BRUCE R. CORDELL
Bruce R. Cordell is an award winning game designer who worked on various D&D settings and products for TSR and Wizards of the Coast including Return to the Tomb of Horrors and Manual of the Planes. Cordell wrote the Dark*Matter adventure The Killing Jar. His blog can be found here.
Could we start by getting a little background on the work you were doing for TSR/WOTC around the time the Dark*Matter game was being developed and published?
The Killing Jar came out in 2000, right around the time the company was ending the publication of D&D 2nd edition and getting ready to release D&D 3rd edition. So right around this time I worked on the "here's a fun way to end your 2E campaign" adventure Die, Vecna, Die! But there was a little bit of slack in the schedule, since we didn't want to put out a bunch of 2E stuff while 3E waited in the wings. So in 2000 other, non D&D projects I worked on also emerged, like the multidimensional sourcebook Tangents and the table-top adaptation for Diablio II. But of course 3E WAS coming, so in 2000 the beginning adventure I wrote to kick-start the edition came out called Sunless Citadel.
You wrote the Dark*Matter adventure The Killing Jar, published in 2000, could you tell me a little about how you came to write the book?
It was partly because I had time in my schedule, partly because I expressed an interest in writing it. The X-Files adjacent nature of the setting was super interesting to me.
The adventure is centred on corporate exploitation and the Point Pleasant Mothman legends - what led you to want to explore and link these themes and mysteries?
These sorts of plots come together organically. The name of the adventure, The Killing Jar put me in the mind of Moth Man. The fact that I'd once worked at a biopharmaceutical lab gave me some background in the real world that I thought would be fun to bring to an adventure that took place in the real world (well, close facsimile) for once. And it seemed like those two concepts, so normally separate, could be melded together to create a surprising story.
You provide a healthy list of resources and further reading in the book, was there a great deal of research involved in working in the Dark*Matter world?
I wouldn't say a GREAT deal, but yes, certainly some. I actually put together two web pages and an email auto-responder that worked for several years to help support the book. So if any PC actually typed in the in-game web pages or sent an email to the in-game email of one of the bad guys, they'd see a real web page and get an actual answer in their email. I was very excited by this, though I don't think a lot of people ever realized it.
What was the typical TSR/WOTC development approach for a source book or adventure at that time?
At the time, writers wrote what they wrote without that much oversight. Well, I'd put together an outline, bring it to a creative team meeting, and ask for any other brainstorming ideas. Then, I'd go write. Afterward, the creative director would have some comments (though I don't ever recall getting any). Then a manuscript was turned over to editing. Which was a very light development pass, because Kim Mohan would have questions :).
It wasn't until a few years later that full-time developers came into the picture.
I noticed there is a handout included about a recent conspiracy victim called JD Wiker, presumably as a nod to the Dark*Matter writer, were there any other in-jokes or creator cameos hidden in the adventure?
In a way. The lab floor plan was taken from the floor plan of the lab I worked in after college. The car being stolen and how the police handled it was taken exactly from how my wife's car at the time had been stolen, and how the police were essentially there to say, "Huh, that sucks." (I think JD had said, "That doesn't seem realistic" which I thought was funny given that that was the one thing in the module that WAS from my own direct experience. Nothing else is coming to mind, and I'd forgotten about the JD Wiker appearance :)
How did you hear about the cancellation of Alternity and the Dark*Matter line? Was there anything else that you were working on at the time of the cancellation?
I don't recall my reaction to the news. But it didn't come as a huge surprise. The line was never meant to go on forever. And no, I was on to working on 3E D&D releases, so at least in my trunk, no half-written Dark*Matter books exist. Probably ;).
Given the subject matter of Dark*Matter and its world of conspiracies and technology do you think the series was ahead of its time in any way? Do you feel it is still relevant to today’s world?
Lots of folks at Wizards had a strong interest in this sort of thing. My friend Monte Cook, in fact, had wrapped up a long-running Cthulhu-inspired, conspiracy-laden game I played in, an experienced he used in co-designing the sourcebook. And as a player in that game, I was also able to bring a lot of those experiences, or at least the sense of certain things PCs might do when presented with such strangeness, into The Killing Jar.
On the other hand, TSR and Wizards hadn't really leaned this far into the genre before. Without the modern social media environment where things can get a lot more exposure, sure, I guess the game was ahead of its time in that sense. Also, given the imminent release of 3E, Dark*Matter (and The Killing Jar) was overshadowed. Maybe if it had come out a few years before or after 3E, or if it'd had come out after social media had matured, it'd have made a bigger splash.
Do you have any other reflections on Dark*Matter and its stories 20 years on?
I used to joke that The Killing Jar was one of the best adventures I'd ever written, or at least, one of the most unique. So it was too bad it only sold 87 copies ;). This was a joke because I know it sold more than that, but hey, hyperbole!
January 2023
Follow this link to watch my history of Dark*Matter on YouTube