Part Two: What IS Mortasheen?
(As a Project)
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Sometime between 2001 and 2003, when I had barely the confidence to draw more than thumbnail-sized pencil scribbles, I felt the urge to come up with a variety of grisly-yet-goofy little "mascot"-quality monsters, first for a platform game concept I called Crepuscular, and later as something sort of aimless I slapped with the name Necromon. With a dime for scale, the very best of my artistic abilities at the time looked like this:
Not long after I started calling them "Necromon," I was well into plotting out an entire continuity I knew for certain would take after the monster-training genre as defined by Monster Rancher, Pokemon and Digimon. A genre still considered so fresh and trendy at the time, a lot of people were just calling these games Pokeclones. Not that this was really "Necromon's" only inspiration; I was also pretty deep into neopets at the time, but it had already deeply disappointed me, twice. First when it teased a selection of weirder, glorpier virtual pets I immediately fell in love with, only to reveal that these were "mutated" neopets for a storyline in which the horror of these "mutations" was heroically averted. The site, at the time, had no intention of ever making these creatures available to players at all, but I mean, look at them:
...I was especially enamored with that last hairy globule, reminiscent (to me) of what you might get if Seth Brundle fused with a tardigrade instead of a housefly. And while Neopets did eventually begin releasing Mutant Neopets to the eager public, they evidently decided that my favorite precious baby was still too ugly and unappealing to be allowed to live, and replaced it in 2001 with what looks more like a mascot for a weed dispensary:
what.
So, around this time, I might have also got it in my head to start designing my own html-flash-powered Virtual Pets Web Experience, "with blackjack, and hookers!" as Bender Bending Rodriguez first uttered just one year prior, in that brand new Futurama cartoon show everyone was talking about. And yeah, because that was still a fresh meme, I was going to give my hypothetical neopets knockoff both an in-universe casino and what would ambiguously be a brothel, because this was going to be a darker and edgier neopets knockoff, for sophisticated, adult coinnosseurs of cartoon creature gifs. Cool Guys like me who were into the also-still-brand-new Invader Zim and the entire Adult Swim block.
...I absolutely, positively never got around to beginning any such project of the sort, or ever even learned how I would have done so, but my ideas for this Mall Goth Pokemon-Neopets bastardization did have the beginnings of a fleshed out world and logic that soon evolved into the setting of "Necromon;" a world fueled by arcane science, cosmic horror and blasphemous sorcery, where Pokemon-style battles could play out with every edgy, spookier twist a kid from the 80's and 90's thought was going to be awesome.
I began pouring all my favorite themes, aesthetics and subject matter into this proposal. Childhood favorites like the Mad Scientist toy line, the look and feel of Ugly Stickers, the works of Hideshi Hino that I'd only just discovered, everything to do with Halloween, with B-movie monsters, with Survival Horror gaming and, of course, enormous amounts of biological science knowledge, having originally wanted to devote my life to the professional study of invertebrates and still, at the time, believing I was headed right down that path.
The setting expanded with more or less lightning speed, and so did my ability to illustrate it. Soon, I was drawing monsters at least the size of quarters, with Silver Dollar proportions on the horizon. Dozens of ideas for new creatures came to me each and every day, and the more of these drawings I made, the more confident I felt in both the drawings themselves and the ideas they represented, to where I was repeatedly redoing entire sets of these monsters at a time, sometimes only months after my initial drawings. Here's just one facelift that befell the second-ever "Necromon" batch:
...And here are those same six monsters as of today, if you were wondering:
By 2007, I believe roughly four years after the first use of "Necromon," I'd long since upgraded the setting's name to Mortasheen, an extremely old term for a deadly illness that strikes horses and heavily features in stories of the Nuckelavee. I don't know...the sound of the word just felt right, I guess! This was also the year I finally felt brave enough to upload my monster drawings one at a time, as they had now grown to fill entire larger size index cards, individually even.
This was also when I would begin building an archive of Mortasheen monsters here on bogleech.com. Not long after that, I even progressed up to the point that I was drawing on normal, full-sized sheets of paper, and later still, enhancing every drawing with a generous addition of digital shading and highlighting:
It was August 31st, 2009 when someone suddenly appeared in my email inbox, asking if I ever considered the Mortasheen world for a pen-and-paper Roleplaying Game. This was someone who had a few years of experiencing designing their own homebrew gaming material, and from that single conversation, an entire new project was born overnight; one that began as something fairly small, mostly just for fun, between just these two people, and we made a lot of progress together. Enough that, another year later, this new friend wanted to know how seriously I might consider the whole thing as an actual business venture, because they happened to have another set of friends starting up their own independent tabletop gaming studio, and they were evidently WOWED by the little setting I'd built.
By 2010, I'd entered an actual, officially notarized legal contract with Cat-Powered Raygun Studios, consisting of a small team who put their experience and creativity together to take the project exponentially further, redeveloping an entire new gameplay system from scratch and brainstorming a positively tremendous volume of new ideas for the world itself.
