Try to imagine, if you can, a world where the only collectible trading card game in existence is Magic: The Gathering, and it’s so popular, you can’t even buy it anywhere because there’s not enough cards to go around. You’ve got people clamoring for it, and eBay is in its infancy, so there’s nothing more to do except wait…and wait…and wait…
That was the snapshot in the mid-nineties. There was nothing to turn to for succor. Wizards of the Coast was having cards printed overseas, at Carta Mundi, and they were backed up for months with other jobs, so they were scheduling WotC’s little card game around the other print jobs.
It didn’t take long for other companies to rush a collectible card game to market. The first one was called Super Deck, a generic super hero based card game with god-awful artwork and a simple, not challenging card mechanic. There was also a WWII card game that was essentially a skirmish battle without terrain, miniatures, or fun. I can’t remember the name.
Then there was On the Edge, from Atlas Games, based on their Over the Edge RPG, a weird, gonzo-mondo head trip of a game that was very high concept—Twin Peaks meets Naked Lunch. The card game boiled a lot of that down into “Try to control the island.” Instead of doing damage to your opponent, you build influence up for yourself. Side Note: We loved this game and played the bejeezus out of it.
Other companies announced their intention to make a CCG and the race was on. There was talk of a Vampire-based CCG from White Wolf, Steve Jackson was repurposing the Illuminati card game into a CCG…it was a gold rush. Everyone was certain that Magic players, tired of waiting for their cards to come back in, would turn to (your ccg here) and that would be that. I told you all that to tell you this: Don wanted a collectible card game. It’s where all of the interest and the majority of the money was. That’s where Weldon came in.
One of the games in the Chessex Manufacturing fine line of products was Wiz-War, a quick and dirty beer and pretzels game created by Tom Jolly. The premise was simple: pick a square 6” title. That’s your dungeon. Drop your two treasures on it, wherever you like. Now your wizard has to traverse the two boards, leaving your “home base” to grab the wizard’s other treasures and get back to your base without getting killed. Both players have spell cards they can use, offensive, defensive and utility in nature. You can play a game in about 20-30 minutes or so. It’s quite fun!
Weldon was casting about for a game idea that Chessex could produce, and while they didn’t own Wiz-War outright, a CCG based on the game of the same name would be proprietary if we licensed the concept from Tom Jolly. Weldon and I started talking over how that might work. That’s how Wiz-War: Chaos Keep was born.
As with the Wiz-War board game, players took the role of a wizard, but in Chaos Keep, it would a choice of one of four types, that specialized in different kinds of magic. Shapers could manipulate the dungeon itself. Elemancers were pretty much glass cannons. Animalists could summon and control creatures. I don’t remember what the fourth class of wizard did, but it doesn’t matter; you get the idea. There were 9 wizards of each type, all with different stats for Attack, Defense, and Move so that you could customize what wizard you wanted to match your play style.
The game was played in two phases: first each player builds the “keep,” their secret lair, using cards with walls and floors and rooms that did extra things—if you could get back to the chapel in your keep, for instance, you could heal some damage. Players took turns laying down cards and building their lairs, with teleport circles to get in and out, and so forth. In phase two, you teleported your wizard into their keep and tried to grab their treasure, but see, the keeps had traps and monsters that you could play out of your hand. If you could make it back to your home base in your own keep with your opponent’s loot, you win. Or if you kill his wizard before he kills yours.
Weldon built prototype cards for us to test out. He got some keep tiles made, thanks to his brother, Lee Perry, who was already working in the video game industry at this time, before he landed on Gears of War. I asked my longtime friend and collaborator John Lucas if he’d draw a set of Wizard cards for us so we could show the people at Chessex what we were talking about in terms of artwork. We used every spell and monster in the Wiz-War game, plus a few new ones. Some of the spells were unique to the class of wizard, and others were more general in nature. Two of our favorite monster cards were the Feral Chicken and Frankensteins’s Cow, a patchwork-looking bovine with the flavor text, “Before the monster, there were many failed experiments.” We were making ourselves laugh, for the most part.
