Keith Healing was the first person to have a go at making a Hopeless, Maine roleplay game. In doing so, he brought a number of key things to the wider project as well.
Keith made a major geographical contribution to the island. He placed the bridge of bottles at the end of Gaunt Street, where it crosses the Gaunt River (also his) beyond which lies Gaunt Town. Gaunt Town is the oldest part of the main town on Hopeless, and it haunted and abandoned. You’ll have seen those ruins in the graphic novels, while Gaunt Street is where Owen sets up his household. Keith pinned down this part of the island, in terms of its history and making sense of how these parts of the town fit together.
I’ve taken this geography and worked with it in a novella that most of you haven’t seen yet!
Given the nature of roleplay games, Keith wanted to figure out the mechanics of how things work. ‘Very nicely thank you’ doesn’t cut it when people want to role dice. This led to a lot of thinking about the way in which magic shows up on the island. For most people, the available magic is folklore derived.
Keith gave us the concept of demon devices – objects that have a demon trapped in them. Being Hopeless there’s every scope for this to go either hilariously or horrifically wrong. Sometimes both. James Weaslegrease picked up the concept and wrote a really cool song about it. It’s something I started incorporating into stories as well – partly to tie the games development into the wider project and partly because it’s such an excellent idea. This is how Lilly May came to be working with demon devices and why Mark Hayes took a photo of a demon he had shoved into a blunderbus. I love the way these things develop.
During the game project it occurred to Keith that he really wanted to write novels – he’s gone on to do just that. I heartily recommend that you check out his Burnt Watcher books out, which you can find on Amazon and also here – https://www.rogueanimalbooks.com/book/the-burnt-watcher/ These aren’t Hopeless projects, but if you enjoy terrible, Lovecraftian things or a touch of King in Yellow then these are for you.
