Wild Cards Design Journal #1

How It All Came To Be
by John Jos. Miller

Last time around I blamed Vic Milán. That worked pretty well, so I guess I’ll do it again.

Back in the early 1980s I was part of a gaming group in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that included a number of writers, their spouses, girlfriends, and several other somewhat more normal people. I was the newest writer of the bunch, if by “new” you mean “trying to make a living at this business.” I had sold a handful of stories over previous years, dating way back to 1970 when I was still a lad in high school, but I had initially decided to do something more practical with my life and become an archeologist. Really.

I had made what was probably the pivotal decision of my life a couple of years previously and decided to attend graduate school at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. My other possibility was the University of Chicago, where I would have specialized in Egyptology. The University of New Mexico at the time had one of the finest anthropology departments in America, including a professor whose contributions were revolutionizing the field of archeology. I thought it would be cool to study under him. On the other hand, I also liked mummies and pyramids. I thought about it for a while, and then decided the winter weather in Albuquerque would probably be more congenial. On this basis was my life-changing decision made.

The first year of graduate school was all right. I went back to New York to work for SUNY Binghamton for the summer on an archeological highway clearance project, met the lovely Gail Gerstner in a cornfield somewhere outside of Oneonta, and we were married the next summer. We came back to New Mexico, where I resumed my academic career and Gail (who has a Master’s degree in library science) got a job working at the Walden’s in the local mall. (Actually, Albuquerque had two malls back then.) Within a couple of months she was the manager, and we started to meet all these writer people.

I’ve got say it was a great experience for me. Meeting Roger Zelazny was like meeting someone who’d just come down from Olympus. George R.R. Martin wasn’t small potatoes, either. I can’t remember exactly who it was who invited us to our first role-playing game, something neither Gail or I had ever done before, but if I had to bet I’d say it was either Vic Milán or Walter Jon Williams. I do remember meeting Melinda Snodgrass at Walter’s apartment.

We gamed a lot in those days. We played a lot of different games: Morrow Project, Bushido, Call of Cthulhu, which was perhaps my personal favorite. I’d loved H.P. Lovecraft since getting the bejeezus scared out of me by “Rats in the Walls,” and the idea of playing a game where you (or at least your character) may be driven insane was quite appealing. I’ll never forget the game Walter was running where James Moore (a grad school buddy of mine) and I played brothers, who had the same mother but different fathers, whose main ambition in life was to open their own French restaurant. We had no abilities relevant to fighting Cthuloid monsters but we had hellacious saucier and pastry skills. While out on a mission we’d always nick things (silverware, cooking utensils, etc.) we felt might be useful when we finally opened our restaurant.

Around about that time I was also getting burned out on academia and, let’s face it, all those writers corrupted me. The siren call of fame and fortune lured me into their world and I took a leave of absence from the university and have never looked back. Of course, I was also getting tired of tiny little pieces of broken pottery. If I would have gone off to Chicago instead, well, who knows. I might very well still be polishing potsherds in Egypt. But one thing is sure: The world of Wild Cards would be vastly different, if it ever came into existence at all.

To come back to my initial statement, it’s all Vic’s fault. He’s the one who got George Superworld for his birthday one year, and the game immediately began to consume our lives. George ran the games, we played them. Some other people ran Superworld games, myself included, but George’s was always referred to as “the game.”

We played a couple of times a week at least, usually once in Albuquerque and once in Santa Fe, where George lived. We rolled countless dice countless numbers of times to create endless numbers of characters. Then, of course, we had to design uniforms for them and color them in on that little box in the top corner of the character sheet. (Some of us were better at that than others. I must confess that my fashion sense has never been very good, so that’s why a lot of my characters wore black. Or jeans and a T-shirt. Or, in the case of Wraith, who was very different in the game than she is in the books, not much of anything at all.)

Not only would we spend hours playing the game, we’d spend hours sitting around and talking about playing the game, rehashing the strategies of the previous session, making plans for the next session. Frankly, as George pointed out, this was really cutting into our working time. We needed to make money from this. Or get real jobs.

That wasn’t an attractive possibility, so George shared his idea with Melinda and they sat around one day hammering out a framework as to how this game could be turned into a feasible literary project.

Although they are not as prevalent in the marketplace today, this was the time of the shared-world universes, projects where a number of writers would get together and create stories set in the same milieu, and to one extent or another share the other writers’ characters in these stories. The grand-daddy of the shared world genre was Thieves World, a project that lasted for many volumes and involved a number of very fine writers (and also available as a game setting from Green Ronin Publishing). We have been fortunate to have their example to guide us.

