Flames Rising » Preston DuBose

Halloween and Fall Fest in Pinebox, Texas

Preston DuBose — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:32:04 +0000

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with a look at how the fictional small town of Pinebox, Texas celebrates Halloween. Dubbed “Fall Fest,” find out how these residents get into the spirit of the season. For more about Pinebox and the games and stories that take place there, visit 12 to Midnight.

Fall Fest in Pinebox, Texas

While East Texas lakes lure hordes of sport fishermen every Summer, most travelers find Autumn the best time to visit the region. By October, one or more cold fronts have swept through the lower states and pushed out the high humidity and higher temperatures. Temperate weather makes it easier to enjoy the beautiful piney woods, the lakes, and “local flavor.”

Chief among the must-see attractions in East Texas is the Pinebox Fall Fest. Beginning on Halloween and ending on Day of the Dead, the town of Pinebox holds an enormous celebration that draws thousands of visitors each year.

“I like Fall Fest because we get out of school,” says Joni Hightower, age 9. With so many civic organizations involved in the festival, even the local school district incorporates the days off into their district calendar.

The Pinebox Fall Fest tradition began in the 19th century, although it was discontinued for a time at the behest of local religious leaders who felt that the celebration promoted paganism. The modern Fall Fest capitalizes on the fun and frivolity of Halloween ghosts and goblins while acknowledging religious sensitivities through more serious religious services incorporated throughout the festival.

The annual Fall Fest begins on Halloween morning with an interfaith blessing of food and drink. In generations past, Fall Fest was celebrated with a city-wide potluck dinner. In the days before refrigeration, some meals didn’t preserve as well as others, leading to food poisoning, “strange behavior”, and even deaths during the celebration. Thus it became tradition for local religious leaders to bless each individual dish. Today, a team of religious leaders from local churches bless the contents of each booth in the food and drink vending tents.

“I’m not superstitious, but ever since Pastor Fennell started blessing the Kiwanis Club hot dog booth 15 years ago we haven’t failed a single health inspection,” said club treasurer Jay Boatwright. “It’s all in good fun…but why take chances?”

After the morning blessing, a Fall Fest parade winds its way through the normally quiet streets. Some kids participate in the parade two or three times, marching at the front of the parade in the high school band then running back to the beginning to join a float. At the parade’s conclusion, revelers filter to the square in front of the county courthouse, where tents provide shelter for food vendor booths, a live music stage, and more.

As the sun sets on Halloween and the shadows lengthen across the square, hundreds of costumed revelers . Early in the evening, parents take the children through the food vendor tent for safe trick-or-treating.

“We’re glad to promote a safe alternative to going door to door,” says Chamber of Commerce spokesperson Ramona DeLeon. “As a parent, I know that I can give my kids a Halloween experience at the Trick-or-Treat Tents without worrying about razor blades in the candy or disappearing for three days with no memory of where they had been.”

“I like it, but it’s a little scary too” says Lashawna Curtis, age 8. “You can’t tell who anyone is ‘cause they’re all in masks. You don’t know who is really behind the mask.”

As the night grows later and the little ghosts, superheroes, and princesses go home, live bands draw adult costumed revelers through a cordoned-off street for an outdoor concert and block party. Midnight is marked by the Grand Unveiling when partiers all remove their masks—sometimes finding surprises at whom they’ve been dancing or flirting with.

“Sure back in the ‘80s we had a problem with underage drinking and a lot of shenanigans with mistaken identity, but we have that all under control now” says Sheriff Butch Anderson. “The street dance is probably one of the safest places to be during Fall Fest. We have more than a dozen uniformed and undercover officers on site to keep trouble from happening.”

Trouble is something that Fall Fest has struggled with from time to time. During Fall Fest the town’s population triples in size, causing accommodation and parking shortages, traffic accidents, and even the occasional missing partier.

“Fall Fest is a great time—don’t get me wrong. But with all those folks walking here and there at night…well, it pays to be careful. Sometimes it’s just older kids being mean, you know? But sometimes it isn’t,” White says. “I guess it wouldn’t be Halloween if sometimes things didn’t go bump in the night.”

Preston Dubose – 2010

Check out all of the Pinebox Adventures at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

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12 to Midnight Halloween Sale!

Preston DuBose — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:31:54 +0000

Howdy, gamers! If you’re a horror gamer, or if you’re just looking for a special one-shot to run for Halloween, now is the perfect time to check us out. We at 12 to Midnight are having our annual Halloween sale. All our modern horror titles for d20 Modern and Savage Worlds are 50% off!

