Sidequest: Every TTRPG played 21-30

Continuing my previous posts listing every tabletop RPG I've ever played, we're starting to get into the Nineties! Of course, just a handful of Eighties RPGs to get through, but we're getting there. 

If you want to catch up with the list in (sorta) chronological order, check out the previous parts here:

Part 1 - 1-10

Part 2 - 11-20

And now, without further ado, let's get on with it. 

#21 - The Price of Freedom

Cover of West End Games' The Price of Freedom

The Eighties were certainly a strange time when it came to the political climate (not that it's any more stable now). In the Eighties, the threat of war influenced movies, TV series, and games. Heavily influenced by Red Dawn, West End Games' TTRPG The Price of Freedom was all about guerrilla warfare in an occupied America. It was very tactical, and came with hex maps and counters for units. It was a bit bleak, and my players didn't really want to play in that setting, so I ended up converting it to play "V", the TV series of alien invasion with a deep message mirroring the horrors of WWII. 

Instead of fighting humans, the resistance was fighting alien Visitors. The hamsters and mice needed saving!

#22 - Robotech

Palladium Games' Robotech RPG

A bit of a strange one and a bit left-field, but for some reason I wanted to play with big robots, and spotted the Robotech RPG on the shelves at our local store. I bought it, read it, was thoroughly confused (it felt a bit like D&D) and we created some characters, but that may have been as far as it went. I'd never seen Robotech, so the concept of the aliens being flippin' giants didn't even occur to me (it wasn't that clear in the book I don't think, or I was just stupid). This may have been my only exposure to the Palladium system. I think someone else in the group had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, but I never played it. 

#23 - Star Wars (West End Games)

Star Wars RPG (West End Games)

Look at it. It's beautiful. One of my favourite games of all time, up there with Ghostbusters, is the original Star Wars RPG by West End Games. I mean, I was a fan of WEG having played Ghostbusters, Paranoia, and The Price of Freedom, but when they announced they had the license for my favourite films that was me sold. 

The Star Wars RPG is just awesome. I know it has its foibles and there were times where we were rolling so many D6s that you could hardly see the table, but it was glorious. It really captured the action and feel of Star Wars. It was the last RPG I bought and ran in what I call my "Golden Age", and we played a heck of a lot of it. Probably so much my players were sick of it, but I loved it, and I loved Star Wars. Still do (with both). 

After that, things wound down for a bit. I went to college, a lot of the players went off to university, and gaming in general faded into the background for two or three years. 

#24 - Vampire: The Masquerade

Vampire: The Masquerade (1st Edition)

There is going to be a bit of a recurring theme here for a while, sorry. I went to the University of the Arts to do a degree (so I could do comics and graphic novels - see, that constant bouncing between comics and RPGs at it again). I'd gone away to Uni, met loads of new people, and immediately stumbled across a gaming group playing Vampire: The Masquerade. I'd never even heard of it, but was immediately hooked. This was back when we had student grants to help pay for our education, before it became 'loans', and I was terrible. I blew a chunk of my grant on buying a heap of Vampire books. This was going to be my next big thing. I ran a game for my old group, started another group locally with people from the comic shop, and set both games in the same city, at the same time, crossing over events and characters. 

Vampire got me back into gaming in a big way, and introduced me to my future wife. We joined the Camarilla, went to a couple of big Camarilla meetings. Heck, Debs was head of Clan Toreador for a while, while I was the second in command in Clan Tremere. 

#25 - Werewolf: The Apocalypse

Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1st Edition)

I told you there was going to be recurring theme... Of course, Vampire wasn't going to be enough, and when Werewolf: The Apocalypse came out, I was just as intrigued, aiming to add werewolves into our current Vampire game. As a bit of an aside, I ran a Werewolf story with my local group set in the same city as the Vampire game – their actions directly impacting upon the Vampire chronicle as a whole. It was fun! I think we did a couple of adventures like that... but then, something else came along.

