Braving the apocalypse one tabletop role-playing game at a time

As bad as it looked, I felt confident that this particular band of Junior Braves would be able to survive the apocalypse.

Savannah-based painter Tafy LaPlanche, “One Chance: The Legend of Valerian's Garden” author Pete Russo, my wife Gretchen Hilmers and I gathered together one recent Thursday evening to play the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Junior Braves Survival Guide to the Apocalypse. In it, players take on the role of what are essentially Boy Scouts in everything but name, who return home from a camping trip only to realize that it’s the end of the world.

Tafy was playing Kip Bay, according to the game’s rules a “Honcho,” or leader-type character, while Pete took on the role of the “Jock,” a karate-enthusiast named Cole McMitchell. Gretchen, meanwhile, went with the “Rebel” trope, proclaiming that she was going to be imagining her character Siouxie as a Girl Scout version of her 15-year-old goth self. As for me, my part to play was as “The Guide,” the person who describes the scenes and calls for dice rolls when the rules demand them. It was also my responsibility to portray “Grease,” the Tribe Master of the troupe, a haggard mechanic whose abilities leading the kids left much to be desired.

By the end of our first session of gameplay, the character’s car had crashed, Grease was taken by mysterious horrors, and they found themselves trudging through thick snow without shelter. It didn’t look good.

I was, however, optimistic: Thanks to a pair of real-life writers and a SCAD grad, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen the Junior Braves in trouble.

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The beginning of the end

The role-playing game Junior Braves Survival Guide to the Apocalypse is actually based on the similarly titled Junior Braves of the Apocalypse series of graphic novels, the first volume of which was released in 2015, five years before the game. The origins of the story, however, written by Greg Smith and Michael Tanner, and illustrated by SCAD Sequential Art Master’s program graduate Zach Lehner, began much earlier.

In 2010, Tanner was working as a writer and roller derby referee in Los Angeles, collaborating with Smith, who was living in the Pacific Northwest, via telephone and Xbox Live chat. The two had met years before in a “Page to Stage” class at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and had become fast friends due to their mutual love of retro action figures and video games. Since that time they had published a few things both together and individually, including Tanner’s story for the graphic novel anthology "Jam! Tales From the World of Roller Derby” by Oni Press.

In a fortuitous coincidence, the lead photographer of LA Derby Dolls, Charlie Chu, whom Tanner knew from his work at the track, got a job at the very same Oni Press as a senior editor. Learning that Tanner was a writer and had done work for his new employers before, Chu asked for a few pitches that he could take with him. Tanner ended up telling Smith about it, and the pair began sharing ideas. That’s when the Junior Braves seed was planted.

“I was in the car with Charlie, I think we were on our way to Vegas for the roller derby convention, [and I] get a text from Greg which just reads, ‘Boy Scouts go on a camping trip, while they’re away the apocalypse happens.’” Tanner recalled with a smile. “That’s it.”

“And I read it out loud to Charlie, and [Charlie’s] like, ‘That’s amazing. Write that up as a pitch and pitch it to me.’” Tanner went on to say. “So, as soon as we got back, Greg and I got to work.”

Having secured Smith and Tanner as writers, Chu and Oni Press needed to find an artist to bring their vision to life. He ended up reaching out to several potential illustrators, including Lehner.

“I was writing my thesis, and I had my thesis project in front of me, and I get this email from Charlie, who I had never met.” Lehner recalled, noting that he’d submitted to Oni Press a few times previously over the years and was therefore familiar with the publisher. “And Charlie said like, ‘Hey, I‘m looking for people to try this thing out. We’re tapping you as somebody to try out for this job. Can I send you a little six page spec script?’”

“I pivoted my thesis project completely,” Lehner laughed. “I basically told all my teachers I’m doing this now.”

Focused and determined, the young artist dove in wholeheartedly, and ended up being the first to complete his test pages. Lehner also let it “slip,” he said with a devilish grin, that he’d been an Eagle Scout, something which really resonated with Smith.

“As a fellow Eagle Scout, I was like, well, this guy might have something to really offer up,” he remembered thinking at the time. “For us, as we go through this, I think we’re gonna be in the same mind frame on things. I know Mike [Tanner] was in Scouts. [That] we all had these types of things we went through with different kids we met and knew through Scouts, would really make these characters stand out and be a lot more memorable, than working with somebody whose like, ‘Um, I guess there’s a character like that…’”

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'A Brave is brave'

The creative team in place, the trio spent the next several years writing and making art, bringing to life Tribe 65’s journey through the end of the world. Smith’s foresight about Lehner’s potential contributions to the project as a former Boy Scout proved to be true and, while he didn’t have the same personal connections to each other that the college buddies did, Lehner ended up becoming a true partner on the project, using his artwork to act as the third storyteller.

