Sidequest: Every TTRPG played 11-20

Well, it's been one of those months again. In such a funk, and kinda down, that I can't really think of anything exciting to add to my blog. It's a good job I've got these ridiculous posts listing things to keep me moderately occupied, rather than just staring into the void. 

So, to continue from the previous post, Kieron Gillen inspired me to list every tabletop roleplaying game I've played. I did the first ten in sort-of chronological order starting with those first games I ever played. Lets see how bad my memory is as continuing the list from 11-20...

#11 - The Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG

Cover of TSR's Adventures of Indiana Jones game

I know, the much maligned Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG from TSR. I freakin' loved this game. Not as free and easy as you may think, involving lots of tables and weird slide-rule thingy, along with lots of cool cardstock miniatures and 3D models. I bought everything you could get for Indiana Jones, and I loved it. I even made a video about it last year. 

Loved it. Wish there was a new version so we can explore, adventure, and punch more Nazis. 

#12 - Warhammer Fantasy (1st Edition)

Cover of the old white box Warhammer RPG

Another game bought by one of our regular players wanting to run something different to AD&D. We should have realised it was going to be very different by the name - Warhammer: The Mass Combat Fantasy Role-Playing Game. It really was quick, brutal, and our characters died very, very quickly. I don't think we got many games in, but after the GM moved to the other side of the world, that boxed set now sits on my shelves.

#13 - Golden Heroes

Cover of the Golden Heroes RPG

Next on the list is possibly our first foray into superhero gaming. We didn't do an awful lot of supers stuff, and when we played Golden Heroes it was just after I'd read Watchmen so we played with powerless vigilante characters rather than having proper 'super powers'. It was pretty cool, but the superhero Odyssey game we played later was better - not because of the game, Golden Heroes is still great, but just because someone else was GMing rather than me and they did a better job. I'm sure it'll come up in a later post...

#14 - Paranoia

Cover of the West End Games Paranoia RPG, 
published as a hardcover in the UK by Games Workshop!

Next is something a little different. Wasn't sure what I was getting into when I started running Paranoia, but it was madness and we loved it. Played all the weird adventures from the time, like HIL-Sector Blues, and Clones in Space. Heck, I even bought those Citadel miniatures and did an awful job of painting them.

#15 - Twilight: 2000

Cover of the original edition of Twilight: 2000

It was the Eighties, and (as you'll see by another later entry) things were a bit tense when it came to international relations. Good thing we sorted that out after all these years! (sarcasm) But, yes, we had a go at Twilight:2000. I don't remember much of it, just creating some characters and wandering around the roads near Krakow. I don't think we played very much of it. 

#16 - Doctor Who The Roleplaying Game (FASA)

Cover of the FASA 2nd edition of the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game

Much like the old FASA Star Trek, we also played the FASA edition of the Doctor Who RPG. We were lucky to have a GM who was not only our Call of Cthulhu keeper, but also a massive Doctor Who fan who knew his stuff. Being a fan of the creepy Hinchcliffe and Holmes era of Tom Baker's run, he ensured the game played like a spooky Cthulhu adventure, with our resident Time Lord, the Collector, strangely absent most of the time (the player hardly ever turned up). 

#17 - Judge Dredd the Roleplaying Game (GW)

Cover of the original Dredd RPG

As mentioned in an earlier post, I'd been reading 2000AD since issue #2, the first appearance of Judge Dredd, and most of us in the gaming group read it to some extent. It was inevitable that we'd play the Dredd RPG. We played a handful of games, engaged in a Block War or two. I'd love to see a new edition soon - I must admit, I'd love to see a TV series done like The Rookie but only with MegaCity Judges...

#18 - Odyssey

Image from the movie ALIENS

Okay, home-brew time. This wasn't just your average home-brew, this was Pete's most epic RPG, taking up a chunky ring-binder of rules. Taking elements from RuneQuest and turning the volume up, Odyssey was Pete's generic RPG to work in any time and any genre. I remember he said "I've a murder mystery RPG to test" and we all joined in on this simple game of regular people who had won a prize to go on a cruise. We thought it was going to be a murder mystery, and then *RUG PULL* the ship sank and we were washed up on a desert island, with superpowers. Inspired by the old Elementals comic, we played the heck out of that. 

