James Burt interviews Dan Sumption about his current Kickstarter Nice Weather for Fish, an adventure for Cairn and other roleplaying games, set in a fantasy version of England's Peak District.
James Burt interviews Dan Sumption about his current Kickstarter Nice Weather for Fish, an adventure for Cairn and other roleplaying games, set in a fantasy version of England's Peak District.
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If you want to know how James and Dan met each other, here are some clews.
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Dan Sumption: Hello and welcome to the Peakrill podcast. I'm Dan Sumption of Peakrill Press and today I'm going to be interviewed by James Burt about our current Kickstarter, Nice Weather for Fish. You can find links to that in the show notes and now over to James.
James Burt: Hey Dan, how are you doing?
DS: I'm good, thank you James.
JB: Have you decided what you're going to call this? Is it the Peakrill Pod?
DS: Is it Peakrill Pod? Is it Peak Pod Real Pod Real Peak?
JB: I'm guessing whoever's listening to this has more idea of what this is called than we do now.
DS: That's a good point. Oh, isn’t the future is an amazing place.
JB: Isn't it?
DS: Except in as much as it isn't.
JB: Ha! We should start by saying a little introduction.
DS: Yeah, who's interviewing here? You're interviewing me, aren't you really? Which is strange because long term it's going to be my podcast.
JB: Yeah, so you go first and then I'll follow up.
DS: Hello, welcome listeners. I'm Dan Sumption and I run Peakrill Press, which is a small publishing house and today I have with me.
JB: James Burt, I'm a writer. My most recent book was True Clown Stories, which was published by Peakrill, working on a couple of other things. But we'll talk about that towards the end. We probably have a long story about how we know each other. But I think that exists on other podcasts already.
DS: Yeah, it does to an extent or in in myth spread around the Internet.
JB: Yeah, I guess we originally met 2019. And then when did Peakrill start?
DS: Oh, gosh, was it 2022, I think.
JB: OK, so this is like three years in. And the current thing you're working on is a book called Nice Weather for Fish.
DS: Yes.
JB: So what is Nice Weather for Fish?
DS: Well, it's it's kind of taking Peakrill back to its roots, which was in roleplaying games. So it is an adventure for fantasy roleplaying games set in a version of the Peak District where, yeah, you get to adventure upstream from the town of Hope, or as I've renamed it in the adventure Hope Springs.
So it came out of lockdown when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in about 30 years, and I started writing these adventures set in my version of the Hope Valley in the Peak District.
JB: For those who don't know, where is the Hope Valley?
DS: It's kind of pretty much right in the middle of England, I would say. So it's between Sheffield and Manchester, but up in the hills in the Peak District.
JB: For people that don't do a lot of roleplaying, and haven't kept up with where the roleplaying world is, this isn't your average Dungeons and Dragons hack and slash type scenario, I guess.
No, it's funny, I went into it with quite a kind of pacifist approach. So you can actually get through this this whole adventure, probably without fighting anything. For some people, that probably sounds terrible because what they really enjoy is the dice rolling and the spell casting and the stuff like that. But I'd say it's fairly sort of family friendly, and it's more your kind of talking animals… although actually, I should put some more talking animals in it before I publish it.
JB: The more talking animals, the better.
DS: Yeah, I mean, the first thing that Peekrill published was called Mostly Harmless Meetings, which again came out of this roleplaying interest that I'd redeveloped. And that was mostly talking animals, and that was actually the the random encounter tables, as they are known, for this adventure.
So basically, if you're wandering around in the countryside, every so often the person running the game will roll a dice and might say… in a normal game of Dungeons and Dragons, they would probably say “you meet a war band of orcs” or “you meet some skeletons and zombies”, whereas in mine, it's more likely to say “you meet a weasel who is late for a party” or “you meet an owl who's upset at being disturbed in the daytime”.
