Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions
By Cape Rust
Fred Hicks is a dad, a gamer, and a game publisher. He runs Evil Hat Productions, and does freelance art direction and layout work for the occasional other game publisher. The rest of the time, though, he’s looking after his kids, and spending time with his wife. Life is good.
Fred is occasionally available for freelance layout work, depending on how busy his calendar is. Learn more about hiring Fred, and see what he has worked on in the past, here.
CR: Fred can you give us 5 words that best describe you?
FH: No, I surely can not.
(That’s five, right?)
CR: What was the first RPG you ever played?
FH: Red box Dungeons & Dragons, back in 19[REDACTED].
CR: Evil Hat, how in the heck did you guys come up with the name Evil Hat Productions? There has to be a story here.
FH: My friend Lydia came onto an online chatroom one day. There, she “emoted” that she was perching on my head. Something like:
“Lydia perches on Fred’s head like an evil hat.”
And my ears perked. “Oo. Evil Hat! That sounds like a good brand name.” So I registered the domain, made a crappy logo, and we started doing our game-runnings up at Amber Con Northwest under the Evil Hat banner. “An Evil Hat Production!”
So when it came time for Rob & I to take our game design notions into a more commercial space, it was a no brainer what we’d call the endeavor.
CR: Other than Evil Hat Productions games, what is your favorite RPG and why?
FH: Right now? Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, just released from Margaret Weis Productions.
Ask me again in a few weeks and I might have a different answer. I’m fickle! Also there are a TON of very good games out there.
CR: Evil Hat Productions seems to focus more on the player than any other aspect in RPGs. Has it been difficult “selling” this player-centric concept to the RPG world as a whole?
FH: Hm, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that, but whatever the case, our approach seems to have been met with some enthusiasm by our fans. I think we filled a need — not an exclusive and unaddressed need, perhaps, but in enough of the right ways that it really clicked for folks.
CR: Could you discuss Evil Hat Productions PDF Guarantee and why it is so important?
FH: Sure! Our PDF guarantee is simple: buy a copy of one of our games at close to full price from a brick & mortar retail store, and we’ll give you the PDF for that game at no extra charge. Just show us a photo of you with the book or a scan of the receipt or the like, and we’ll get you set up.
Why’s it important? Well, a number of reasons. We’re at a time of transition between print and electronic, without either of those formats likely to go away, but we want to make sure local game stores are able to continue to stock our stuff and support our communities. As a publisher we’re not here to compete with retailers, we’re here to cooperate with them. Making sure that a retail store customer gets the same value from a purchase made there as they would from our online store means that we’re giving them the kind of support they need to maintain a healthy RPG presence on their shelves.
CR: Unlimited budget and no worry about sales numbers, what type of game would you design?
FH: Those are only the first concerns in getting a game to publication, but I’d LOVE to see a Terminator RPG that delivers on the promise in that premise that we saw in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
CR: What is it about the FATE system that makes it so epic?
FH: Ultimately, I think it comes down to how the aspect system gives players the power to turn clever descriptions about their characters into bold, brash, cinematic heroism.
CR: You are the driving force behind the Don’t Rest Your Head RPG. Why do you think people are so drawn to it?
FH: If there’s ANY hobby out there that’s populated with a greater number of insomniac geeks who wish they had superpowers, I couldn’t tell you what it is. So you might say that Don’t Rest Your Head is uniquely targeted to its hobby. :)
CR: How different would Don’t Rest Your Head be if crowd-funding had been around when you were developing it?
FR: Oh, gods, I would’ve been so unequipped to handle crowd-funding enthusiasm for that game. I really didn’t think I’d sell more than 30-50 copies of the thing. And if it had turned out that folks wanted hundreds, I might’ve made every bad mistake in my effort to get it out the door. Now that I AM running a Kickstarter campaign, I’m glad I had the last six years since DRYH to get ready for it.
CR: With crowd sourced funding, do you think you can still capture the same magic that you did with Don’t Rest Your Head? It seems that even with a severely limited budget you were able to produce a spot-on product.
FH:
*looks at the question*
*looks at the way the Dinocalypse Trilogy kickstarter is going*
Yes. :)
CR: Another unlimited budget and no worry about sales numbers, what other type of game would you design?
FH: Ooh! You’ve asked me this question twice, so I get to answer it a second time.
I’d grab the Amber license from the Zelazny estate (that’s only impossible) and do a new, fresh take on that setting that respects its many years of diceless heritage while reaching for a new population of players with a different approach.
CR: Spirit of the Century is a pulp superhero game, what influenced you to develop a game in what could be called an obscure genre?
FH: Rob Donoghue loved pulp at the time; I didn’t have much of a “read” on the genre outside of Indiana Jones, The Rocketeer, and The Shadow. Really, we were looking to do a game that tested out our new build of Fate and wanted a genre to fit to it that felt right for how our play with Fate tended to play out. So we sorta backed into it. Once we did, it became a sort of love-letter to White Wolf’s Adventure! and Warren Ellis’s Planetary, with a side helping of The Rocketeer.
CR: How important is the FATE system to Spirit of the Century’s success?
FH: Integral. Spirit of the Century is a fun world, but very thinly drawn. I tend to think of SotC as a nearly-pure-system product, if genre-biased … but I would, since I’m very much a gear head rather than a setting guy.
CR: Speaking of Spirit of the Century, Dinocalypse is up for crowd-funding at kickstarter, could you give our readers a quick one over the world on the product and tell them why they should contribute?
FH: I’ll let Stephen Blackmoore’s quote speak for it:
“Thrills! Chills! Stalwart heroes! Mad geniuses! A Conqueror Ape! And a whole lotta dinosaurs! Chuck Wendig’s Dinocalypse Now takes on the Golden Age of pulps and beats it at its own game.”
— Stephen Blackmoore, author of City of the Lost
That really says it all. And that’s just the first book. At the time of this interview, the full trilogy by Chuck Wendig is funded as well as two more novels by Brian Clevinger and C. E. Murphy. Harry Connolly’s may be funded soon, and Stephen Blackmoore’s will get funded as well if we reach $30k, putting our talking ape hero on Mars.
Plus, folks who are fans of ebooks can get ’em all for just $10 as part of the kickstarter. Softcover and hardcover tiers are available too.
CR: The Dresden Files RPG has torn up the RPG world, how did Evil Hat Productions get that franchise?
FH: I knew Jim Butcher before he got published. Gamed with him. Played in his Birthright campaign. When it came time to consider who to give the rights for the RPG to, he approached me. And that’s what catapulted Evil Hat from being a couple of guys tinkering around with free stuff online to being an actual commercial game company.
CR: What parts of The Dresden Files RPG were you most involved with?
FH: Layout, first and foremost. I also got my hands dirty with some of the early drafts of the non-spellcasting powers system.
CR: How did it feel when you got to hold a finished/published copy of The Dresden Files RPG: Our World?
FH: That’s the setting book, volume 2 (Your Story is volume 1, the true ‘core’ book). I think I was in shock, mainly. It was a long, hard road and it was hard to believe we’d gotten to the end of it.
CR: Last question is a free for all, feel free to talk about whatever you like (Except for that time they found you with three midgets, a freshly painted Armadillo, three tubes of modeling glue and a gross of ping-pong balls).
FH: Everyone should get a FitBit. It hacks your brain and motivates you to get off your ass. I lost weight with it after years of no loss. Big fan.
Fred Hicks
Co-President, Evil Hat Productions, LLC – www.evilhat.com
Freelance Layoutist * Game Publishing Blogger – www.deadlyfredly.com
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