Wild Cards by George R. R. Martin
What happened next was almost scary. I came up with a campaign and my friends came up with characters, and we began to play, and before any of us knew what was happening SuperWorld had swallowed us all. At first we were playing once a week, and alternating SuperWorld with sessions of Walter's game, or Vic's. But soon we stopped playing Morrow Project entirely, and then Call of Cthulhu as well. It was all SuperWorld. We would assemble at suppertime, play until two or sometimes three in the morning, and then post-mortem the game we had just played for another hour or so. Many a time dawn caught me while I driving home from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Within half a year we were playing twice a week, with one campaign running in Albuquerque and a second in Santa Fe, and the same players participating in both. Once, at an especially dull SF con, we adjourned to my room and played SuperWorld all weekend, leaving the game to do our panels and readings and then rushing back.
A number of characters who would later grace the Wild Cards books made their first appearances in those games, albeit in early “rough draft” versions significantly different from their later selves. Melinda's first character was Topper, but a Topper who had only her costume in common with the bit player who would appear in Ace in the Hole. Walter's firstborn was Black Shadow, with powers and personality both rather different from his later Wild Cards incarnation. In the game, Shad was the brother of Vic's character, who would become the Harlem Hammer of the anthologies. Chip Wideman played, a succession of surly antiheroes and the sweet-natured Toad Man before devising Cryptkicker, toxic shitkicker from hell. John Miller had Nightmare, who never did make it into the books. And Jim Moore . . . well, I could tell you about Jim Moore's characters, but if I did the PC police would have to kill you. The first incarnation of Hiram Worchester was pure comic relief: a well-meaning oaf who fought crime from a blimp and called himself Fatman. And the primordial Turtle might have had Tom Tudbury's name, power, and shell, but he shared none of his history or personality.
Many of these early creations were retired when the players got a better feel for the campaign, and for the nuances of the SuperWorld rules. Topper hung up her top hat, Black Shadow faded back into the shadows, the Harlem Hammer went back to repairing motorcycles. In place of Shad, Walter introduced Modular Man and his mad creator. Vic Milan unveiled Cap'n Trips and all of his friends, and John Miller brought in Yeoman to displace Nightmare. Some of the gang had gotten it right on the first try, though; Gail never played anyone but Peregrine, and Parris was Elephant Girl from the start; the book version of Radha O'Reilly was pretty much a clone of the earlier game version.
The game was deeply and serious addictive for all of us . . . but for me most of all. I was god, which meant I had lots of planning and preparation to do before the players even arrived. The game ate their nights and their weekends, but it ate my life. For more than a year, SuperWorld consumed me, and during that time I wrote almost nothing. Instead I spent my days coming up with ingenious new plot twists to frustrate and delight my players, and rolling up still more villains to bedevil them. Parris used to listen at my office door, hoping to hear the clicking of my keyboard from within, only to shudder at the ominous rattle of dice.
I told myself it was writer's block. My last book, an ambitious rock and roll fantasy called The Armageddon Rag, had failed dismally despite great reviews, and my career was in the dumps, enough to block anyone. Looking back now, though, it's plain to see that I wasn't blocked at all. I was creating characters and devising plots every day, like a man possessed. It was the opposite of being blocked. I was in a creative frenzy, of the sort I sometimes experienced on the home stretch a novel, when the real world seems to fade away and nothing matters but the book that you are living by day and dreaming of by night. That was exactly what was happening here, only there was no book . . . yet. There was only the game.
I don't know just when my fever broke, or why. Maybe my steadily diminishing bank account and rapidly increasing debt had something to do with it. I loved the game, I loved all these wonderful characters that my friends and I had created, I loved the egoboo I got from my players after an especially exciting session . . . but I loved having a house to live in, too, which meant I had to keep making those pesky mortgage payments. And godhood, intoxicating as it was, did not pay.
Thus it was that one day, while rolling up another yet another batch of really nifty villains, I said the magic words-
“There's got to be some way to make some money from this.”
It turned out that there was . . . but for that story, you'll need to come back and read my afterword to WILD CARDS II: ACES HIGH.
George R.R. Martin
May 15, 2001
George R. R. Martin, Wild Cards
(Series: Wild Cards # 1)