JB: One of the interesting things I think about where roleplaying is ending up is that it's got away from a lot of these kind of power fantasies of people trying to increase stats, you get those a lot video games now, whereas people are moving more towards storytelling, I guess.
DS: Yeah, yeah.
JB: One thing that I find really interesting in the moment is there's a real kind of interesting avant garde happening in the moment with people doing odd things or trying new things.
DS: Yeah, I mean, I like I say, I got back into roleplaying games through Dungeons and Dragons, which seems to be the route about 80, 90 percent of people take into that hobby, but that is very much structured around combat, and around lots of rules, neither of which really endeared me to it. And yeah, there is a side of the hobby… there are these things that they call story games, which came out of a game The Adventures of Baron Munchausen where you just tell outrageous stories about things that the Baron has done.
But there are literally thousands of games, many of which you can download free from the website itch.io and they explore all sorts of aspects of life, storytelling… I mean, someone I know, Tanya Floker in Edinburgh, has just published one where you're… what’s it called, Mum Chums, something like that, Where you basically play a mum and it's all about navigating the difficulties of life as a mother. Anything it seems is a good subject for a game.
JB: I like the fact that the cliché of Dungeons and Dragons, it's about weird shaped dice, but… is it Dread that uses a Jenga tower as its mechanism?
DS: Oh, possibly. There's a few games. There's one which I backed on Kickstarter, actually, which is a combination of pulling cards from a regular set of playing cards, and then pulling things out of a Jenga tower until it falls down.
Yeah, so playing cards is another quite often used mechanic. In fact, my first game that I wrote, In My End Is My Beginning, you draw from a pack of cards and narrate the things that your character says on their deathbed and, depending on which suit it is, it might be something they regret doing, something they regret not doing, something they're glad they're done. And depending on whether it's a one, two, three, four, queen, queen, whatever, that influences whether you're talking about something relating to maybe your mum and dad, or your siblings, or a friend, or a stranger… so, yeah, just prompts for telling a story.
JB: I think the other interesting thing about kind of modern roleplaying games is the sort of zine jam aspect, the fact that these are mini festivals of creativity. So, my friend, Lizzie Cable, has been involved in gaming for years and years, now and she's very excited about this 25 word game design challenge. And I think, if I'm right in saying, Mostly Harmless Meetings came out of one of these jams originally, didn't it?
DS: Yeah, it did. It was a thing… was it zine month? People were really supporting each other and they were kind of writing about each other's projects, and, yeah, I really got a community feel from it.
But there's also events: I've just come back from a zine fair in Barnsley. There were quite a few zine fairs around the country, I think a lot of them shut down during Covid and didn't come back, But I think they're starting to pop up again. And that's a really nice thing where, you know, you just get, you know, maybe 50 different zine makers in a hall with stalls sort of selling their stuff to the general public, and largely to each other as well.
JB: Now, I think there's something nice about just the physicality of these things, that it's easy enough to put stuff online and that's great, and it gives people an audience, but I think committing yourself that you're going to print something up is a whole new thing.
DS: It is. Yeah, I've always loved holding something on paper. I mean, even in the early days of computing, just just printing something out on paper, it was very different from having it on screen. I think once you bring material elements into it. And also there's an element of it being kind of fixed in that way as well.
JB: Yeah, I guess everything's changeable or can disappear online, whereas,
DS: : Yeah, I mean, I built websites for many years, and to an extent, there was a well, this sort of culture of move fast and break things arose kind of because you can do it wrong, and you can learn from that, and then you can go straight in and fix it. Whereas if you publish a couple of hundred copies of a zine, you you're not going to go back and do it again, so you want to try and do the best job you can.
JB: Be good to talk a little bit about the background of Nice Weather for Fish. What's the kind of flavor of the Hope Valley? And you've set it in 999AD as well, which is obviously just before the change of millennium, which was a crazy time in itself. So what are people going to get from this they won't get from a sub-Tolkien dragon-slaying quiz.
