Dark Tales and Disturbing Legends
Author's Notes
Joël : Ryan, for your part in DT&DL, what did you change from the design of bogeymen from the original BoS article? What concept / corrections / whatever you changed when you rewrote this for DT&DL? Ever had a project to blend the bogeymen into an adventure?Ryan Naylor : I made the bogeyman a little more powerful compared to the versions from the BoS, and I obviously replaced the plagiarised ones with ones I couldn't be sued for using.
I thought a lot more about the concept and the concept of stories, and generally made everything a lot more recursive than it had been (Monsters made by stories in a story within a story being told as a weapon by a storytelling monster hunter named after the Brothers Grimm in a book about stories!) I think I took the design brief for DT&DL to heart the most of all the authors, although hopefully it wasn't as ridiculous as that summary makes it sound.
Other than that, I think things were expanded rather than changed, but I'm not really sure any more.
Obviously all the stuff outside of the bogeyman descriptions, which wasn't in the BoS article, was greatly expanded or created anew. And physically painful to write, I might add. That chapter was by far the hardest to finish of all the work I did. Which makes it particularly gratifying that it was so well received. I remember being very pleased that I'd made the front cover.
As far as I remember, Arthaus wasn't interested in publishing adventures, so there was never, ever going to be a bogeyman adventure. I believe RL always sold well as novels, and sold moderately as sourcebooks, but no one ever made any money from adventures.
Personally, I never thought about doing it as a fan project, because having worked up Shadow of the Knife from John's outline showed me what a nightmarish experience writing an adventure could be. One of the reasons Death Undaunted never appeared (although it is only one of quite a few) was because I couldn't face writing it up. I have no idea what John thinks of this idea or my write up of his adventure. From a couple of stylistic discussions we had, I suspect he thinks I'm a moron and would have died rather than let me touch Death Undaunted.
John: Really? I don't remember that. If so, sorry -- I was, shall we say, not in a good mood in those days. In general. Anyway, I've gone back and reread it a couple of times, and I think it's fine. Now that I've picked up some basic proficiency in layout design, I sometimes even ponder going back and making the newspaper handouts actually look authentic.
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