Interviewing David Chapman

David F Chapman has been playing games for over 40 years and developing RPGs for nearly 25. Find out a little about his dreams for dreamscapes in WILD...

Please tell me a bit about yourself

Hi! I’m David F Chapman. I’ve been playing RPGs for over 40 years, and writing and developing RPGs for nearly 25 (if you don’t count my earlier attempts). I’m probably best known as the line developer for Conspiracy X 2.0 for Eden Studios, and for developing and writing the Doctor Who RPG for Cubicle 7 Games, as well as creating the system (Vortex) that powers it. I’ve also worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Army of Darkness, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Star Trek Adventures, and ACE, as well as my own personal project - WILD: Wake Initiated Lucid Dreaming - a game of dreamshare technology that was Kickstarted about four years ago. I’m currently a full time producer at Cubicle 7 Games.

I also started the #RPGaDAY initiative eleven years ago, a series of prompts every August to get people talking online in a positive way about our hobby and to bring people together.

What do you like best about designing games?

I get very twitchy if I’m not creating something, and designing games allows so many avenues of creativity, from developing a storyline and plots, to creating or elaborating upon a world, to working on rules systems to enhance the game. As a producer, I also get to help determine which products are being worked on, how they look, elements of the graphic design and commissioning art and writers who bring worlds and stories to life. Also, I’m a bit of a control freak, so I enjoy putting all the bits together, though I really just enjoy the writing most of all.

What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?

That’s a really tricky one as I can’t say what I’m actually working on at this very moment - NDAs and all, nor can I talk about what’s next.

Most recently I’ve been sorting out the final stages of The Laundry RPG based upon Charles Stross’ The Laundry Files novels. We Kickstarted it earlier this year, and we’re very close to getting the four main books into the hands of the backers. I hope they enjoy it, and particularly enjoy all the little gags and nods in the text that should bring a smile to fans of the series. It’s a really cool balance of horror, humour, spies, technology, and horrible bureaucracy!

Outside of Cubicle 7, I keep dreaming of more WILD books, but that’s so far off it feels like another life.

Can you tell me more about WILD

WILD has been my dream project which I’d been working on for nearly 10 years when Stoo Goff volunteered to help Kickstart it. I was inspired by the movie Inception, and a little frustrated that the dream worlds the characters went into were not more fantastic. WILD allows characters to use dreamshare technology and go into dreamscapes to gain information, help overcome problems, solve crimes, and more, but the dreamscapes can be mundane or… well, wilder! The game is powered by Tarot, and there’s a specially designed Tarot deck illustrated by Gareth Sleightholme that not only illustrates elements of the game but also chronicles the backstory of the world and how the technology was developed.

What experience(s) are you trying to give to players? Where do they find the fun in your game?

I really hope that players of WILD get to experience something different to mainstream roleplaying games. The worlds can be as weird and wild as you like, the only limit is the imagination of the person whose dreamscape you’re in. Go into the mind of someone with little imagination and start changing things and summoning dragons and so on, and they’ll realise they’re dreaming and wake. Also, there are weird archetypes, the sort that Jung talked about, who exist deeper in the dreams who hope to ride onieronauts back to the waking world.

Also, you get the additional fun of being able to play it solo, with the dreamscapes being formed through the draw of a Tarot card.

Is there anything you would like to promote right now?

You can find WILD on the dedicated website https://www.wildrpg.com, but Stoo Goff, who ran the Kickstarter for me and sorted printing also has other games - especially Aegean, his game of epic Greek mythology. We’ve played so many games of it, including in settings other than Ancient Greece, and it’s great. He’s got a Kickstarter running at the moment for a new supplement https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoo-goff/aegean-the-isle-of-pelops

Where should people go to follow you, and to find your products?

You can find me on most social media platforms (except X) with the handle Autocratik, and I have a site at https://www.autocratik.com which is mostly my ranting, nostalgia trips, and continuing my obsession with The X-Files.