An Interview with Brian Campbell

Living Force, the Dark Side, and ... Tentacles

by Jesse Decker

Illus. John Bolton

One of the newest members of the Star Wars team here at Wizards is Brian Campbell, editor of the Living Force Campaign Guide. In this candid interview Brian introduces us to the joys of the Question of the Week, previews some of the new campaign guide, and reveals his preoccupation with tentacles.

Wizards of the Coast: What's the project you're most excited about in the coming year?
Brian Campbell: Actually, I'm really looking forward to the d20 adaptation of Call of Cthulhu. I'd like to see how far the designers can push the limits of the d20 system, and I'm a huge fan of Call of Cthulhu. My favorite genre for gaming would probably be "supernatural investigation," and to be perfectly honest, I'm a freak when it comes to H.P. Lovecraft's stories. I play the original Chaosium version quite a bit, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the d20 version turns out.

Right now, I'm also editing the Dark Side Sourcebook for Star Wars, so the thought of running a dark side campaign is rather exciting. I've started hacking out a story for a dark side adventure for my Sunday group. I've got nothing against a straight-up, black-and-white, stop-the-Empire campaign, but I prefer scum and villainy. So far, the story starts out with bounty hunters and mercenaries taking a contract to explore some Massassi ruins -- and then facing the temptation of using the Sith artifacts they find. And maybe I'll throw in some tentacles. Mmmm. Tentacles.

Wizards: How'd you get into gaming?
Brian: Ah! You've asked a question about ancient history. The day before my eighth birthday, I saw a story in the newspaper about Dungeons & Dragons. The next day, my parents bought me the third edition basic set - the "blue book" version - and I tore into it. For about six years, we did a lot of kick-in-the-door, dungeon crawling kind of adventures. Since then, I've lost count of the number of roleplaying games I've played, but I started out with D&D.

Wizards: What's the campaign you reminisce about the most?
Brian: When I was in college, I ran a different game setting each month for about four or five years, so we didn't have many long-term campaigns. We did a lot of strange experiments. One month it would be a western, the next it would be a Prisoner episode, the week after that, we'd adapt a Phillip K. Dick story -- I was too busy trying out strange ideas to settle into one campaign. After I graduated, my longest running games as a GM were probably in the Storyteller system - historical Vampire, Technocracy Mage games, and Werewolf epics.

Wizards: How about as a player - what are your favorite characters?
Brian: My longest running characters have been in live-action games for Mind's Eye Theater. I started out in the game industry as an editing intern at White Wolf. After they hired me on full-time, I had a chance to sneak into live-action games in different cities and see people experiment with different techniques for live action. The biggest game I saw had about five hundred players in a hotel in Pennsylvania; since then, I've been told the last big event in Portland drew over a thousand. Wandering around a huge game like that surrounded by hundreds of plotlines going off was a blast.

Wizards: For those who don't know, what is the Living Force campaign, and what's the coolest thing you can tell us about the Living Force Campaign Guide?
Brian: Living Force is a nationwide, ongoing campaign in the RPGA (the Roleplaying Game Association). Like most Living campaigns, players generate characters (with the guidelines in the Campaign Guide) and take them to RPGA Living Force events. RPGA members also write the adventures. Each game session pretty much runs like a four-hour roleplaying tournament; however, you can take a Living character from one sanctioned event to the next, building him up as you go.

I was the editor for the Living Force Campaign Guide; Robert Wiese and Morrie Mullins wrote the text. My favorite thing about working on the book was being able to watch Living Force events based in the setting after I was done. I just got back from Winter Fantasy, the yearly RPGA Convention in January. The RPGA released its first Living Force adventures that weekend, and it was nifty seeing it get such a warm reception.

It's always cool watching players get into their Star Wars characters. Some of them bring action figures; some of them bring Star Wars Lego bricks and start building things; some of them bring toy blasters and lightsabers. As you'd expect, some of them even start dressing up in costumes if the game is at a convention. In other words, at a Living Force event, Star Wars fans don't just sit passively watching the same movies over and over again -- they get actively involved in building up their personas. It's still a sit-down, tabletop game, but in a Living campaign, you get to see a wide range of characters grow over time.

Wizards: If you could write any Star Wars product in the universe, what would it be?
Brian: I guess that would be the script for Episode Three, but I think Mr. Lucas has that covered.

Wizards: Tell me about the "Question of the Week." What is it, how'd it start, what were the funniest questions.
Brian: When I first showed up at Wizards, the company was growing at an insane rate. I had just come over from White Wolf to work on Vampire: The Eternal Struggle. Back at White Wolf, we typically had from 20 to 30 employees at any time. At Wizards, I was probably one of the first 60 or 70 employees, but within two years, we had over 300 people. Now we've got about 800.

So anyway, I saw new faces in the hallway every day, but I had trouble learning all their names and jobs. You could sit 50 feet away from someone and never learn what he or she did. So every week, I'd spend a few hours hiking around asking a different Question of the Week.

The game only had two rules. You could interpret the question however you wanted, and the Question of the Week couldn't be discussed over email. You remember the "lunchtime poll" in Heathers? It's the same sort of thing. A typical Question would be something like:

• "What's the strangest thing you've ever put on a pizza?"
• "Spaghetti-O's: Tasty Treat or Foul Concoction?"
• "If you were a supervillain, what powers would you have, and how would you take over the world?"

One my favorite Questions was the Casablanca one: "If you lived in the movie Casablanca, what would you do for a living?" A bunch of folks started inventing an ongoing series of subplots involving as many characters as they could. The question pretty much became a "metaquestion" and took on a life of its own. This week's question was rather similar -- it was based around Planet of the Apes.

Wizards: Why is there a chainsaw on your desk?
Brian: Every editor needs a chainsaw.

Wizards: So, do you still play D&D? What's your favorite part of the new edition?
Brian: Yep, I've got a game running right now for about nine players. We started out with Death in Freeport, and the game has been getting increasingly Lovecraftian since then. My favorite thing about the new edition is seeing half-orcs again: angsty, nasty, bitter little half-orcs all over the place. Oddly enough, the players in my Tuesday group felt the same way -- of the nine players, six of them showed up with half-orcs. They're down to the point where they can smash their way through a huge, crunchy combat pretty quickly. So when I get my hands on some more Cthulhu d20 stuff, I'm going to surround them with waves of deep ones and undulating tentacles. Mmmm. Tentacles. Excuse me. I must go find some sushi now.