#26 - Mage: The Ascension

Mage: The Ascension (1st Edition)

Oh yes, now we're talking. Vampire was cool, and goth, and moody. Werewolf was angry, and nature, and anti-corporation. Mage: The Ascension was just nuts. And we loved it. I ran a Mage game for our local group (who we still play with today) and it was amazing. Debs created a character that inspired so many works of fiction. The setting, the characters, the themes we tackled in those games were beyond anything we could hope to replicate. It was Quintessence in a bottle, rather than lightning. When the Paradox Backlashes hit, things went really weird, and yet we kept it all in the same city and story as the old Vampire game. Truly epic. Until one of the characters died...

#27 - Wraith: The Oblivion

The incredibly hard to read and over-the-top cover for Wraith: The Oblivion

So, one of the characters died in our Mage: The Ascension game, but no one wanted to see the end of that character. Luckily, White Wolf had just brought out the next in the line of World of Darkness games, with Wraith: The Oblivion. Therefore, the character remained in the Chantry, and joined in with the adventures, only as a ghost! We never played a dedicated game of Wraith, at least, not to my recollection. But we explored many of the themes and adventure ideas in the Wraith setting in our main WoD campaign. 

It was about this time I considered going back into writing roleplaying games again. 

However, things happened, I got grumpy, over-reacted, and turned my back on World of Darkness. I wanted to keep running the game we had going in Mage, keeping with weird magic and ghosts and supernatural stuff. That's when I turned to the next game in the list...

#28 - KULT

KULT (1st Edition)

The replacement for World of Darkness was an easy conversion over to the grim and terrifying world of Kult. Sure, the magic wasn't as easy to cast, but it made the game more creepy and somewhat sinister. The Mage character's Chantry was a pocket in the Metropolis, and things took a decidedly darker turn. There were still vampires and evil creatures, but the influences of Hellraiser were definitely there. Possibly the tensest games I've ever run, and some of the scariest stuff we've played, but it was cool and very 90s goth.

And that 2nd edition with the cool typography (rumoured to be done in MSWord)... oh, Lordy. That's so good. 

Maybe a little too dark, though, which lead to converting our existing game once again to yet another system...

#29 - CJ Carella's WitchCraft

CJ Carella's WitchCraft

More closely in line with the themes and tone of our old World of Darkness game, we switched over to CJ Carella's WitchCraft. I was initially drawn to the cover design, and that the game was a smaller digest format rather than the usual sized gamebook. It was smaller, easier to carry, had some great art, and the system felt very like the old World of Darkness. Of course, this introduced me to Eden Studios...

#30 - All Flesh Must Be Eaten

All Flesh Must Be Eaten (1st Edition)

We'd relocated to the other side of the country, and the gaming had come to a halt again. But there was a little gaming store on my way into work. In there, I spotted another one of Eden's smaller digest RPGs, the legendary All Flesh Must Be Eaten, a game of zombie survival horror. I didn't actually get to play it until many years later, after we'd moved back to where we were before, and I started hosting an RPG bookclub at the bookstore I was working at. Instead of reading a book and talking about it once a month, we'd pick a game, and run a short one-shot once a month. The members of the group could then buy it at a small discount if they liked it. 

I ended up running a quick one-shot of All Flesh Must Be Eaten, set on one of my sixth-form school trips. It was suitably over-the-top and complete carnage, but great fun. 

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That's it for the latest section. Possibly only a couple more of these to go, I find I'm buying games and reading them more than I get chance to play them these days. You may be surprised at the omissions when it comes to what I haven't played!! 

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

[Roll Your Own Life] The Games That Shaped Me (Part 5)

Vampire: The Masquerade - White Wolf (1991)

It was the long, dark tea-time of gaming for me. I'd left school. My gaming group had been fractured by some going off to university. I'd started working for the local archaeology unit, and tabletop roleplaying games were the last thing on my mind. The archaeology unit encouraged me to go back into education, and after taking a BTEC in graphic design and a fine art foundation course, I was soon on my way to another part of the country, away from my home town, and off to university myself.

