The End of Suppressed Transmission - and trying to follow its act
Well, it's official. With the Pyramid Changeover from a web to a PDF-based magazine, Kenneth Hite has announced that he his ending his Suppressed Transmission column for the time being.
I cannot say that I am entirely surprised, since the publication schedule of the column has been going steadily downwards during the last few years. Still, it saddens me greatly. The Suppressed Transmissions were, to me, the highlight of Pyramid Online. Each column had an extremely high density of gameable material, adventure seeds, and suggestions for entire campaigns - made even better by the fact that all the material was entirely rules-free.
And the man could turn anything into inspiration for games. He had an essay on Chess. He had an essay on Ebay. He had an essay on Coca-Cola, for that matter, and it turns out that the world's most popular soft-drink has no shortage of mystical associations fit for gaming. And then there are the more obvious game-related matter, such as Spring-Heeled Jack, Emperor Norton, Walpurgisnacht, H.P. Lovecraft, the Queen of Sheba, El Dorado, Le Comte de Saint-Germain, the Frankenstein family, Atlantis, the Sphinx, Rudolf Hess, the Congo, Route 66, Phileas Fogg, the Grand Canyon and so forth and at nauseam. "Hite's Handy Guide to Ultraterrestrials" remains unforgotten, as does "There's More to Faeries Than Their Glamor" and "Ancient Astronaut Texas Steel Cage Death Match".
And then there were all his Alternate Histories - his recurring Halloween essays in the "Clio's Nightmare" series (where history goes very dark indeed), as well as other works, such as his "Six Flags Over Roswell" where the UFO crashes at different points in history and creates some very different worlds. In short, this series was such an enormous font of ideas that I deeply lament its ending.
I bought the printed collections of his earlier essays for the extended footnotes (and nifty art). They might not have sold well, but I throughly enjoyed them. And a few weeks ago, I spent eight hours by stitching all Suppressed Transmission essays in the Pyramid archives into a single document, and then converted it into an ebook readable by my Amazon Kindle - complete with working internal links between the different essays (and no, you can't have a copy unless you can prove you are an SJG staffer or Kenneth Hite himself). Now I'm slowly reading through the archives again and add notes to the document when I find new inspiration for my campaign setting - which tends to happen three or four times per essay.
Well, this proved prescient, as the Pyramid website is closing down soon. I'm glad that I continued to resubscribe for the archives, as I can still download their entire content before they turn off the lights - others, who have waited with resubscribing, are not as fortunate.
And after I have finished reading through them, I will try to follow in the footsteps of these essays - by continuing to expand the Arcana Wiki, which I founded a few months ago in the hopes of also trying to find the strange, the bizarre, and just plain interesting in history and real life, and tying it all together into gameable material. I don't pretend I - and the other contributors - will be able to someday reach the quantity of his works.
And that's why, as of now, I am dedicating the Arcana Wiki to the memory of his column. Good luck with your future projects, Mr Hite!
I cannot say that I am entirely surprised, since the publication schedule of the column has been going steadily downwards during the last few years. Still, it saddens me greatly. The Suppressed Transmissions were, to me, the highlight of Pyramid Online. Each column had an extremely high density of gameable material, adventure seeds, and suggestions for entire campaigns - made even better by the fact that all the material was entirely rules-free.
And the man could turn anything into inspiration for games. He had an essay on Chess. He had an essay on Ebay. He had an essay on Coca-Cola, for that matter, and it turns out that the world's most popular soft-drink has no shortage of mystical associations fit for gaming. And then there are the more obvious game-related matter, such as Spring-Heeled Jack, Emperor Norton, Walpurgisnacht, H.P. Lovecraft, the Queen of Sheba, El Dorado, Le Comte de Saint-Germain, the Frankenstein family, Atlantis, the Sphinx, Rudolf Hess, the Congo, Route 66, Phileas Fogg, the Grand Canyon and so forth and at nauseam. "Hite's Handy Guide to Ultraterrestrials" remains unforgotten, as does "There's More to Faeries Than Their Glamor" and "Ancient Astronaut Texas Steel Cage Death Match".
And then there were all his Alternate Histories - his recurring Halloween essays in the "Clio's Nightmare" series (where history goes very dark indeed), as well as other works, such as his "Six Flags Over Roswell" where the UFO crashes at different points in history and creates some very different worlds. In short, this series was such an enormous font of ideas that I deeply lament its ending.
I bought the printed collections of his earlier essays for the extended footnotes (and nifty art). They might not have sold well, but I throughly enjoyed them. And a few weeks ago, I spent eight hours by stitching all Suppressed Transmission essays in the Pyramid archives into a single document, and then converted it into an ebook readable by my Amazon Kindle - complete with working internal links between the different essays (and no, you can't have a copy unless you can prove you are an SJG staffer or Kenneth Hite himself). Now I'm slowly reading through the archives again and add notes to the document when I find new inspiration for my campaign setting - which tends to happen three or four times per essay.
Well, this proved prescient, as the Pyramid website is closing down soon. I'm glad that I continued to resubscribe for the archives, as I can still download their entire content before they turn off the lights - others, who have waited with resubscribing, are not as fortunate.
And after I have finished reading through them, I will try to follow in the footsteps of these essays - by continuing to expand the Arcana Wiki, which I founded a few months ago in the hopes of also trying to find the strange, the bizarre, and just plain interesting in history and real life, and tying it all together into gameable material. I don't pretend I - and the other contributors - will be able to someday reach the quantity of his works.
And that's why, as of now, I am dedicating the Arcana Wiki to the memory of his column. Good luck with your future projects, Mr Hite!