DS: It's a lot less high fantasy., so I don't have elves and orcs. And, I mean, I actually… I don't know, when I started getting back into roleplaying, I was quite anti this kind of randomness of that stuff, and I actually came up with this idea… I I came up with an arbitrary date, I can't remember, like 100,000, 200,000 years ago or something, when the human species as it was then split into a load of different branches, and they kind of inhabited different niches. And obviously, you know, homo sapiens kind of emerged as the kind of jack-of-all-trades that ended up populating most places. But in my fantasy Hope Valley, there are little outposts of different types of humans who have slightly different physical bodies, practices, and ways of thinking about things. And you encounter one – slight spoiler for the game here –.but you will encounter, or the players will encounter, the Fisher-folk, who are kind of semi aquatic, catch fish. they wear giant fish-head masks, and they have a very strange, almost insect like social structure, very rigid. Yeah, but there are people within the society, within the Fisher-folk society, who are looking to… who are a bit unhappy with that rigid structure, and questioning it.
JB: The classic fantasy thing of going to a nice established civilization and wrecking it.
DS: Well, could be wrecking it, could be improving it, could be showing them a different way around things.
JB: I think, for me, one of the interesting things about Nice Weather for Fish, which obviously, as you say, is related to this… yeah, I'm not something that does roleplaying, I'm somebody that finds it quite awkward, but reading that as a kind of weird, Borgesian piece of literature, it's quite a nice soft set of scenarios and weird sort of like motifs, and I actually end up reading it as a fantasy J.G. Ballard. I'm very into avant garde literature, I thought that was quite a fun way to approach it.
DS: Well, you said that about mostly harmless meetings, which was just a hundred little kind of vignettes, basically, and it's a bit of a in joke, really, in the world of roleplaying games, that there's so much stuff out there that's really tempting and gorgeous, and that people end up going out, buying it and never playing it as a game, It's just something that they read. And so, yeah, I do try and make the stuff so that it sort of tells a story, and it's as much fun to read and imagine how a game might play out, as to actually run a group of people through it.
JB: It's almost like a level of meta storytelling, where you don't have the single narrative, you have the kind of spurs it could take off.
DS: Yes, it's like it's kind of like a choose your own adventure, but without giving all of the kind of leafs on the branches, it leaves you to sort of fill in the detail.
JB: Yeah, there's something about that, and obviously, like lit RPGs are a big form of literature right now, don't know if you've dabbled in that.
DS: I haven't. No, I don't really know about that.
JB: Oh, that's effectively stories, effectively from a character's point of view, or a lot of them are portal fantasy where somebody slips into a Dungeons and Dragons type environment, but with a kind of heads up display of all their stats. It's an absolutely fascinating world. There's a kind of approach from the other side of scenarios, describing just a different point of view to the regular author.
DS: So, I remember, I actually wrote Nice Weather for Fish in 2021, and I'm kind of completely rewriting it now, but at the time, I was quite unhappy, like I say, with various aspects of roleplaying games, particularly Dungeons and Dragons: the combat heaviness. I’d just finished reading Debt the First 5000 Years by David Graeber, and I was I was very unhappy with the monetary systems of games like this, where you just go down a hole in the ground, and suddenly there's like half a tonne of gold down there, and everyone's carrying more gold than Fort Knox around with them. So it's a very low money world, I try and make the rewards in kind of story and in little… just bits of interest rather than “here's another sack of coins and you get some experience points and you level up from them”.
JB: Yes, it’s something that I always found very difficult, and find difficult with a lot of kind of fantasy, is that thing of worlds that don't actually make any sense. Diana Wynne Jones, I think it was The Tourist’s Guide to Fantasy Land I think it was where she spoke about the ecology of a lot of fantasy lands: basically, you know, to have a single dragon, you need a lot of sheep for it to be eating, and the level of sheep to support a dragon is never really considered in a lot of these these worlds.
