have a couple of percentile dice, 2 20-sided dice, one's red, one's white, that I bought back in the early or the late 1970s. I didn't sell those because those are my favorite dice, I would never part with them. I brought them with me and I talked to a guy there because they had an original, in-the-shrink-wrap set of dice they were going to auction off at this convention to raise money for their charity.

Wow.

I was talking to the guy, I said, You know, I have these two dice, and he's like, he pulls out of my crumb.

Yep.

And he measures the sides of. He took the dice. He took some other dice out that were known quantities to him, and he measured those, and he measured mine, and he said, "This is a da da da. This is circa." Gave me the year like seventy nine or whatever. This is a little bit later. He said, that die is probably worth $30, and this one's probably about $15. And it's like, holy crap!

Well, so there are weirdo dice collectors, but one of the reasons why those dice are so expensive is at the time the dice were made out of the same plastic. Like, if you ever go to a zoo and they can do the injection molded animals and stuff, where you throw it in and it injection molds it right there, It's the same sort of plastic, and it breaks down over time and in light and is not particularly durable. So they're so scarce, and there were so few put out to begin with, so they're like holy grails for dice collectors.

I had a set, I had a set of those dice in a little leather pouch. It's one of the few things that was ever stolen from me when I was the super nerd in school. And this, I still regret losing it because they were the little blue dice And I crammed them in. I'd been given them from my uncle, so they were a gift. And it was, like, so heartbreaking. I don't know if I'd pay $500 to replace them, but I might, you know?

Well, this set of dice, this original one, and this is, again, this is from back in the— when they were selling the books in the boxes. They— I think they ended up selling for $5,000 or $6,000. But these were original, in the original wrapping that they would have been bought from TSR back then. Very rare. Just like about everybody else who started back in those days, you start playing a game and you kind of come up with ideas how you're going to make the game better or more interesting or whatever. Oh, of course. First of all, I look in D&D and My family had a couple replica swords in our house. And it's like, I look at the D&D broadswords, they're like 10 pounds. It's like, nah, that's not— that's crazy. That's way too heavy. You know, and I had this— I don't know where it came from, but my father had this replica sword. It was like a basket broadsword. It was like maybe half size. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And I knew it was half size, and it was, it was a replica. It wasn't real, didn't have a real edge on it. But it's like, I took that and I weighed it, you know, and it's like it weighed a pound. It's like, okay, well, this is the half-size thing, so if you doubled it, it's probably gonna be maybe 3 pounds, kind of thing. So it's like, there's no way this is even close to being correct. So I had a book this book called Weapons by an author named Edwin Tunis, and he had a bunch of medieval stuff in there. It's like, oh, this is really cool, and different kinds of weapons that they used and stuff. And I had another kind of encyclopedia kind of book that had weapons from all eras. It had guns in it, it had ancient weapons, you know, it had modern stuff. And I just went through it and it's like, oh, okay, here's a—

Right.

Here's something called a cinquedea. Oh, that was something they used. Okay, I wrote that down. Oh, here's a falchion. That's the kind of sword that the knights used. Okay, here's a broadsword, which is kind of like a Viking sword kind of thing. And so I just started writing these down and kind of keeping little sketches of them just so I would remember what they looked like. And I started introducing that into my game because It's like, hey, you don't want to just find another sword, you know, you want to embellish it a little bit. Oh, it's a curved sword or something like that. And so that kind of started my collecting these references to these things. And then my brother went off to college in Ann Arbor, and there was a very active game scene in there, in Ann Arbor, back in the mid to late '70s.

Okay.

Ann Arbor, Michigan. And he got this game club periodical called the Ann Arbor Wargamer, and it had a series in it, and it was called the Ring of the Pegasi. And it was a guy who was writing up different ideas for D&D, and he had like alternative magic stuff, and he had, um, just all kinds of different ideas of how you could enhance your D&D game. And he had this— he did this one issue where he had different kinds of weapons, and, and he had like maybe 20 or so. And it was like, wow, that's really cool. And he had different capabilities they would, um, and different kind of damage they would do and, and that kind of stuff. And I thought that was a really cool idea. And it's like—

Wow.

And that really got me going into adding this to my campaign that I was running at the time when I was in high school. And I tell people this, and it's— even I don't believe it, but I had a group of people. I had my best friend from high school, his older brother, and his older brother's girlfriend, and 3 kids who lived across the street from me that were younger, a little bit younger than me. And we played in the summertime when we weren't in school. We played 6 nights a week from like 7 to 10, 11 PM, 6 nights a week. The only time we didn't play is like if I was going out of town or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it was incredible the amount of hours we spent doing that over the course of maybe 2 and a half years. And you know what the highest level anybody got in that game?

7?