However, Odyssey really came into its own when we started using the system to play Colonial Marines in the ALIEN universe. The encumbrance system was genius, and I remember this frantic run for the drop ship and shedding my smart gun to speed up so we could escape the nuclear blast of the terraforming plant exploding. He also ran a brilliant game where one of the players was a villain, working to sabotage the plans for his own benefit. Lots of note passing to the GM, and it was only when combat started and the dice rolls started matching up did they realise who was shooting at them. Decades before Free League's game of marines and hidden agendas, Pete was doing it in the 80s. Brilliant stuff.

#19 - Ghostbusters

Cover of the legendary Ghostbusters RPG by West End Games

Here we come to one of my favourite games of all time - West End Games' Ghostbusters Roleplaying Game. You wouldn't believe how much I love this game. I've written at length about how reading this game made me want to be a game writer and designer. It's just a joy to read, brilliantly simple, and based on one of my favourite movies and franchises. How could I not love it? We played so much of this, so much that the Ghost on my Ghost-Die started to wear off. 

Again, I'd love to see a new Ghostbusters RPG - especially as the D6 system that powers it has returned recently in the Carbon Grey and Planet of the Apes RPGs. If anyone at Ghostcorps is listening, you know who to call. 

Here's a link to another video I made!! 

#20 - James Bond 007 Roleplaying Game

The Victory Games RPG of James Bond 007

Finally for this batch, here's another one of my favourite RPGs of all time. Victory Games' official James Bond 007 RPG. Amazing game, with some brilliant and revolutionary mechanics, and some of the most amazing presentation (especially for the adventures). Absolutely love this game. 

I'm going to sound like a stuck record, but again I'd love to see a new version of a Bond RPG (who knows, it may happen now the Amazon deal has happened - I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they honour such a legacy). And, again, here's a video I recorded if you want to check out what the game looks like. 

We played a heck of a lot of this too, and I ran a couple of the adventures multiple times for different groups, each with very different outcomes. Awesome.

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That's it for this batch. We're getting close to the 'break' I had from gaming, and I'm keeping track of games I've bought and not yet played, just in case I wanted to do a Sidequest of the Sidequest!! 

Until next time, stay multi-classy. 

Six of Eight

...and half a dozen of the other.

It had been a while since I'd returned up to my home town. The last time was a brief day there and back to bear witness to my mum's ashes being interred at their final resting place, but I thought I'd head back, see my sisters and catch up with some of my old gaming friends.

After an excellent time catching up with my sisters, reminiscing about old times, I headed through to one of the larger towns to meet with six of The Eight, my old roleplaying group.

While chatting to my sisters, one of them asked what the plans were for the evening. One even asked if we'd be playing Dungeons and Dragons. I guess most people would be offended and say "Nooo, not any more!", but in my case I just cursed - if we'd only thought about it, given them more warning, we COULD have been playing D&D for the evening. Just like old times... How stupid of me for not suggesting it.

However, the original plan was going to be get some pop in, and biscuits, and have a good catch up and talk about how life was treating us. At least, that was the original plan.

The plan quickly changed, and soon we were heading to the pub. A pub I'd not been in for over twenty years. One with a particularly apt name considering our D&D roots - The Green Dragon.

Us in the Green Dragon (click to embiggen!)
(L-R: Bragi, JR, Milo, Coop, Fordy, me)

So here we are, in The Green Dragon, Bragi, JR, Milo, Coop, Fordy, and myself (excuse using the nicknames, they're designed to protect the innocent). Many beers were quaffed, food was devoured, and I tried to keep up with their drinking matching them with pints of cola (a really bad idea in most cases).

As the evening progressed, as always, gaming came up in conversation again. 

Fordy pointed out (much as my lovely wife and I had discussed last year) that gaming seems to produce stronger bonds of friendship than any other we'd had. He agreed that it was almost like the comrade-re that is found on the battlefield, when soldiers bond in times of war. It is just that our times of war were marching through dungeons and battling orcs and goblins rather than any real threat.