DS: Yeah, that used to bug me a lot at the time I was writing this. I'm slightly less bothered about it now, and I'm rewriting it to be a bit looser: there may be some financial rewards down holes in the ground. But that was very much on my mind.
JB: And with the area specifically, so obviously you spent a lot of time around the Hope Valley. I mean, we should probably talk about where you've ended up, but yeah, it's an area that you know quite well, isn't it?
DS: Well, I lived in Sheffield for 23 years, which is just on the edge of the Peak District, and actually, for a couple of those years, I was working in Macclesfield, which meant I was driving down the Hope Valley and back every day. And in summer, I would stop off every every evening on my way home and sort of walk up a different hill. So, yeah, I've explored the area quite extensively. My fantasy version of it is a lot bigger: I used a rough guide that for every mile in the real world, there's sort of five miles in my fantasy version. And maybe for every thousand feet of elevation there's maybe kind of two or three thousand feet. So it's a bit more a bit more sort of heroic in its aspect, otherwise, you could you could walk from one end to the other in a day, and I just wanted to make it a whole land you could immerse yourself in.
JB: And we should probably speak a little bit about the history of Peakrill and where, well, you've now moved away from Sheffield, you said.
DS: Yes.
JB: Where is the base of Peakrill? I'm assuming like some fancy office block or some exciting warehouse. Where is Peakrill based?
DS: It's based in a cottage in the hills. In fact, I've just recorded another podcast, What is Roleplaying with Beyond Cataclysm, and in that podcast, I got to play “the wizard in the hills”, which is kind of semi- the real-life role I play. So I live in the North Pennines, which… there aren't really any reference points for where it is unless you know the area really well, because it's about 50 miles from anywhere that you might have heard of. But, kind of halfway between Newcastle and Carlisle, and down a bit.
JB: I mean, obviously the big connection to the area that most people have is Dominic Cummings.
DS: Yes, Barnard Castle is one of our nearest towns, that's only a 45 minute drive away.
JB: Yeah, I've been up to your valley and it's impressively bleak, and I imagine you’ve had all sorts of trouble getting things, sort of running a press from there and the Post Office being particularly stressed out by having a large publisher in their catchment area suddenly.
DS: Yeah, I sort of turn up occasionally… if I've run a Kickstarter and I've got 100, 150 parcels to send out… there was a period when I was having to sort of drip feed them through a few a day. I mean, our nearest post office is 25 minute drive, you know, it's like a 50 minute round trip, so even even doing that has an element of heroism to it.
JB: Well, particularly in the winter. I mean, I've seen your videos of trudging through the snow.
DS: Yeah, we get snowed in every year for at least a week or two.
JB: And the Peakrill model is that everything gets launched on Kickstarter, doesn't it?
DS: Yeah, almost everything, there's been one or two that haven't, but yeah, generally I will do a Kickstarter for something and then that will mean that we've got the money to go off and get it printed. And also that will mean we've got, like, hopefully 50, 100 people who are really into it who will get their hands on it first.
JB: And how many Kickstarters have you run now?
DS: I've been meaning to count this up, I think it's 12 or 13 or maybe 14 by now. Yeah, I've run most of them on my Kickstarter account, I ran one on someone else's account as well, so Chris Barker, who I've done a lot of stuff by, was quite impatient to get a Kickstarter going and I was in the middle of running another one, so we did one on his account at the same time.
JB: Yeah, because you published a few things by Chris.
DS: Yeah.
JB: And obviously you published my clown book.
DS: I’ve published your true clown stories…
JB: But it's quite an eclectic mix of stuff, isn't it?
DS: Yeah, we don't have a lot of… well, all publishing companies seem to define themselves by… they do a certain genre or they focus on a certain part of the country or a theme, but we do fiction, non-fiction, genre, non-genre, weird genre, books, zines, comics, prints, postcards.