“There’s no better or more exciting feeling [than] when art comes in and you look at it and you’re like, ‘god-damn, this is good!’” Tanner proclaimed, noting that if the art Lehner submitted “wasn’t how I pictured it; it was better on the page.”

“That’s the great thing about a good relationship between writers and artists,” he added.

During this period, Boy Scouts became Junior Braves for legal reasons, a name change that allowed the creators to more directly explore the uncomfortable and, at times racist, cultural appropriation entrenched in the Scouts history.

“Growing up in Montana, our Cub Scout group, and Boy Scouts by extension, uses a lot of indigenous people fakery,” Tanner acknowledged. “Even at the time, I remember as a kid [thinking], ‘This is suspect.’ So, we wanted to be able to play with this appropriation of something that on some level is seen as very innocent, but is also just weird at its base level.”

“It was a way to really kind of address some of the problems with the way that youth organizations can take other [culture’s] stuff and get it wrong, or just appropriate it for their own uses,” he added.

They also fleshed out and added Johnny Redclay, a First Nations member of the Junior Braves, to the already diverse collection of protagonists. Johnny’s personal quest for his father throughout the first two volumes would allow a lot of opportunity for the writers to speak to these issues.

“We need this character to call out these things,” Smith, who has a bit of Native American blood himself through his grandfather’s side of the family, “[to] make a point that this is a lot of B.S..”

Finally, five years after first signing on to the the project, the graphic novel "Junior Braves of the Apocalypse Book One" was released on July 8, 2015.

“Oni [Press] was super-hyped for this series,” Tanner described. “We had a huge banner at San Diego Comic Con!”

They also had a 24-page preview edition released for the popular Free Comic Book Day in 2016, and the graphic novel was a hit to audiences both young and old.

Tanner recalled a moment at Rose City Comic Con in Portland, Oregon, the year after the first volume had come out when a couple cosplaying as Ash from the Evil Dead and Morticia Addams came up to the Junior Braves of the Apocalypse booth. He and Smith gave them their pitch, and the couple ultimately purchased the book, noting that they thought their daughter would like it. The next day the two came back, this time accompanied by their little one, who was dressed as Wednesday Addams.

Other tribes’ tales

The second book of Junior Braves of the Apocalypse was released two years later in August 2018, this time with less fanfare but, in this writer’s opinion, with even better art and an ever more compelling storyline.

Then, in 2020, Oni Press, in collaboration Renegade Game Studios and Hunters Entertainment, released “Junior Braves Survival Guide to the Apocalypse” by GremlinLegions, the TTRPG that would ultimately be my introduction to the world that Smith, Tanner and Lehner had created. The roots of the game, however, go back much further, to long before the game’s creator had the connections to make it a reality.

Michael “Mike” Wight, known online and in the gaming community by his aforementioned nom de plume GremlinLegions, first met Greg Smith via Smith’s wife Anne when she was his manager at Suncoast Video in Vancover, Washington. This was years before Junior Braves had even been conceived of, so by the time Greg told Mike that the graphic novel was going to be published, they’d already become close friends. It was at a barbecue hosted by Wight in the early 2010s, and Wight immediately knew that he needed to turn it into the TTRPG that I’d be playing years later.

“I remember us talking, ‘If you ever get this graphic novel published, sure, I’ll make a game based on it,’” Wight recalled. “We all kind of laughed. Then, his graphic novel got published.”

“[Wight] was like, ‘Oh, man, this sounds like a great idea!’” Smith related, joking that Wight essentially took him hostage to build the RPG. ‘Well, you’re staying here tonight, because I’m not letting you go home,’” He recalled Wight saying, “‘You’re hanging out with me and we’re gonna make this game.’”

Once completed, what qualified as the game’s rules were put into a drawer. Then, through yet another fortuitous coincidence, Steve Ellis, Wight’s former boss at Rainy Day Games in Portland, Oregon, became the go-between for Oni Press and Renegade Games. They were looking to turn an established intellectual property (IP) into a game using their popular Kids on Bikes roleplaying game system, and Ellis tapped Wight as the potential person to design that new game. He brought a stack of books they were considering adapting to Wight, a stack that happened to include Book One of Junior Braves of the Apocalypse.