We are also offering an insane deal on our horror anthology Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas. You can pick up this tome of terror by leading RPG designers like JD Wiker, Chuck Rice, Jess Hartley, and Shane Lacey Hensley, plus horror novelists David Wellington and Derek Gunn… all for $0.99!

Why would we put this book on sale for 80% off? Reviews. In exchange for practically giving the book away, we hope you’ll take a few moments to write a review on one of your favorite sites, be it LibraryThing, Amazon, Facebook Visual Bookshelf, or your own blog. It’s an awesome book, and we would appreciate your help in spreading the word!

Finally, if you’re a fan of our Modern Floorplans, we’ve got good news for you, too! We recently released Modern Floorplans Volume 4: At Home, a collection of 4 home-themed maps, including the ENNIE-Nominated Victorian-Style Mansion. Save $1.34 over buying them individually.

The sale ends on Day of the Dead — November 2 — so stock up and save!

Get 12 to Midnight products at these fine retailers:

Midnight Cellar – RPGNow.com – DriveThruHorror.com

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Halloween Horror: Biting Water

Preston DuBose — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 12:38:35 +0000

Today’s addition to the Halloween Horror series is from game designer Preston DuBose (Bloodlines) from 12 to Midnight. Artist Jeff Preston adds a bit of colorful dread to this strange creature.

Be careful where you go swimming, there are more than sharks to be afraid of…

Biting Water

Created by Preston Dubose
With Art by Jeff Preston

From the icy waters off the tip of Alaska to the warm coastal waters of Malaysia, Biting Water tears life from all manner of creatures. Some fishermen call it “witch’s water”, “dead water”, or “stinging water” and attribute it variously to a cursed shipwreck, underwater volcanic activity, witchcraft, jellyfish, invisible sea monsters, and aliens. Biting Water is a patch of ocean water anywhere from 20 to 110 feet in diameter that paralyzes its prey before painfully grinding flesh from bone. Reports from those brave or foolish enough to investigate suggest that Biting Water is the same color and temperature as the surrounding ocean.

Biting Water allows its prey to enter deeply into its midst before striking, the better to insure the prey’s capture. A swimmer’s first warning is a sharp, stinging pain very much like a bite or having one’s flesh pinched between sharp fingernails. The attack leaves a quarter-sized, bloody pockmark on the skin. Experienced locals know to immediately swim in a straight line as far and fast as possible. Skeptics and strangers frequently react by stopping to examine the bite and look for its source. As they are still examining the first bite and feeling numbness burn around its edges, Biting Water begins to chew.

In most victims, mild alarm turns into fear and panic. Panic drives the heart faster, which pushes the Biting Water’s paralyzing salts through the blood stream and into muscle. As the prey loses fine motor control, swimming devolves into thrashing toward safety. The victim’s muscles painfully cramp and spasm, while blood blossoms in the water from dozens of small, deep wounds. As the victim loses gross motor control, he claws at the ocean and empties his lungs in screams for help. Below the surface, the biting becomes grinding. The ocean is seemingly as hard as a millstone, rubbing the flesh from his body as easily as a t-shirt-clad biker smearing down 60 feet of asphalt. Empty lungs quickly fill with water as he slips below the surface.

The surest way of finding Biting Water is to look for the bones littering the ocean floor.

About Preston Dubose
Preston P. DuBose is president of 12 to Midnight, a publisher of modern horror roleplaying games. He has several RPG writing credits to his name and hopes to begin adding fiction credits to the list as well. He keeps a semi-regular blog and can be found in various social media, where he invites you to “friend” him any time. He lives in Texas with his wife and kids.

About Jeff Preston
Jeff Preston is a Freelance Illustrator who has been doing concept art and quality interior art and a few covers since the early 21st century. Jeff has been producing art under deadlines consistently, building a reputation as the go-to guy for artwork to order, with no guff, and always on-time! Visit www.team-preston.com for a look at his gallery and upcoming projects.

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Preston DuBose “Degrees of Horror”

Preston DuBose — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:26:45 +0000

Recently I contacted a handful of horror game designers, writers and publishers and asked them to tell me about the creation process that went into their projects. I tried not to limit them with artificial rules or requirements on the project…I wanted to see what they came up with…

The idea is to let these creative folks tell us how horror works for them. They have each worked on at least one horror game that tested their creative energy, ideas and made them reach for just a little more. These essays are a chance to see how the creative process works from a variety of talented individuals in their own words.

We’re going to start out with Preston DuBose from 12 to Midnight talking to us about the Pinebox Adventures series and the upcoming ETU: Degrees of Horror project.

Degrees of Horror

I’ve talked before about how the small town of Pinebox, Texas came into being. Pinebox is a place far from the beaten path, where shadows are thickest and the night is darkest. It’s a beacon that calls to the otherness intersecting our world. From the haunted high school boys locker room to the strange man running the local pawn shop, Pinebox is a town of many mysteries. When you spend five years thinking about a place, even an imaginary place, it tends to come alive in your mind. In some ways, I know the people and places in Pinebox better than I know my own hometown. In other ways, it IS my home town, albeit a darker, more sinister version. You see, I grew up on a ranch 20 miles from a rural Texas town, and that experience definitely colors how I see Pinebox.

Last year we at 12 to Midnight made the decision to break with our tradition of building the Pinebox campaign setting through stand-alone adventures. However, we knew that the setting was too big, too multifaceted, to fit in a single campaign book. Our solution was to take one slice of Pinebox and cover it in depth. Hitherto, East Texas University on the edge of town had received little more than a mention and some detail on the free city map. We quickly seized upon the idea of a self-contained modern horror campaign starting as freshmen and ending with your graduation. As students at ETU, you’d have to unravel grand mysteries and learn how to fight back the darkness… all while maintaining passing grades. Thus, Degrees of Horror was born.

This book, which is being written for the Savage Worlds system, follows that system’s traditional “plot point” setting style. That means that in addition to all the information you need about the setting, character creation, and so on, the GM’s section includes an entire campaign in outline form. The last two words of that sentence are very important. Plot point campaigns are not fully scripted. A typical campaign may have 8-12 individual plot points, summarized anywhere from a few paragraphs to a two or three pages each. This approach seems to appeal to time-starved GMs because it gives them a cohesive campaign but with plenty of room for personalized embellishments both in between and during plot points.

So that was the storytelling framework we adopted for our first campaign book. I volunteered to take a stab at coming up with the overall plot point campaign, then proceeded to write an introductory plot point as a convention game for Origins last year. That adventure about Freshman orientation, called Sweat Lodge, went on to heavily influence the rest of the campaign. One randomly generated element resonated so strongly with players that it went on to become a central touchstone.

I craft plots by coming up with a scenario, then poking holes in it. This drives my partners absolutely up the wall, because I indiscriminately shoot down their ideas and my own if something just doesn’t make sense. When I have an answer for every “but why?”, then know I have a solid plot. I knew very early on who the major adversaries would be, I knew how things would begin, and I had a general idea of how things would end. From there it was a matter of building up a scenario, then poking holes.

Meanwhile one of my partners, Ed Wetterman, approaches plots by creating backstory. I’ve known him to create hundreds of years of history –pages and pages of notes–about a setting, most of which is unused. But it gives him the grounding he needs to explain what happens in the present. For Degrees of Horror, while I was tackling the present-day plot points, he was busy building history. Once a week we would meet for coffee or beer and compare notes. I’d poke holes in his timeline, and he’d cause me to rethink the plot based on ETU’s sordid history. It may sound like a dysfunctional way to develop a campaign, but we were both approaching the problem from our strengths.

We had been making incremental progress up until one fateful day. We couldn’t meet in person that week, but I was tackling the plot points on my own. I called up Ed to get clarification about when something happened, then something just clicked. His chocolate got in my peanut butter, and vice versa. (You have to be of a certain age to get that joke.) What I thought would be a 5 minute phone call ran an hour and a half. Everything fell into place–all the motivations, all the schemes, even the stand-alone adventures we’d published earlier. All the “but whys?” had an answer. It was the Grand Unification Theory of Pinebox. We were euphoric . We knew that we’d finally nailed it. It was like we hadn’t so much created the plot as we had discovered it. It was one of those creative moments that writers live for.

Everyone has their own way of writing. I certainly don’t have the hubris to say that our way is the best way. Heck, we didn’t even go into the project with a firm understanding of how our contributions were going to fit together. Fortunately, my partners have spent the last five years thinking about the same imaginary place as me. Collaboration is a difficult process. At its worst, it’s “design by committee.” At its best, the sum is greater than the parts. From my perspective, the key is being willing and able to shoot down bad ideas, pick apart mediocre ones, and lift up the best—and being able to recognize the difference.

-Preston DuBose

12 to Midnight

12 to Midnight publishes roleplaying games and accessories, primarily in the modern horror and fantasy genres. Visit 12tomidnight.com for more information.

Look for 12 to Midnight eBooks at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

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