JB: And I saw your new submission guidelines…
DS: Yeah, the submission guidelines are basically to get to know me, and ideally to come up with an idea that sounds unpublishable. Those are the ones… there's an account on BlueSky from someone posting about rejected manuscripts that they got… someone from a publishers and they're saying, you know, “someone sent us this detective novel and the detective's name kept changing every few pages with no explanation of why”. And I thought, oh yeah, I would so publish that! Everything they were saying was like the ultimate no-no, I was thinking “that really interests me”.
JB: And we've spoken a little bit about what's coming in 2025, you've got a very busy year, so… I think we've got a little bit more time on the Nice Weather for Fish Kickstarter.
DS: Yeah, about a week left to go, I think, depending on when we get this out.
JB: What else is coming in 2025?
DS: After Nice Weather for Fish, I'm doing another project with Chris Barker, who I've done a… he does a comic called Dregs of Rudetown, we've done two issues of that, which is kind of set in the 1990s, It's kind of… they're really funny, it's a really funny look back at how different life was then, you know, only like 30 years ago.
So the first one was just general stuff about being in your late teens, early 20s in the 90s, you know, before mobile phones and things like that. Second one was specifically set at a festival, with a kind of a bit of a hat-tip to the late great Pete Loveday and his Russell comics. The third one, which we're doing a Kickstarter for beginning of March, is going to be: Dregs is going to time travel to the present day, and there's going to be some real future shock. It's quite weird, actually, when you start looking at how different things are. Like I said, the arrival of mobile phones and just, well, the ubiquity of the internet has made things so different. But also there's little things like at one point Dregs goes to smoke, spark up a cigarette in a pub, and everyone leaps on him: “you can't do that!” while he's asking “why has the pool table been replaced by a soft play area?”
JB: Yeah, I'm excited about Chris's new thing.
DS: Yeah, so that's going to be quite a short Kickstarter, try and get that funded. And then after that, I'm doing a thing with Terry Howard, who is a legendary rambler and campaigner for access to the countryside, who actually helped to get 2000s Countryside and Rights of Way Act passed. And he's also my father-in-law. So the first Peakrill book that I did that wasn't by me was with him. And it's an Inner City Round Walk of Sheffield. We're now doing a Moorland Notebook, which was actually originally published in the 90s, before there was the Right to Roam, so it's actually a series of reflections on the Peak District, and with some walking routes, which actually were trespass routes at the time it was originally published. So that's going to be running a Kickstarter in late March, April, publishing it, hopefully kind of April, May.
Then it gets a bit more vague. I've got a few I want to do. There's a thing we did a couple of years ago called Krill Journal, which was basically “I will take things from anyone and stick them in a magazine”, which kind of sounds like a recipe for disaster, but worked out really well last time. This time, I want to do it with a theme, which is “what would you create if you knew this was humanity's final year?” So that will be probably April, May we'll be doing that.
There's some more stuff with you later in the year.
JB: Yeah, I'm very excited about that.So I think the first one of those is going to be Swedish Pizza, a collection of some quite unpleasant horror stories about, well, themed around Swedish pizza. One of those things that started as a joke with my friend, the Swedish poet Louise Halvorsson, and it's actually turned into, I think, a really interesting collection of stories… it's kind of a longer novella made up of small stories, and that's going to be interesting. It's fairly brutal.
DS: Some of the stories from that are on your sub stack, aren't they? Which is Microfictions…
JB: microfictions.substack.com.
DS: Or just Google “Swedish pizza horror James Burt”.
JB: Yeah, I should probably say at this point, Sweden's famous for some quite odd pizza flavours, their famous one being a curry one that has curry powder, peanuts and banana on. And this fills a lot of people with revulsion.
DS: I don't know if the Swedes came up with that, because I ate a pizza like that in India about 35 years ago.
JB: Interesting. I have been doing a lot of research on this, so I'll be able to tell you where that came from, but yeah, it's just this interesting idea of horror as well, as being something that's not only about gore, but things like disgust, alienation and so on.
