Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Scott Malthouse

Scott Malthouse is a well-know internet blogger who talks mostly about Tunnels and Trolls. He has recently released his own gaming system as well.





TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF
Well, I'm 24 years old and I live in Leeds, UK. I did a degree in journalism and currently work in digital marketing. I'm a big comic book nerd and I really love pulp heroes like The Shadow and The Spider. Bruce Campbell is my god.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO GAMING?
Really my interest in tabletop games began with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. My step-dad bought a stack of them second-hand at a university book shop. Most of the pages were yellowed and you could see where previous readers had made notes, but nevertheless they sparked my imagination something fierce. After that, really it was Warhammer 40K which eventually led to me playing D&D 3rd edition when it was first released. It was a whole new experience for me and I knew I wanted more of it.


WHAT IS IT YOU FIND SO APPEALING ABOUT GAMING?
I'm usually the DM, so for me it's the ability to craft worlds with their own inhabitants, history and politics. But it's also great to spend quality time with my friends, essentially making up stories and telling jokes. It's something about the level of interactivity that not even MMORPGs can emulate. I like MMOs, but give me a good old tabletop game over World of Warcraft any day.

SHARE A FAVOURITE GAMING MOMENT WITH US
This moment is alwas brought up in our home games and it's something the players will never live down. In a D&D 4e session, there was a tree in a temple atrium with a dagger stuck in it. The atrium was filling with demented clerics who were proving a match for the players. They were toying with the idea of removing the dagger in case it was magical and could help against the clerics. However, one of the players realised that if the dagger was removed, the one removing it would be diseased and brought to the brink of death. Things were looking bad, yet for some reason the fighter, who was protecting the party's cleric, decided to run to the other side of the room and remove the dagger. Everyone was baffled and everything went to hell pretty fast. The encounter ended with all but one, I believe, unconscious on the ground. To this day we don't know what came over the fighter, but he gets ridiculed for his stupididy all the time.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY PLAYING?
Right now I'm wrapping up a two-and-a-half year D&D 4e campaign. In a week or so we'll be picking a new game and I know we've got quite a few lined up, such as Tunnels & Trolls, Call of Cthulhu and Space 1889.

CAN YOU TELL US WHAT YOUR FAVOURITE GAMES ARE?
My favourite game as a GM is definitely Call of Cthulhu. I love creating tension and seeing how an investigation plays out. Something about it really strikes a chord with me. Plus I love Lovecraft. As a player, I adore Tunnels & Trolls for its excellent system and humour. I also love Swords and Wizardry for an OD&D fix. Three Sixteen is cracking if we feel like all-out action.

WHAT WAS THE LAST GAME YOU PLAYED?
That would be D&D 4e last week.


WHICH PRODUCTS HAVE YOU HAD YOUR WORK PUBLISHED IN?
Periodical-wise, I've written adventures for Elder Tunnels by Peryton Publishing a few times. For the lastest issue, which was released early May, I wrote an article on my Tunnels & Trolls campaign setting called Peakvale, which is sort of a living setting that all my new published T&T material is set in. It's like King Arthur crossed with Doctor Who and the Daily Mail. It's weird.
Aside from that, I've published an RPG system called Unbelievably Simple Role-playing (USR), which is a free generic system. Last year I also joined forces with Peryton Publishing and released a T&T adventure called It Came from Beyond the Stars!. I also released a solo T&T adventure called Depths of the Devilmancer.


ARE YOU WORKING ON ANY GAMING-RELATED PROJECTS AT THE MOMENT?
So many! The trouble is, once I have an idea I really want to go ahead with it. Off the back of the USR system I released early this year, I'm working on a bunch of games: Derring-Do! will be a pulp hero game, DemonLord is a series of solo adventures for USR, Dwellers is more of a sci-fi time travel game and I'm also toying with the idea of a space opera game called USR Galactic. Aside from USR, I'm working on the next Peakvale GM adventure and a T&T megasolo. I doubt most of these will see the light of day this year, but I hope to have at least the first DemonLord book out and Derring-Do released by the end of the year. The Peakvale adventure, however, will be submitted to the publisher this month.

DO YOU HAVE ANY WEBPAGES OR SOCIAL NETWORK ACCOUNTS WHERE FANS CAN FIND YOU?
Sure, my blog is www.trollishdelver.blogspot.com and you can find me on twitter @scottmalt and Google Plus https://plus.google.com/112651739533171362407/posts

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