Exactly. Oh, 7th level. We had one guy got up to 7th level. He was a cleric. And that's why when I, when I see these games, when I see 5th Edition today, I can't believe it. Because the original game, you only got experience points based on the hit points of the creature you killed and then gold that you collected. And so you would play 4 hours, maybe you got through one little section of a dungeon and you got out and everybody would get, oh, you got 300 EPs, you got 500, oh, you got 600. And then you would divvy up your magic items. You didn't get EPs for magic items.

Yeah.

It was just the treasure stuff. Or if you got a gem, you would get EPs for the gold piece equivalent. And so it was a long slog A lot of giant centipedes that you would have to kill to get from first to second level.

Yep.

It's not like today where it's like, oh, I go on one adventure and, you know, now I'm up a level. It's like, no. Back in those days, it was a long grind, and people died all the time. I mean, this one woman, her name was Robin, my best friend's older brother's girlfriend. She liked to play elves. She always played an elf and she wanted to be a thief. It's like, okay, you roll the stats and she always would choose that because I don't think there was minimums to be a thief. I mean, you had to have a decent dexterity, but I don't think there was a minimum per se. And so she started her character out with the name Liz, L-I-Z. And then I would say at the end of the summer, Like, her character name was like Eliza Thadzic. It was like 12 characters long because you just add another character when, when one got killed.

That's, uh, Elf the Elf.

So, 12th the Elf.

But, uh, and, and I mean, again, the, the concept— I mean, I was probably real hard on it because I remember my brother rolled a natural. He rolled up a Ranger character using 3 6-sided dice. And back in those days, it was very rare that I would let you reroll anything. You went down the list— strength, constitution, intelligence— you know, just you roll your 3 dice, whatever you roll, you get it. And then that's, you know, if you rolled a bunch of real crappy numbers, I'd say, yeah, do that again. But it wasn't like later where you'd roll like 6 dice and take the first 3, or you'd roll up 10 characters and pick the best. There's all the different ways that people generate characters nowadays. Back in those days, I mean, I came from a war game background, and to me, this was the rules, this is how it was written, this is how we're gonna do it.

Right.

But my brother had rolled up a ranger and he really— I mean, he was in love with that character. And he did one of the best role-playing scenarios that I have to say during that campaign. He got— his character got paralyzed. I forget what creature was back. Some undead creature would paralyze you.

Ghoul.

Yeah.

Ghoul or a wight.

Yeah, he got paralyzed. He wasn't dead, but he was paralyzed. and the rest of the party defeated the Nemesis and they got their stuff. It's like, okay, we're going out to the surface. And my brother's just sitting there being quiet. And I have to hand it to him, he was playing the character. No one said that they were helping him or picking him up and carrying him out. And so it's like, you know, finally it was like, Oh, they get out to the surface of the desert. Oh, his character's name was Yvonne. I said, where's Yvonne? And I said, where do you think Yvonne is?

Oh no!

So they rushed down there and I said to myself, okay, I'm gonna roll percentile dice 4 times. And I gave it like a, I don't know, some relatively low percentage, maybe 10 or 15. that some wandering creature came along, oh, look at this, a meal! And, you know, he didn't make it. You know, something came along. And I could tell my brother was really pissed.

Yeah.

But, I mean, I really gotta hand it to him at the time. He did not say anything. He did not, you know, try to remind me, hey, pick me up too, remember? He didn't do that because his character was paralyzed and couldn't— And he was playing the character. And I mean, if I had that to do over again, I should have let them go down there, and they would have found him, and he would have gotten out. But they would have learned a lesson like, hey, if you— somebody— if you want something to happen, you got to say you're doing it. Because that's, that's how I wanted them to play.

We are running beyond time at this point. The con is picking up, so we have Yeah, unfortunately. Uh, so let's go ahead and wrap this up. Matt, it's been a pleasure having you here, and I would love to get you back on the mic and just listen to you tell more stories because it's great.

Yeah, it's—

I have a feeling there's many, many, many, many, many, many more.

Oh yes, I— and, uh, I haven't even really gotten into these. If you guys have the time this weekend, I got nothing else to do other than I'm running a few games, but So, um, you know, we can get together again.

Let's make it happen.

Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us. I'm looking forward to playing in your games this weekend.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for being here at WagonCon and, uh, joining us here. And, um, you made— yeah, you may win, uh, I used to do a thing and they'd have the, uh, the Man Mile Award for longest distance traveled. So you may actually be the furthest away that someone has come to the convention. Yeah, um, I'll have to check with our records. Yeah, uh, but, uh, really appreciate it.

You've been listening to the Glitter Boys recording here live at WagonCon. Uh, if you, uh, dear listener, are unfamiliar with WagonCon, you should follow the links in the show notes and you should come here next year and every year after that. And we look forward to seeing you and playing with you in the future. And this weekend, we look forward to playing with you. Matt, and experiencing more of this awesome game.

Yep. All right, thank you.

Thank you.

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 I just 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 Sembida and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order directly at palladiumbooks.com, and their entire catalog is available digitally at DriveThruRPG as well. Thanks for listening. Our opening music is 8-Bit Bass and Lead by Furby Guy 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 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.