And then towards the end of the year, we're going to be releasing an advent calendar, which is very exciting. So, I did this on a small scale last year, hand-folding 1500 sheets of paper. I discovered that there's actually machines you can get to do this at print shops. And, yeah, we're going to be producing that thing.
DS: Yeah, so the idea was each day you get… it's like a sort of folded letter, isn't it, and you open it up and there's a short story, some kind of Christmas horror story inside, for the 24 days leading up to Christmas.
JB: Yeah, the big question being whether I go quite as bleak as I did for the private edition. But we shall see.
I think that's, well, we've done rather a lot of talking. We both agree we really hate those podcasts where two middle-aged men go on for about two hours. So we're going to keep this fairly tight, I guess. But, Dan, was there anything I was supposed to ask you about that I've completely failed on?
DS: No, but there was probably something I was supposed to tell you about that I've completely failed on, but unfortunately, the nature of these things is that I don't know what it is.
Yeah. No, I've got a couple of other books in the works, but I'll keep those quiet for now.
JB: Cool. And where can people go to find out about Peakrill?
DS: Well, interestingly, peakrill.com has out new web shop on it, with all of our stuff, all of our currently available books for sale.
And that's Peakrill, spelt like mandrill, but with a peak instead of a mand. Does that make sense? No, it doesn't, does it?
JB: I mean, hopefully Google's still got enough competence to help people just like… mash the keyboard and get somewhere close.
DS: For the next week or two, maybe.
JB: P-E-A-K-R-I-L-L. And among the things for sale there is True Clown Stories, which is my collection of clown based horror, although it's not your usual creepy clown stuff, It's more about the sheer disappointment of life under capitalism. You know, capitalism is the bad guy, not the clown.
DS: Especially when you're a clown and you want to make people happy, and they're just terrified of you.
I should also plug our most recent book out, it's called Crab and Bee's Matter of Britain, which is a set of retelling of kind of old folklore from all over… well, some old, some not so old from all over the place, but there's stories from a thousand years ago, but rewritten in quite a radical, new, exciting way. And that's making a few waves.
JB: Yeah, there's a timelessness to the retellings where, you know, cars will be mentioned alongside these mythic elements. I think that me…
DS: Yeah, someone said… I had a wonderful review the other day, compared it to the Australian Dream Time tales, and The Elder Edda, in that sort of timeless and cyclical nature of it, and also said it reminded them a bit of Ted Hughes and Alan Garner, so those are four comparisons that I'll take.
JB: I think, yeah, one of the interesting things about folklore is that it's tended to end up sort of pinned into books a bit too much.
DS: Yeah.
JB: I think that free floating of folklore is whatever people are into, whether it's like rumors about Taylor Swift, UFOs, conspiracy theory, are all part of the same tapestry. I think Crab and Bee's thing takes a lot of these classic English myths, but connects them more to that real, like say Dream Time, that kind of collective unconscious.
DS: And interestingly, you mentioned that Swedish pizza came out as a result of a joke. This kind of came out of a bit of a dare, really. There was another book of folklore that came out a year or two ago, which Phil Smith and Helen Billinghurst (who are Crab and Bee) kind of had hoped would be somewhat different. So I said, “well, why don't you write the version that you want?” And they did. And it's great.
JB: The Peakrill thing there is just, like, publishing random weird things that you may not expect and pulling them together in weird ways.
DS: As a result of dares, usually, or jokes.
JB: I think we should stop there because we're definitely over 20 minutes now, and I think like there's too many podcasts to listen to that, you know, like so… we'll do another one of these, hopefully at some point soon but, yeah, thanks, and yeah, good to see you.
DS: You've been listening to the Peakrill podcast. Find more about Peakrill Press at Peakrill.com and please check out our Kickstarter Nice Weather for Fish on the Kickstarter website, you'll find links in the show notes.
See you soon!