Adam Scott Glancy Interview

President of Pagan Publishing

Adam Scott Glancy is the President of Pagan Publishing, the company that has given the Call of Cthulhu world such roleplaying gems as The Realm of Shadows, Walker in the Wastes, The Golden Dawn and of course, Delta Green and many more. Here we interview ASG about his involvement with the game, past and present, Pagan Publishing and his plans for the future. 


YSDC: How were you introduced to Call of Cthulhu?

ASG: You mean the game or the short story? My first introduction to Lovecraft was when a friend of mine whose father owned one of the old Arkham House collections directed me to the passage in The Dunwich Horror where Wilbur Whatley's demonic corpse is disintegrating into a fetid pool of filth on the floor of the Miskatonic University library. That description really knocked me back. I was maybe ten years old at the time and it completely redefined what I thought of when it came to 'monsters'. Somehow the wolfman, Dracula and the Frankenstien monster just weren't going to cut it anymore. 

I think the first time I ran across the Lovecraftian mythos while gaming was during a game of Traveller. A vengeful player turned referee was getting me back for a time that I dropped a bunch of vampires on him during an earlier Traveller game, so he upped the ante with Cthulhu. Suffice to say it was an eye opening experience. It wasn't long after that when I picked up my own copy of the 3rd edition Call of Cthulhu rules. But what really sold me on CoC was the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. Here we had the Call of Cthulhu mission statement: world-spanning conspiracies, exotic locals, loathsome cultists, mind-shattering perils, and the only thing standing between civilization and the doom of mankind is your weenie little Archaeologist with his 12 hit points, base handgun skill, and not enough SAN points to fill a Dixie cup. After that I knew that character classes, alignments, and levels were for pussies.

YSDC: Why do you think CoC has been so successful?

ASG: Call of Cthulhu was certainly owes some of its success to the earlier editions of the Chaosium books where the writing was a lot edgier than the average role-playing game material. It really pushed the limits of propriety in order to tell its stories. The game was one of the earliest to provide a modern role-playing setting where thing like cars and telephones and guns were the order of the day. The system's initial setting in the 1920s also gave gamers an opportunity to role-play in the Pulp-era of high adventure that the Indiana Jones films had just reintroduced. But I also think there was some appeal to the "anti-power gamer" aspect of Call of Cthulhu that really set it apart from Dungeons and Dragons. Some people have said that Call of Cthulhu was "fun" because of the so-called novelty of having your character dying horribly or going insane every single game, but I think that is utter bullshit. My experience is that CoC was fun because when you did succeed against such astronomical odds it really felt like you'd accomplished something. There just wasn't any margin for error in Call of Cthulhu, just like in real life. If you didn't use your head, you died, just like in real life.

YSDC: Do you have any memorable moments from play?

ASG: That is a truly dangerous question. Is there anything more awful than a poorly told story of a role-playing game session? Nevertheless, I can't resist doing it anyways. It must be the fan-boy in me. I'll try and keep these short and sweet. See if anything sounds familiar.

Ah, archaeology: the cornerstone of any CoC game. Ever notice that the moment your archaeologist starts to dig stuff up, he might as well be holding a steerage berth on the Titanic? Once in 1920s Spain we found a bunch of canopic jars in the ruins of a Medieval castle previously occupied by the Knights Templar. Is it a historic archaeological discovery or is it a sign that we delayed our estate planning too long? One of the players, Chris Klepac, turned to me and delivered the second greatest Call of Cthulhu archeology quote of all time:

"This is one of those times where my character has never been more happy, and yet I've never been more sad."



Needless to say, by the next morning all the NPCs were dead and the rest of us were fleeing through the Pyrenees in nothing but our underwear, and there was a platoon of undead zombie Templars hot on our heels.

Within days of being released from their tomb the undead zombie Templars had acquired modern dress, firearms, trucks, modern maps, flunkies, disguised themselves as badly scarred WWI vets (wrapped up like Claude Raines in The Invisible Man) and set off for Rome to exterminate the Pope!

There followed a reckless chase across Europe wherein we saved the Pope from assassination by dynamiting his undead zombie Templar assassins, were accused by the Italian police of being bomb hurling anarchists out to assassinate the Pope, blew off Blair Reynolds' pants with miss-thrown dynamite... twice, barely escaped five hair-raising gun battles those self-same gun-toting and annoyingly spry undead zombie Templars who, incidentally, were immune to everything except complete dismemberment, dumped all the black market arms we'd picked up in Instanbul to avoid arrest, stole all the undead zombie Templars' Byzantine coins and alchemy gear, snuck out of Italy on a boat load of Corsican smugglers bound for England, had a very frustrating conversation with the undead zombie Templars' Brazen Head, placed a personal ad written in Medieval Occitan in the London times and, ultimately, received a personal intervention by Pope Benedict XV so that all the charges against us were dropped... in the UK at least. Still can't show our faces in Italy though.

Which brings us to the greatest Call of Cthulhu archaeology quote of all time:

"Ever notice how in Call of Cthulhu you start off with an archaeologist but you end up with a commando?"

And I've tried to keep things from turning out like that. I've counseled restraint. I've told the other players to leave their Tommy guns at home, that there's no reason to go into the new scenario loaded down like it's the battle of Belleau Wood. Sure we're all seasoned CoC characters with a couple of scenarios under our belts, but that's no reason to presume it's all going to go terribly pear shaped, is it?

Of course the last time I said that we still ended up doing a search and destroy on a mansion full of cultists, all the players armed with Lewis guns, BARs, trench guns and dynamite. Every room got softened up with stick of dynamite before we even stuck our heads in. Yes, we blew up the clues. And no, we didn't give a *****. By that point in the scenario we were so freaked out by the horrible magic the Cultists were using against us we'd moved on the "pest-control" portion of the evening. I think the most rewarding part was hearing the dynamite-deafened cultist screaming in panic "Who the hell are these guys and where did they get all these machine guns?"

During that room-to-room battle, Blair Reynolds tossed a stick of dynamite into the family library and after it detonated he ran into the maelstrom of toppled bookcases and whirling page fragments only to find a man sitting calmly and reading a book. Naturally he instantly cored out the guy's head with a load of buckshot. This was CoC after all. If there is a guy with a gun and a guy with a tome, you kill the guy with tome first! When I went back to discover which edition of the Necronomicon he'd been reading from I discovered instead a brain-soaked copy of the Canterbury Tales. Apparently Blair had blasted the cult's resident catatonic. Still, it was the right thing to do.

Best quote by a new player about Blair Reynold's style of play- "Wow. I gotta admit, he doesn't disappoint. Ten minutes into the scenario and something's already on fire."

YSDC: What inspired you to write for CoC?

ASG: I was inspired to write for CoC because I enjoyed playing the game. In the early 1990s I was going to law school and, since I'd already tried sky-diving to break up the ennui, I figured it couldn't hurt to try writing. I was sending stuff in to GDW's Challenge magazine, which was publishing a fair amount of CoC at the time, but wasn't doing much more than generating rejection letters. I was also kicking around the idea for a Delta Green-like agency for CoC based on the UFO mythology of the Men in Black, but as I imagined it, government involvement was supposed to be more of an impediment than a resource for the players. GDW rejected my MiB article, so I submitted it to The Unspeakable Oath and it turned out John Tynes was working along similar line with his Delta Green concept. We put out heads together and managed to write some stuff that didn't suck.