DR. BRUCE BALLON

Founder, and how any of this happened

A green slime, in about 1979

I bought a boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons from TSR in the late seventies and started running games for my friends. One evening I was running the Village of Hommlet, and a green slime dropped from a ceiling onto somebody’s character and absorbed him.

That player had nightmares for weeks.

I have spent the rest of my life on what happened in that room.

Not the slime. The fact that a made-up thing, described out loud by a teenager with some dice, reached into a person and stayed there. Everything I have done since is some version of trying to understand that, and then trying to do it on purpose and do it well.

What formed the rest of it

A steady diet of Philip K. Dick, Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury. The Twilight Zone and Kolchak: The Night Stalker on television. All of them circling the same question, which is what is real and how would you know, and all of them answering it with a story rather than an argument.

So the path was set early: reality and illusion, and the space between them, as a lifetime’s pursuit.

The reading never stopped, and neither did the loading. Newspaper adventure strips, then Kirby, then Zelazny, then Welles. Kung fu cinema, kaiju films, and the sort of spy story where nobody comes out of it clean. A lifetime of loving things and taking them apart to see how they did it.

That list is not nostalgia. All of it is in the work, and what is owed to the people it came from is set out in Keep the Bones.

When Chaosium launched Call of Cthulhu I went straight to it, for reasons that will be obvious to anybody who has read the previous paragraph. Over the years I ended up helping with the sanity rules, and writing other material, including Unseen Masters.

That one took a GAMA Origins Award, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist, and received the Mary Seeman Award for Humanities and the Arts. It was the first game supplement to be given a psychiatry award. Three different worlds looked at one book and each recognised it on their own terms, which is still the thing I am proudest of.

The day job, which is the same job

I became a psychiatrist. Addiction psychiatry, youth and family psychiatry, trauma and stress. Thirty years of watching how people come apart and how they put themselves back together, mostly in rooms where it mattered a great deal that somebody got it right.

Alongside it I built simulations, because a simulation is a game where the consequences of running it badly are real. Healthcare education, interprofessional training, work with the Canadian Armed Forces and paramedic and police services, and eventually a national role teaching other people how to run these things properly.

And alongside that, media consultation. Making sure a portrayal of mental illness landed as truth rather than as shorthand. Television. Film. Plays. Fiction. The same craft question every time: does this emulate for the participant what an experience is actually like, or does it hand them a stereotype to carry away in their memories?

I have also been an illusionist for a long time, working with magicians and mentalists around the world, building theatrical devices and effects, and performing shows that were about mental health without ever announcing that they were. Stratford. Canadian Stage. Magic taught me the thing I use most, which is that everything is built backwards from what a person is going to feel.

I thought of all of that as time away from games. It was not. Illusion is the discipline of what you show a person and what you leave them to work out for themselves. Simulation is putting people inside a constructed situation to find out what they actually do in it. Theatre taught me that the sound is doing half the work. I spent a decade being paid to get good at all three, and then came back to games carrying them.

A fuller and more formal account of the clinical and academic side is available on request.

2020

Every decade or so I try to do something new. It is a habit rather than a plan, and it has never once gone the way I expected.

In 2020 the new thing was this: a house where all of it could be in one place. The psychiatry, the games, the magic, the simulations, the reading, the decades of wondering why things work. I had never tried to bring them together deliberately before. They had always been separate rooms.

Then the pandemic arrived and everything moved online, and I found myself running a great deal of virtual roleplaying with people scattered across the world.

That is where it turned into what it is now.

Because once you are running games over a screen, you start wanting the thing to be immersive in ways a table never needed. Which meant art. Which meant music. Which meant looking for a vocalist who could do a particular thing, and then a composer, and then a cartographer, and then a food illustrator, and finding all of them in different countries and never meeting any of them in person.

The music was not decoration and I knew it before I could say why. Bond is not just the gadgets. Bond is the theme music, and four bars of it through a wall tells you what kind of story is happening on the other side and roughly how excited to be. The music is the DNA. Once you have seen a cue land properly you cannot unlearn it.

I did not plan that. I followed it, because it kept being obviously the next thing, and because I have learned to trust that instinct more than I trust a plan. It spiralled outward from a few online sessions into games, albums, books, decks, a cookbook, magic, and a roster of people I would not have found any other way.

The pack itself came out of a failure. Mystmoor funded on Kickstarter, and then I looked at what I had promised against how much of me there was to deliver it and concluded I could not do it justice. So I refunded every backer. Anyone who had already received extras kept them. The only person who lost money was me, which is the correct arrangement, because the person who overcommitted was me. It taught me that I am one person with dreams somewhat larger than one person, and that is when I stopped trying to be a factory of one and started building a pack.

Where it is now

Hounds & Jackals is a house of games, music, books, theatrical magic and other experiences worth carrying. It is made by a pack of paid, named people in a great many countries, and a portion of everything goes out to causes I care about.

Even the cookbook has a reason, though I found it after the fact. Writing gives you a world. Music gives you sound. Art and video give you something to look at. None of them can hand you taste, meaning the actual sense. Food is the only one that reaches it.

What it is for is written down properly elsewhere: in Who We Are, and in the Manifesto, and in the documents about how the work actually gets made.

What I can tell you here is only where it came from, which is a green slime, a frightened friend, and a very long time spent trying to work out what had just happened.