We chatted about games, and again, Fordy pointed out something we'd not really considered about our old gaming. While we played a lot of roleplaying games as kids, we never really roleplayed. At least, not until later in life. Our characters were just glorified versions of ourselves, a way to escape reality and to do something more interesting with our lives, rather than just go to school, or look for work. These versions of us did cool things, like battling monsters, or fighting off alien invaders. They didn't really stretch our abilities to try to be someone else entirely. It wasn't until we'd matured a bit, and usually in later games apart from The Eight that we sampled the scope of roleplaying games, and how we didn't have to just be us. How we could be anything else. Do something different. Play at being someone new.

Fordy suggested that the only one of us who actually tried to be anything different was Mole. Mole's characters were slightly frustrating as they were usually sneaky, backstabbing, anti-heroes who may just as well sell the whole group out or kill them in their sleep than blindly following the plot of the adventure. While at the time we may have dismissed it as "Oh, it's just Mole trying to kill me again," he was the one who wanted to try something different. Mole's not a sneaky person. He certainly didn't want to kill us in our sleep. But he stretched the scope of the game, and we were too blind to see it at the time.

While you may be on the other side of the planet, Mole, hats off to you (if I was wearing a hat, at least) for trying to show us what this roleplaying stuff was all about.

More beer was consumed, the evil looking concoction called a Jaeger-bomb was revealed, and I kept drinking my colas. The conversation turned to "What was your best gaming experience, as a GM and as a player?"

As the sober one, I sat and listened. It was fascinating to hear these tales of the old games, and what made them so special. I just should have videoed the whole thing, it would have made a great (if slightly drunken) vid-blog. Conversation turned to something else (probably motorbikes or cars or something) before I had answered. So, a little later than everyone else, here's my answer. 

My best gaming experience as a player:

Probably Marines Odyssey. Odyssey was a home created system that Pete designed, which felt a bit like a faster version of BRP (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu). Pete ran many games of different genres using that system, but for me, the Colonial Marines game we played, based upon the setting from Alien/Aliens was possibly the best. I wrote a blog post about it a little while back. 

Using the same system, and set in the same universe, we did another SF game with a bunch of pre-gen characters that Pete provided. It felt a bit like a murder mystery in space, with a crashed ship, a hole in the ground, and someone picking off the characters one by one. In my head it looks like LV421 meets Pitch Black (during the eclipses) and it was gripping. Mostly because about half way through the game, Pete started handing me notes under the table. The thing that was taking out the characters was me. My character was the villain, and I'd started writing notes discretely back, reveling in this new-found villaindom to think up new and interesting ways to kill off the rest of the group and to make it look like an accident. This was possibly the closest I came to really "roleplaying" with the old group, and it opened my eyes to the potential of the games that could be run, when I was just making crap up as I went along in my GM'd games. 

My best gaming experience as a GameMaster:

That would have to be Mage. Or at least the Mage: The Ascension game I was running that became Kult. While I don't think I'd progressed much as a GM (I was still making huge chunks up as I went along), I think it was purely down to the players I had at the time. Stoo, Edge, Tetch and Debs made a great team who created real characters who were such individuals, so independently minded, that I hardly had to do anything. They'd start the game, they knew what their characters would want to be doing, and they'd go and do it. It was almost freeform storytelling. Debs' character was an evil little self-centred Goth, while Edge's hippy chick character died early on but continued on as a ghost. It was thrilling, exciting, and every session was a surprise. I'd warn them at the beginning of each session "I don't really have anything prepared" but by the end we were hanging on each other's every word, waiting so see what madness and horrors would come next. Awesome stuff.

Anyway, that was my brief journey back home. 

Maybe next time I'm back I'll try to get a game going.

Funnily enough, tonight I was supposed to be at a game - my first in nearly two years - but it has had to be delayed until next week. It'll be an odd experience getting back into the swing of it all again, maybe just what my game-writing needs.

Until next time, stay multiclassy!!

Roll Your Own Life (11) - They Mostly Game at Night... Mostly...

