Sidequest: Every TTRPG Played 31-40

Many, many moons ago, when I wasn't distracted by work, conventions, and other goings on in life, I started a series of blogposts listing every tabletop roleplaying game I've ever played - inspired by a post over where the skies are blue (BlueSky) by Kieron Gillen. 

I've tried to list them in some sort of chronological order. If you want to catch up, you can find the previous posts here:

Every TTRPG I've Played 1-10

Every TTRPG I've Played 11-20

Every TTRPG I've Played 21-30

So, without further ado, let's move on to 31-40!!

31) Buffy The Vampire Slayer / Angel

Cover of Eden Studios's Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG

Oh man, where to begin with this one. I was a MASSIVE Buffy fan, so when I started doing a little work for Eden Studios and they said they'd got the Buffy and Angel licenses, I was completely ecstatic. I did some editing assisting on the Slayer's Handbook and Monster Smackdown, and got really into rewatching episodes and trying to map out locations for the unreleased Welcome to Sunnydale. 

The Buffy RPG was brilliant, still is, and a real inspiration for many games I worked on. The way CJ Carella baked in the mechanic that you had to weaken the vampires before you attempted the staking move, made it feel like the series, having a cool fight before dusting them.

Still in my Top 5 RPGs of all time in my books.

32) Deadlands

Cover of classic Deadlands RPG by Pinnacle

Played a few games of Deadlands, and they were great fun. I played one of those magic-slinging types with the cards, and it was a really cool the way the game integrated using cards, poker chips, and dice. Really gave you a great feel like you're in the Old West. 

33) Terra Primate

Cover of Terra Primate by Eden Studios

While I'd been doing some editing and stuff for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and All Flesh Must Be Eaten, my first real writing and developing work was for Eden Studios again. I'd suggested some All Flesh Must Be Eaten supplements, but George suggested a helped out with a project they had been working on called Terra Primate. The text for the settings was all done, it just needed the rules plugging in and converting from AFMBE, and testing... Had to be play tested, of course!

I never realised there were so many options for 'Planet of the Apes' style games.

34) Farscape

The cover of the Farscape RPG from AEG

Ah, it was back in the days when D20 was an open license and everyone was making games using the D20 system. Again, if ever there was a game that shouldn't be D20, it was Farscape. Man, I love Farscape. It was a weird series... everyone kept telling me I should watch it, I tried the first episode when it aired and it didn't really do anything for me, but I caught the two-parter of the end of season one/start of season two, and wondered what I was missing. I immediately bought the DVDs, caught up, and was really hooked.

When AEG (back when they used to do RPGs) announced they were doing Farscape, and wanted playtesters, I signed up. I had pages of feedback for them... pages... and then the playtesting stopped, and we heard nothing more until the game came out. Haven't played it since those playtests, but it sits on my shelf as a reminder of what could have been. 

35) GURPS/Hellboy

Deluxe limited edition of the first Hellboy RPG, powered by GURPS

Back when we had the 'RPG Reading Group' at the bookstore I worked at, the first RPG of Hellboy appeared. I loved the comics, so was excited to check out the game. However, again, it was another licensed property that I thought had a game system that didn't work for it. I'm sure it was fine, but GURPS didn't do anything for me. Sorry. We did a session as part of the group, it was fun, but... that was it. Sits on my shelf with the other limited edition books and the Hellboy collection. 

36) Conspiracy X 2.0

Cover of Conspiracy X 2.0 from Eden Studios

I've mentioned so many times on this blog how I have always been obsessed with The X-Files, and I loved the first edition of Conspiracy X. However, the game system just didn't do it for me. I'm sorry. I know there were loads of First Edition Conspiracy X fans out there who were dedicated to the system, but it just felt odd that it was the only game that Eden produced that wasn't Unisystem. I pitched a conversion to George, and in a completely unhealthy way to deal with a loss in the family, I immersed myself in converting the game for a year. 