The game was clever, all right? It might not have been as elegant as Magic: the Gathering, but it did seem to manage to be a CCG and still feel like a board game. It worked great, allowed for some randomization of cards to make the keep, and kept that “casual game” feeling from the board game. In a real “cart before the horse” move, we figured out how the cards might me distributed to allow for rarity in the booster packs, but not be so irritating that you couldn’t get a wizard to play the game with. There was math involved. Weldon made a chart.
During one of the regular sales conferences, Weldon had a separate meeting with Don and a couple of trusted advisors to pitch him the idea. He started explaining his concept to Don, who listened until Weldon had finished and then said, “Oh, we could include dice with the game. And tokens! On chipboard. And glass stones, that’ll all fit in one box…”
Don was essentially naming the various components we had in the warehouse; the stuff we already made and sold. Don wasn’t trying to mess up the pitch; he just wanted to maximize what we already had on hand. Also, as a chess player, Don tended to think several moves ahead of everyone at all times.
Weldon diplomatically replied, “Don, you’ve just created the travel version of Wiz-War.”
Chuckles and mumbles ensued, and Don told Weldon to pitch the idea to the branch managers. Their next meeting included Don and every branch manager from every warehouse, along with legal and a couple others. It was a packed room.
Weldon started his pitch again, and everyone seemed pretty interested. After he’d laid it all out, there were a couple of questions and then Don asked. “What about the dice? And the chits?”
Weldon replied. “I appreciate the feedback, Don, but if you want to make a collectible card game, you’ve got to start with a collectible card game.” Weldon went on to say that future expansions and accessories might include such things… and that’s when Don got up and walked out of the meeting. And in doing so, he took all of oxygen out of the room with him, and thus the wind out of Weldon’s sails. As soon as Don left, there was a sudden and noticeable chill that crept into the room. If Don didn’t like the idea, so then neither did they.
Wiz-War: Chaos Keep wasn’t officially dead—but it wasn’t greenlit, either. We tried to keep the project alive after I was in Berkeley, but there was a tacit disinterest in the part of management to chase after that idea.
It’s All T.R.U.E.
Even before I was summoned to Berkeley, I had been working on a role-playing system to encompass my modern-day heists and capers game. I’d even been playtesting the system to favorable reviews and helpful suggestions. Because it was fashionable at that time, I was trying to develop a set of rules that were (forgive me) universal and that somehow bypassed the problems of the HERO system, GURPS, and any other one-size-fits-all game (a task that I now believe to be folly), I was trying to scale up the mechanics for super heroes and scale them down for fantasy and magic. The working name was The Roleplaying Universal Engine, or TRUE. When coupled with a genre or a setting, you had a brandable name. TRUE Crime. TRUE Heroics. TRUE Fantasy. You get the idea.
My design approach was to build the system to handle super powers, and then scale it down for other genres. This made the modern-day game, with guns and knives, very deadly. I could live with that. The TRUE system when paired with a setting, created a unique one-volume rulebook. That was my big idea. There wasn’t a crime game on the market at the time, and there certainly wasn’t a modern-day game that didn’t also have vampires and werewolves and shit in it.
This in-development game got listed with the other reasons why they needed me in Berkeley—not at the of the list, mind you, but it was on there. I continued my writing on the West Coast between other projects and on weekends. It’s not a coincidence that what I was working on looked a lot like a marriage between Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying and R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk in terms of system usage and design choices. It was a big coincidence that both R. Talsorian and Chaosium were located in the Bay Area.
Regardless, I had the system 85% done. Combat worked, character creation was cool, skills developed, assets and detriments, etc. The mechanic was a simple percentile dice roll and d6s to supplement. Super powers weren’t fully developed, but how they worked was foolproof. The World of Crime information was all that I lacked. I started working on heist mechanics, not as a genre, but as a plot structure. It was about ready to show off to Don and the managers.
That was when we heard about the new game. It was a top-secret project. Weldon got a copy of a rulebook for a card game, with instructions to read it, tell no one, and then report on his thoughts. He was told this was something that had come up and Chessex was considering investing in it.
That game was Banemaster.