...Which...well...for the most part, I was kind of only tenuously involved with. Everybody meant well, and I was still officially the head artist of what was still considered my original setting, but enough happened without me that an entire TVtropes page would fill with setting details I didn't recognize, and I'd only be contacted every few weeks with an update or two. Then every few months, then roughly once or twice a year. It was only 2011 when I wholeheartedly believed the game was "coming soon" enough that I drew and colored a "promotional poster" intended as the game book's cover...
...Only for several more years to fly by, during which I still saw just enough new material to know that, yes, work was being done, on a game that had perhaps grown too large for the efforts of only five to seven people (something like that). At some point, the original individual who contacted me got busy enough with another career that they quietly phased out of the project and even out of using the internet to socialize at all, and as I write this, I'm honestly not sure whatever became of them after that. Others involved had their own major life developments, one by one, until no one was really left to run the development side but the original founder of CPR Studios, who still stuck with it, somehow, even through his own significant real-life obligations. There were at least two, maybe three "this year for sure" false alarms by the time it was approaching a whole decade, and no one could really be faulted for it, but in the fall of 2020 - having last heard in 2019 that we were nearly good to go - I just sort of charged ahead and vowed to do any remaining work myself, no matter what it entailed.
That resolution turned into the staggeringly successful Kickstarter project, but (I guess these are today's magic words) at the time, I was sure nothing was left but for the other team to send me the gameplay data I could plug into a PDF, which I foolishly believed would take me one year of work, tops. Instead, it took roughly a year and a half to receive all the necessary files that had been written over the course of that decade, a gargantuan amount of written content that had drifted quite a bit in tone and style from the version of Mortashen my audience had been expecting since 2003, but still packed with solid concepts and a great deal of ready-made roleplay fuel.
These were basically novels worth of material, from multiple people, from across ten entire years, that needed to be combed through word by word and incorporated together until they not only made elegant sense as a whole, but could eventually fit into a fraction as many pages; some things would have to be merged, some expanded upon, some whittled down, others completely reinvented with a copious addition of brand new elements to fill in countless gaps in the many-layered merger, all before I was even sent the final pieces of the gameplay system, too. This would also in itself need months of editing and formatting to fit into a book that still also required many new illustrations on my part, and by then, I must have been two to three years into this "less than a year" endeavor.
That gameplay system, created by and owned by CPR founder Morgan Mullins, is in my opinion worth every single day of that wait. It isn't just completely original and distinct from anything out of Wizards or Paizo, but precisely the only way the Mortasheen setting could ever really be communicated in tabletop gaming mechanics. Its modular system allows you to not just build creatures from multiple abilities, but build each individual ability from a large enough library of modifiers and add-ons that you can more or less recreate the effect of almost any other creature ability you've seen in almost any other RPG title, tabletop or console. It's been a huge hit with every backer (as far as I'm aware) who's gotten to see it, learn it or test it, but that of course brings us to the next big issue, which was unfortunately that I did not have time to be one of them. In all the time since August 31st, 2009, in fact, I never had a single minute of experience playing any tabletop roleplaying game myself, and at the time of this writing I still wouldn't be able to play a session of Mortasheen without assistance. There was simply far too much for me to do, with an already far too attention-deficit brain to begin memorizing hundreds of rules and mechanics I had never seen before.
Fortunately, a long time fan of the setting, Bonnie, had already leapt on learning the system, homebrewing her own content and piecing together the specs for over 200 existing Mortasheen monsters by the time I even asked if she might want a job. A massive, massive amount of work still had to be done for the book to happen, and the only reason it is happening at all now is that Bonnie spent more than two straight years of her life not only writing hundreds of playable builds, but essentially running a playtest focus group to expand on and refine the mechanics, assist me in editing and formatting, develop entirely new content to fill in sorely overlooked niches and ensure that this first book will actually be worth the entire new, additional wait time since the Kickstarter. All for prooobably a whole lot less pay than the industry standard, because I'm one person who makes just slightly enough to afford basic living (kind of) and it was still going to take the entire original projected $10,000 budget just to print all the physical backer copies that were already ordered, and the extra I received after taxes, fees and Kickstarter's cut was by then already spent on a dozen additional artists to keep the workload from running e v e n. l o n g e r.
There's a whole, whole lot more I could get into, but that's where we are now: after five years and hundreds of painful hours of drawing, writing, editing, formatting, proofreading, rewriting, proofreading, re-editing, proofreading, reformatting, and grappling just as many unexpected technical hiccups in editing software I taught myself as I went, Mortasheen: The Tabletop Role-playing Game has the presentable sourcebook you should soon be able to buy.
Until then, enjoy the next 31 days of free, playable bonus monsters and any additional content that Bonnie and I have time to churn out.
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