Once again, playtesting was the key here, and a few sessions playing through some of the classic ConX scenarios. One was incredibly helpful in fixing a rule or two if I remember correctly. Really cool.

37) Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space / The Roleplaying Game

Cover of the first edition box set of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space by Cubicle 7 Games

I've talked about the Doctor Who RPG many times on my blog as well – how Chris Birch was in touch after Conspiracy X 2.0 came out, how we chatted about getting new people gaming, and how he knew people at the BBC. One thing lead to another and I developed the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG, which later became simply Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game. 

Sounding a bit like a stuck record, this was playtesting again, making sure the game system worked. I ran a couple of tiny system tests, but the bulk of the playtesting game from the volunteer groups, and they helped shape it into the flexible game it is. 

38) Fiasco

Cover of Fiasco from Bully Pulpit Games

It's not all playtesting! We played a couple of one-shots of Fiasco as well with some friends. I can't remember too much about it — it was a scenario on a space station if I remember correctly. A murder mystery, may have involved aliens, certainly involved crawling around in air ducts. It's really interesting to play something quite so improv. It's quite freeing. Sometimes you need to try different games to experience new systems and ways of playing. 

39) Star Wars (Fantasy Flight Games)

Cover of the Force and Destiny Core Rulebook for FFG's Star Wars RPG

Yeah, I know, it has weird dice. But those weird dice produced some seriously epic moments. We played a lot of Star Wars – one campaign was a cool one where we played Padawan Jedi, during the Clone Wars and mid-mission, Order 66 happened and we had to go into hiding, start a resistance unit, join the rebellion, and take down as many of them as we could. There were some awesome moments, one involved riding a crashing Aethersprite then jumping off and landing on an AT-TE and lightsabering my way in. Of course, every time Vader turned up, we ran away. That was genuinely terrifying.

We also played games as troopers who switched sides, pirates, engineers, and smugglers. I can't remember a session of it that wasn't a complete blast. Our only gripe was we could do all these cool things, and do epic stunts, but when we had to jump over a gap we just kept failing. Typical!

40) Tales From The Loop / Things From The Flood / Mutant Year Zero

The cover of the Tales from the Loop RPG by Fria Ligan (Free League)

This one's really three-in-one, but it'll make sense. First of all, I have to state that I LOVE Tales From The Loop. Really cool, gorgeous art that inspired the game. Simple system on a minimal amount of pages. It just oozes weird sci-fi alternate 80s. I love the setting, really like the system, and then, to top it off, the campaign we played was flippin' epic.

We played as teenagers in the 80s in Great Yarmouth, close to the East Anglia Loop system. We discovered wacky time travel goings on, strange robots, and creatures as expected in a Loop game. And then, things progressed. We moved into the setting's sister game, Things From The Flood, as we grew up a bit and became older teens. Weirder things were happening at the Loop, and we failed to stop it happening. Something exploded, and the area was irradiated, and we moved the game into Mutant Year Zero. Setting up a sanctuary on the pier, we investigated what was happening, and faced the worst evil – my character's mother, mutated into a strange spider creature. We finally discovered what was at the heart of it all, and how to fix it, using weird occurrences in the Loop facility to time travel back to the 80s to prevent the disaster. We reset the timeline, and saved the county. 

Epic. 

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I think a couple more of these and I'll be up to date! Stay tuned, and stay multi-classy!

[Roll Your Own Life] The TV That Shaped Me (Part 7)

Farscape (1999-2004 (including The Peacekeeper Wars))

Number 7, chronologically, of my ten series that had a massive impact on me, is another one I came to a little late. Don't get me wrong, I watch SF series all the time, and there was a real shortage of them for a long while, but when Farscape first aired in the UK in November 1999 all the promotion was on the fact that the Henson Company was behind it. Frell, the review in The Guardian had the headline "Muppets in Space", and that was a big problem. The other was the BBC2 6:30pm timeslot where the BBC always shoved its genre shows - Buffy included. It was edited (though not enough, there were complaints apparently) and tucked away at a time when I really didn't get chance to watch it.

I tried the first episode, but it was tea-time, and I guess I wasn't paying much attention and it slipped away under my radar for a while. But I remember a friend of ours, Mark, saying "Why aren't you watching Farscape?" and I honestly didn't have an answer. "You should watch it, it's amazing."

The BBC was still on its first season, and I thought I'd give it another go to see what I'd been missing. If Mark said it was good, I had better give it a try. The episode that week was Hidden Memory (S1ep20) when lead guy was being tortured for information and the other characters infiltrate a base to rescue him. And I had no idea who was who, but it was frelling awesome.

He was right. Why wasn't I watching Farscape?

My Farscape DVDs... oooh, time for a rewatch!

So, I started buying the DVDs. They brought them out in weird sets of two disks with four episodes, and I had the chance to start catching up on what I had been missing.

And I was missing out on loads.

I'm sure you know the story now, John Crichton experiments in his little spaceship "Farscape One" on the edges of Earth's atmosphere and ends up being catapulted across the galaxy through a wormhole and getting picked up by a living prison ship, Moya, and the bunch of escaped prisoners on board.

It's the usual "person from Earth ends up somewhere new in space" that you'd expect, along with a very Blake's 7 take on escaped prisoners stealing a ship and escaping a militaristic force of leather clad humans (sorry, Sebaceans) called Peacekeepers (who act a bit like Blake's 7's Federation). The Peacekeepers hunt them, and Crichton for the information about wormholes in his head, and they go on many adventures...

Only it goes to really, really bizarre extremes. Evil bondage-Vader "Scorpius" implants a version of himself into Crichton's head (who Crichton nicknames Harvey after the imaginary rabbit), Crichton is cloned - a work of genius that allows the sexual tension to be resolved between Crichton and Aeryn, and get reset without the Moonlighting problem. They reverse the "Stranger in a Strange Land" of Crichton being surrounded by aliens in space, by bringing the crew to Earth to warn them of the imminent arrival of hostile forces. There's even a weird animated bit where Crichton imagines himself in WB style cartoons.

The cast changes slightly and characters come and go, but there are no bad characters (Crais probably being my least favourite) and the villains are great. Henson's practical effects for the aliens mean it hasn't aged badly (sorry, looking at you Babylon 5. I love you, but the CGI does look dated now).

And, like all good things, it came to a very abrupt end at the season four finale. And what a season ending. As Crichton and Aeryn agree to get married, they are shot by an alien craft and collapse into little cubes that fall apart...

Frell. That ending punched you right in the mivonks.

Luckily, we were saved from being left there by a two part miniseries "The Peacekeeper Wars" which wrapped everything up and resolved all of the storylines (just about) in another emotional and gut-wrenching three hours.

It was awesome. Loved it, and I can't believe I wasn't on board right from the start.

When season three came out on DVD they did some brilliant limited collectors sets - each came with prints, and cool extra things like an IASA watch, comm badge, and more. I think it's one of the few times I had things on preorder at my local HMV as I didn't want to miss out on them.

When they announced a Farscape RPG I was right there when they needed playtesters. But alas, it was just as everything was D20, and there were some major omissions (I remember pointing out that Luxan injuries needed to be hit or squeezed until the blood runs clear). There was a weird moment when all the playtesting stopped abruptly and then a few months later it came out. Gorgeous book, lovely graphic design, the fixes we pointed out were done, but I wasn't a big fan of D20 so it's kinda just sat on my shelf ever since (much like the complete collection of the D20 Stargate SG-1 RPG). Shame...

Ho well. I still love Farscape, and started a rewatch about a year ago (that I haven't finished yet). May have to go back to it!

Frell, if you loved Guardians of the Galaxy and haven't seen Farscape, you seriously need to check it out...