Thieves World is an explicit fantasy setting while Wild Cards took an explicitly science fictional approach. George and Melinda started with a basic notion of a world where paranormal (or, if you will, super) powers existed. The question then became, how do we get to that world from ours? A plethora of origins, a separate one for each and every hero and villain, would quickly strain the readers’ credulity. There can be only so many radioactive spiders, lightning strikes, blown up alien worlds, old Norse gods, old Greek gods, cosmic ray incidents, chemical accidents, ancient Atlanteans, and inexplicable super-geniuses in existence, and even all of these possibilities couldn’t account for all the characters we’d need to populate our world. We needed a one-time event to bring the possibility of paranormal powers into the world, but not to make them so common that they become ordinary.

In keeping with the explicitly science-fictional approach, they came up with the idea of a virus that rewrites an individual’s DNA in a manner specific to that individual, thus allowing innumerable powers to spring from a single source. They also wanted to avoid comic book terminology like superhero, and to stamp this project with its own specific jargon. Since the virus as envisioned was something of a crapshoot that would bring harm and even outright death to its victims as well as paranormal abilities, they decided on gambling, specifically card-playing terminology. Someone who gets a superpower is an “ace.” Someone who is deformed by the virus is a “joker.” A trivial power is a “deuce.” Someone killed by the virus, usually in horrifically imaginative ways, draws the “Black Queen.” And the virus itself would be known colloquially as the “wild card” virus. It all works beautifully.

George sent out a call for character proposals. Naturally, the New Mexico group had something of an advantage over other writers, because we were right here and in many cases were privy to some of the initial discussion. Beside myself, Walter Jon Williams, Vic Milán, and Melinda Snodgrass were the young writers in our initial gaming group. George was there, too, of course, though not right at the beginning. Roger Zelazny didn’t game until much later. Other gamers, including my wife, Gail, (who would soon leave the world of retail behind to help make the world safe for nuclear waste at Sandia National Laboratory), Parris (then and now George’s significant other), and Royce Wideman, a non-writer friends of ours, all went on to contribute characters to the series. Gail also wrote a story for volume four of the series and learned that dealing with nuclear waste was easier than dealing with editors.

But characters came first, many of them out of the actual game, though in many cases the characters as written became very different than the characters as played. I mentioned my character Wraith earlier. In the game, she was an alien xeneologist who came to the Earth to study our society. She was intangible in her natural state. When she became tangible, she’d freak out whenever she was touched by anyone. (It helped in the game system we were using to have common phobias. You’d get more disadvantage points to build a studlier character. We had some really disadvantaged characters. I loaded one of mine—whom I called Pariah—with just about every disadvantage you could think of, including stuttering.)

Other characters that made the transition to the written word include George’s Great and Powerful Turtle, Gail’s Peregrine (although as originally conceived she didn’t have wings, until Vic drew a picture of a naked Peregrine with wings and suddenly it seemed like a good idea), Walter’s Modular Man, Vic’s Cap'n Trips, and my Yeoman.

In the previous incarnation of Wild Cards as roleplaying game, I mentioned a few characters who didn’t make it into the books, among them Atomic Samurai, Cycle Slut, Rat Man, Professor Psycho, and Holy Roller, the globular evangelist who literally rolls over his foes, squashing them. I told the readers not to hold their breaths waiting for these characters to show up in the books, and though it’s probably a good thing they took my advice, everyone can breathe easier now, as one of the above has indeed been introduced in the new series of Wild Cards books. I’ll let you guess which one.

Obviously, though, as creative and talented as all us gamers were, we couldn’t carry the ball all by ourselves. George invited others in who had interest in or knowledge of comics. There was Roger Zelazny, of course, Ed Bryant, Lew Shiner, Pat Cadigan, Arthur Byron Cover, Steve Perrin. Ed brought in his friend Leanne C. Harper, and Lew recruited fellow Austinite Walton “Bud” Simons. That was the original group, save one.

Which brings us to Howard Waldrop.

Howard and George go back a long way. In fact, they first met through the pages of comic book fanzines, back, oh, a number of years ago. Howard, another off-again, on-again Austinite and one of the finest short story writers the field has going for it, was enthused about the project, but Howard, being Howard, wanted to write a story about a kid with his own jet plane, and he wanted the story to climax on his birthday, September 15, 1946.

So, he did.

Such are the vagaries that can shape an entire literary universe.