Ruminations on Oblivion

Another day has come. A day I’m going to talk about something we’ve not discussed in quite some time. You may have already guessed, but I should really check your security clearance before we go any further. Instead, I’ll just remind you only those field agents with the proper security clearance should proceed any further. Those with information above their security could face early retirement, and in the Agency you know what earlier retirement is, don’t you? Proceed at your own peril.

Agents of Oblivion, the Perfect Cocktail of Horror and Espionage, is proceeding quite well under the guiding hand of Ed Wetterman, one crazy Texan who also happens to be the line developer. Today’s Ed’s birthday, so everyone raise a PBR, slaughter a cow, or perform an appropriate ritual of celebration honoring our friend’s birthday. At this point in time, I’ve known Ed for a long time, and he’s best known for his work on Pinebox and, more recently, Iron Dynasty and Realms of Cthulhu. If we dial back a few years, our bond began when we began exchanging emails and talking game stuff and I wrote an adventure set in Pinebox many moons ago, but our friendship really cemented when I first began sharing ideas of my dark vision of a world filled with espionage and monsters, a world where magic was real and so were aliens, where conspiracies were not just theoretical, but secret puppet masters pulled the strings of millions, influencing the very shape of the future. Needless to say, he was hooked. He and I worked together developing out a back story. A lot of it I gushed to him over the phone and Ed began putting together a coherent backstory to the world and together we wove a tapestry of madness. These things take time. We didn’t have an automated loom. We just had ideas. I hammered out the rules with the same diligence I always have and we placed it into the hands of trusty playtesters, one of whom became a staffer, Norm Hensley. The rules have been beaten and abused and tweaked until we got them all to play together nicely. We released an Agents of Oblivion Beta Guide for free a few years ago, and many of you provided commentary and it was well received. While the core was solid, we weren’t finished. Ed stitched together the fragments of the documents and my notes and began creating Frankenstein’s monster comprised of our blended ideas. Then our very own Dave Olson, stepped into the product and added some really sleek innovative stuff regarding weapons. When I took another pass, I saw room to improve on some stuff I had written years ago, at this point, so I did. We want this product to sing and the additions we made to it have us very exciting to release it into the wild. In other words, if you’ve had an opportunity to check out the AoO guide and liked it, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu!