Giving Birth to CHILDREN OF THE SUN

By: Chris Wyatt
Date: Sunday, October 27, 2002

Role-paying game critics have been raving about the new post-industrial fantasy game CHILDREN OF THE SUN. The release represents the dreams and hard work of Lewis Pollak and the staff at his newly founded company Misguided Games.

"I'm in my early thirties now and I've been playing since I was in my single digits," confesses Pollak. "It's like a dream come true to see CHILDREN OF THE SUN on shelves."

Pollack was living in Ohio attending medical school at Case Western University with the intention of earning a PhD and going into research. But during the course of his studies he began to have a mid-degree crisis. Pollak's wandering feet brought him out of scholastic life and into business for himself.

"I've always loved role-playing games, so naturally, when I left academics I wanted to find a way to make gaming my profession," explains Pollak.

But with a background in medicine, Pollak didn't have the knowledge base he needed to become a game publisher...so it was time for some self-education.

"I went to [famed gaming convention] Origins and just started walking around the convention," says Pollak. "I started getting in the face of everyone and anyone who was willing to talk to me. I wound up being able to talk to some of my favorite games people. The games community is very open and very warm. They were interested in telling me not to make the same mistakes they did when they were starting out."

Pollak also took incredible initiative in creating a new gaming mechanism, called the Token System.

"This game system came out of the other games I was playing and out of my frustration with certain aspects of those games. Also I knew I was looking for a certain feel in any game I wanted to design. Not just with the rules but with the atmosphere. I wanted the game to make the players feel like they were in the middle of an action movie, that they were the stars."

Working from this motivation Pollak's Token system was intended to facilitate game play.

"The game system designed itself," says Pollak. "I just followed a logical path. I would think of game play permutations and then write down the rules that would govern them. But I would always have to then take a step back and pare things down. I would always overwrite the rules; I have that problem, and then have to edit them so that they would be a little slimmer, a little more streamlined. I would have to look at each aspect and say, can I still accomplish my goals for this set of rules without this and this and this. But I think it's easier that way. It's easier to write too much and then pull back, rather than writing a sparse system, finding out it doesn't accomplish all it should and them having to bulk up with add-ons. It just wouldn't be as smooth that way."

Once Pollak had the information he needed to start his company, and had a revolutionary new gaming system, there was still something very important that he lacked: a game to release...

...enter game designer Dan Ross.

"Dan Ross and I were on a WARHAMMER newsgroup together," says Pollak. "I was very taken with his writing and realized that my new company could become a vehicle for me to work with Dan. Dan became the author of the setting. I told him I wanted to do something in fantasy, like the games I loved, but I told Dan that I wanted to do something different and distinct."

Working together Pollak and Ross hit upon a new angle... the game would create a new genre: "Dieselpunk." Dieselpunk is shorthand to describe a fantasy society with an industrial level of development, and a Cyberpunk attitude. It was the creation of this concept that became the foundation of CHILDREN OF THE SUN.

"Originally Dieselpunk was more a marketing term, but soon we latched onto the idea," explains Pollak. "But once the concept of Diesel punk took hold we started moving the material in that direction. We went back and began to impress the spirit of it into their ideas. Some people wish we had pushed the industrial aspects some more, and we will in the future, but we wanted to start with a baseline. It gives us a place to go with the development."

Pollak admits that launching both a new company and a new game can be tough.

"The new game was slow catching on at first. But we weren't surprised like that. We have to build the trust of the fans. When gamers see a new game by an untested company they have to think about the risk. They have to ask 'will I get invested in a new game and then have the company tank?'"

In the last few months Pollak and his team at Misguided Games have been pleased to see interest in the game up, and still on the rise. Also, they are doing their best to communicate to fans that they're into CHILDREN OF THE SUN for the long haul.

"We're on the cusp of launching our first supplement," enthuses Pollak. "And we're going to be expanding our market. We're going into hobby stores and into chain stores...And we're looking for more people to run store demos."

Misguided is so pleased with their expansion that they're looking about into branching into other types of games.

"We're thinking about traditional card games as well as board games," concludes Pollak. "Everyone here loves games. That's all there is to it. Gaming is about creating stories, creating characters and creating adventures. It's an alternative way to communicate and to express yourself...and its something we [at Misguided] plan to be in the business of doing for a very long time."

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