If I continued writing about my history of "life" in gaming, I'd be reaching what I sometimes call the "long dark teatime of gaming" when I really didn't do anything at all. I didn't game, didn't write, I just became a self-absorbed misery and tried to do college stuff and desperately try to get a member of the opposite sex to see me as more than "just a friend".

I'm going to skip that game-less era, and head straight onto the "Second Renaissance" of my gaming, but that'll be next post.

Before I move on though, I want to mention a particularly influential movie and the amazing game that it spawned.

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Back in the mid-late 80's, right through to the end of the decade, we had a regular tradition at our house which was "Friday Night Videos!" Basically, we hired a movie from what was our local video rental store (Dixons) and we took over the living room at my mum and dad's and we watched a movie. My folks were usually out until the mid-evening, and they hid in the bedroom until the movie finished, but every now and then we'd hire something that my folks were interested in and one or both of them would join us.

For some reason my dad thought that watching "The Terminator" was a great idea (which caused a slight awkwardness at the Reese / Sarah Connor love scene), but we all agreed (my dad included) that it was awesome. It wasn't my mum's cup of tea, but it didn't stop my dad describing the most violent and gruesome moments to her with a giggle of enthusiasm.

Aliens - What are you looking at Burke?

James Cameron was the new god, and when we first saw the trailer and making of documentary for his sequel to Alien, the Eight were all pretty keen.

I think I saw Aliens about three or four times at the cinema in the end. It was the first 18 certificate film I saw at the cinema, and I managed to see it with various members of the Eight at different times. Even today, Aliens is still awesome, and we can all recite most of the lines word for word.


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Bill Willingham's ELEMENTALS

Meanwhile, as I mentioned briefly in the previous post, Pete had created his own game system called Odyssey. I don't really have much recollection of the system - Pete has mentioned that it was a 2D10 system, and I do remember having skills over 100% which allowed you to do extra actions. That's about all I can remember. But the real test for any game is whether you remember the system (and its faults and interruptions) or whether you remember the games themselves. And Odyssey certainly produced some of the most memorable games I'd ever experienced as a player.

What started as a more realistic and authentic RuneQuest style game proved that it could be used for any genre when Pete decided to use the system to run a superhero style game based on Bill Willingham's "Elementals" comics (published by Comico).

But the game really came into its own when Pete decided we'd play as Colonial Marines in the Aliens universe.

Most of us were troops. JR showed his natural born leadership skills by being the Gorman of the group, remaining in the APC and watching us all balls-it-up through our helmet cameras. I thought Vasquez was the coolest, so I played a similar character. A short, stocky, and hard-as-nails female Smart-Gunner.

Aliens. We were not as smart as these Marines...

Pete had predicted the similar space-colony background that would form the Spartans in the Halo-verse, having our group of marines being sent out to outlying colonies to quash resistance elements and rebels. The Smart Gun was rationalised, and made super cool with a really efficient tracking system, firing punched disks (rapidly bashed into a sharp cone of armour piercing metal) which made the ammo carrying easier. But it was the encumbrance rules that really stick in the mind.

I have very vivid memories of the colony's terraforming reactor being overloaded and damaged, about to cause a huge nuclear explosion (I think part of the damage may have been from stray gunfire, I'm not sure). We'd stopped the rebels, but the explosion was imminent and the squad had to run the 5k back to the dropship as our APC had been taken out, before the nuclear explosion wiped us off the planet. The encumbrance rules really added to the tension, as we realised we were never going to make it to safety without dropping all of our guns and equipment.

The later games had us encountering the xenomorphs from the movies, and we had a great one shot with different characters where each member of the party was taken out by an unseen force (that was revealed to be my character, under orders from the GM from slips of paper he kept passing me under the table).

Nothing really much to add there except that Odyssey introduced me to the idea of gaming in a group where one of the player characters was the secret villain, showed me how to do a faithful game that was tied to an existing universe, and showed me that you could create a game system from scratch and have some seriously kick-ass adventures with it. I really hope that people have as much fun with the games I've worked on as I had with Odyssey.

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Next "Roll Your Own Life" brings us to the Vampire years...