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Once Leighton and I had formed an real, legally recognized company and convinced some people to invest in it, our next step was to write the game that would be the company’s first release, QAGS. During the early stages of planning, Dale French was our third partner, but he was whisked away on a magical adventure of one sort or another fairly early on in the process. We did manage to get a single page of doodles from him during one of those planning meetings and those doodles provided about 1/3rd of the art in Q1E.
Our first order of business was to decide how to stretch what we (incorrectly) thought would be about a page of rules into something people would actually buy. After dismissing the idea of going overboard with some of the usual types of RPG filler–monsters, dumb tables, NPCs, sample adventures, etc.–we decided it would be more fun to make fun of gamers. You know, because the best way to sell a product is to insult your target audience. We have never been very good at marketing.
When we started coming up with possible jokes and material ripe for ridicule, the much-maligned running bisexual gag was born. A few years earlier, the three of us had played in a truly godawful D&D tournament at Dragon*Con where the characters weren’t even allowed to have their own names: we were Steve the Thief, Leighton the Monk, Dale the Magic-User, and so forth. It did not go well. You can find a more detailed account at the Death Cookie, but the important detail for our purposes is that at some point we were all sitting around the table waiting for the tournament staff to make some call about something or another. We were already pissed because the game was so poorly-run and stupid so Leighton, in a not-so-subtle jab at the complete lack of role-playing, stated “Did you guys know that my character is a woman? And she’s bisexual!” to which our GM and several of the other tournament people started giggling like seventh graders who’d just heard an Andrew Dice Clay routine. The reaction was so immature that it stuck in our heads, which means when we decided to make fun of gamers, someone (I think Dale) had the idea to make one of our sample character bisexual and have the GM get really awkward about it as a “tribute” to “those morons at Dragon*Con.” This seemed like a good idea at the time, but unfortunately without the full context the bisexual gag (like many jokes in QAGS) has not aged well.
Eventually we managed to pull together a rough outline of the book, so we started writing. Dale only made a couple of the writing sessions before leaving to Walk The Earth, so it was mostly Leighton and me, but since my apartment was upstairs from our friends Ray and Stacy and less than a block from our college campus, we had a lot of people dropping buy to offer ideas or distract us (we routinely ended up putting the writing on hold to do dramatic readings of Jack Chick tracts and Ate My Balls pages).
Early on, we realized that clearly explaining how to do common things took a lot more words than we expected, which meant even a game as simple as QAGS was going to require more pages to explain the rules than we’d originally imagined. At that point, though, the jokes were as big a part of the project as the game rules, so we decided we’d just have to make the book bigger than originally planned.
We spent the next year or so writing the game, and it was the most carefully-written thing I’ve ever done in my life. During the initial writing, Leighton and I would talk through the exact wording of nearly every sentence, then we did at least two read-throughs during which we read each line out loud and agonized over word choices that nobody but us would ever to notice. When we were satisfied with the text, we turned it over to Stacy Forsythe, who I would not trade for any 10 editors from any other game company.
Once the text was in done, it was time to figure out how to actually print the damned thing on a very tight budget. I’ll save that for next time.