One of the first things I found while in my new location was that a group of students on my course had started roleplaying. A relatively new RPG at the time that was taking the world by storm - Vampire: The Masquerade. Hot on the heels of Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, White Wolf's Vampire RPG paved the way for a new generation of gaming. Everyone played vampires - members of different clans, struggling to survive in a "World of Darkness" where you wrestled with your own humanity, and desire to feed.

The game was really cool, and I was instantly hooked. I blew a lot of my term's money on buying out the local game shop's stock of rulebooks, clanbooks, guides and so on, and heap of ten-sided dice.

I got so into it that I started running the game for a group in my hometown when I went back between terms, set in the same game that I was running while at university. Then I started another game (this time Werewolf: The Apocalypse) with a group of people I met at the local comic shop that again crossed over with the other game. It was a mass of storytelling, narrative connections, and a whole lot of blood sucking.

I met my wife through the game, and we (foolishly) signed up to join The Camarilla - the live-action global LARP with a storyline and narrative that spanned the world. As we were both into making zines and graphic design, we started making newsletters for our clans which got us promoted quickly through the UK ranks (and Generations) - Debs became head of Clan Toreador, and I became 2nd in command of Clan Tremere. It was at these LARPs that I was introduced to Angus Abranson and Andrew Peregrine, which led to a host of game writing later down the line - and without those introductions I doubt I would have written the Dr Who RPG.

But, some people in the clans were not happy at our promotions, and Debs and I started getting hate mail - both in character and out - and we quickly decided to retire from the Camarilla and I turned my back on White Wolf.

Ironically, while Vampire: The Masquerade had such a massive impact on my gaming, my favourite of the World of Darkness games isn't Vampire. The aforementioned Werewolf gaming group went on to play Mage: The Ascension, and it was freakin' amazing. Paradox realms, secret dimensions, reality changing magic. Absolutely loved it. Vampire quickly took the back seat, and we played Mage a lot.

Things happened and I kinda fell out of love with White Wolf, selling about 80% of my World of Darkness collection. I continued the Mage game we were running by converting the whole thing over to Kult. It was darker, messy, and really quite horrific at times and lead to some of the most intense roleplaying I've GM'd.

Kult drifted away and I converted the game once again - keeping the characters and setting but running it with the next game on my Games That Shaped Me...

#RPGaDAY 2019 - DAY 29: EVOLVE

Robin is certainly a character who has Evolved! Cool Autocratik dice thanks to www.chimericdesigns.co.uk

Day Twenty-Nine of #RPGaDAY 2019 is EVOLVE, and I'm sure (like me) your gaming has evolved over the years. If only I knew then, what I know now. Well, that's true of many things really, not just gaming.

Anyway, back in my dim and distant youth, RPGs were all about killing monsters, taking their stuff, and getting the XP to get better at killing monsters and taking their stuff.

There was no character development - short of gaining XP and becoming more powerful so we could adventure some more. There was very little in story, especially the games I used to run. It was all about throwing bigger and bigger nasties at the characters and letting them fight it.

I guess, it wasn't until I'd had a break from gaming. Everyone had gone off to Uni and I didn't game for ages. It wasn't until I went to Uni myself years later, and was introduced to the local gaming group who were engrossed in a game of Vampire: The Masquerade. Gradually, over time, I experienced the delights of stories, character development, tension, and more. I mean, they were all there to be experienced in our old-school games, but we were too young to really think about it.

The games have certainly evolved since those first ones I played back in my youth, but I like to think my gaming style and tastes have evolved with them.

WWTDD?

Last weekend was Dragonmeet 2015, another great convention where I had chance to mingle with incredibly cool people, chat about games and see what's awesome and hot in gaming.