That’s when the the nearly forgotten game that Smith and Wight had created years early re-emerged. Reaching into his desk, Wight pulled out the manuscript and handed it to Ellis.

“I (A), play Kids on Bikes, and (B), know the person who wrote this graphic novel,” he recalled telling his boss at the time.

Ellis was impressed and soon after, Wight was officially put on the project.

“The Kids on Bikes system lended itself well to the themes presented in Junior Braves of the Apocalypse,' Wight said. “You’re playing kids who are in over their heads a lot of the time, and the idea that you’re living in a town where you can get from one side of the town to the other on your bike.”

The process took about two years to complete, and included frequent correspondence with the creators of Kids on Bikes as well as with Smith, who acted as the sort of “lore master” of the fictional universe. The resulting game is one in which players can make their way through stories similar to those told in the books, or tales that go in completely different directions like I and my friends did, while remaining true to the source material.

“There was a lot of talking with Greg particularly about other aspects of the Junior Braves story and world," Wight noted, since the TTRPG setting needed to be more expansive than that of the graphic novel. “That in turn apparently also affecting some of the ideas that they were writing.”

Future Braves

It’s been almost three years since the role-playing game was released, and nearly five years since the second graphic novel came out. The initial contract among Smith, Tanner, Lehner and Oni Press was for five books, but things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to in the comic book world. Charlie Chu, who brought Junior Braves to the company, left the company in June 2022, and there are NDA-protected details to be worked out before any additional volumes can be expected.

In many ways, the situation that the three creatives are facing isn’t dissimilar to the difficulties that writers and artists everywhere are facing.

“[Graphic novels] take time, and you have to be able to live while you’re doing it,” Lehner said.

“Braves for all three of us was the big break thing,” he continued. “I graduated into the recession; I wasn’t getting any other work. I needed a job. Those five years [since the release of the second book] I tried, but at a certain point you gotta find a way to make a living, and I took full-time day job work.”

Smith and Tanner, too, have since taken on other work, albeit in the comic world, putting Junior Braves on the back burner. Smith has been collaborating on the Starlite series with artist Brett Weldele, also a SCAD graduate, while Tanner was been writing another project for Oni Press called Orcs in Space.

They’ve also had to contend with occasional bouts of disillusionment and burnout, a trend in the comics industry recently highlighted through the hashtag #comicsbrokeme going viral after the death of yet another SCAD grad, one of Lehner’s classmates, Invader Zim/Adventure Time illustrator Ian McGinty.

“It’s a very hard reality,” Tanner said, “There’s no easy fix. There’s no money to pay people more for the most part. It’s a complicated issue that a lot of artists, in general, face. It is a barrier for people being able to create and make a living off it.”

On the role-playing side of things, Wight described the response to his game as “muted,” although he says he didn’t go into the project with the “hope of becoming the next RPG superstar.” In fact, he ended up giving away all of the money he earned from the game to help others make games.

“My store has something called Fresh Games, where people prototype their own games and test them out and work on them to make them publishable,” he explained. “So I ran a thing called the Gremlin Game Design Contest, where I said, ‘Here’s these random little bags of just components that I’ve scavenged from dozens of different board games. Make something out of it.’ And so I gave them a month and a half, they brought in their game designs, and I gave out pretty much my entire royalties plus a little bit more as prizes for them.”

“I just like having a community I can do this stuff with,” he added, confirming that future additions to the role-playing game universe will come exclusively from those like me who are out in the world playing the game.

All this being said, however, Smith, Tanner, and Lehner do anticipate that the third volume of Junior Braves of the Apocalypse will eventually be released: Much of the book is already completed, with Lehner proclaiming his artwork to be “the best stuff he’s ever done.” As a fan of the material, I’m personally hoping for at least one more, given the massive cliffhanger that the latest release left readers dangling from.

But in the comics industry things move slowly, even when it’s the end of the world.

“When we signed our editor Charlie Chu was like, ‘Guys this is the beginning of the next 15 years of your life.’” Smith recalled. “And we looked at him like, ‘You’re crazy!’ Lo and behold, here we are.”

Both Junior Braves of the Apocalypse graphic novels and the role-playing game Junior Brave Survival Guide to the Apocalypse can be found at most online retailers, as well as in select comic, book, and game shops. Find Greg Smith’s Starlite at starlitecomicbook.com. Michael Tanner’s Orcs in Space can be purchased via the Oni Press website at onipress.com.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah Ga role playing Junior Braves Survival Guide to Apocalypse