Oooooh, look at the shiny!!

There was about an hour where I stood behind the Cubicle 7 stand while Dom went off to host the "what's coming from C7" seminar where I got to plug the new edition of the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game (no longer "Adventures in Time and Space"). Super shiny it is too. Every time a new edition comes out I'm just blown away by how gorgeous these books are...

But while I was on the stand, a chap came up to me and started talking about the Doctor Who RPG (sorry, I didn't get your name!) and asked "How do I run a game with 5+ players?"

Interesting question. My initial reaction was to run something without the Doctor or a Time Lord altogether - a Torchwood team, or a UNIT squad or something. Or look to the Fifth Doctor era when he had the most companions at once! 

But travelling back on the train that night I couldn't help but ponder over the question and how to actually run a Doctor Who campaign with a large group. My gaming groups are usually only three players and a GM max, but I used to run a Vampire game with eleven players - though not all of them at the same time...

It was the typical control-freak in me wanting to have a huge setting and lots of players. There was a group of players in my home town, and another load where I was at University (as it is now) studying, so rather than run two different games, I ran them all as one big setting. Two groups whose actions would affect each other.

It kinda got out of hand when the Vampire game spawned a brief Werewolf: The Apocalypse game, still in the same universe, and then a Mage: The Ascension game... of course, while the other games faded in time, the Mage game continued.

But actually running a group that big was more of a case of having a big enough setting, one that I was familiar with and knew what was going on, and leaving the players to it. It's the equivalent of open-world videogaming. Imagine all of your players are in GTAV... they can go wherever they like, and engage in missions when they fancy. Things happen to pull them into action, but there's no railroading or forcing them on their way...

-

Oh Pond... I miss Amy Pond...

So, how could that work with Doctor Who?

For a group of about 5 or 6, I'd stick with my earlier suggestion and have no Time Lord player character. It could be a mundane Earth-bound game of investigation and defence. My old Dr Who game (we're talking old FASA RPG) run by our rather awesome Cthulhu Keeper, John, had the Time Lord (The Collector) absent a lot of the time as the player was one of the least frequent to attend (sorry, Gladys, but it's true. You hardly ever turned up).

This meant John could run Doctor Who like his Cthulhu games. Very Tom Baker - Hinchcliffe and Holmes era - dark, spooky and gothic with lots of sneaking around and stumbling upon alien plots. The Time Lord would almost drop them places to investigate and then bugger off somewhere.

This could be very like the upcoming spin-off series, Class. Where the Doctor isn't present at all (or makes a brief cameo) and the kids at the school do all the investigating. Of course, this does mean the characters can get into trouble more, but the guest starring Time Lord can appear as an NPC when needed to save them. Though that could get old, fast...

If you don't want them Earth-bound, have one of them have access to a found Vortex manipulator, or have them find technology to allow them to hitch-hike their way across the galaxy. Now that sounds like an idea for book. Or maybe a radio series...

-

I'll probably come back to this topic in future, but I hope this helps.

Do check out the new version of the Dr Who RPG, it's very cool.

Love those credits!

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 15: Longest Campaign Played

That's one of the great things about tabletop roleplaying games... They don't have to end if you don't want to. You can do some cool one shots, short adventures, and small stories, but sometimes those adventures string together into a continuing campaign that can go on and on. It's usually due to circumstances outside the game that the story ends.

I've played a few long running campaigns - the longest is probably the Vampire: The Masquerade game that became Mage: The Awakening (and then morphed into Kult, and eventually WitchCraft).

You can find out all about it in the video below, which also features a special guest in the form of gaming guru Robin D. Laws.

Roll Your Own Life (14) - Yes, this is a Kult

Last time I did a little nostalgia piece I was talking about the old World of Darkness and how we all got very into playing Vampire and Mage, and then I had a bit of a falling out with White Wolf, mostly due to the way my wife and I were treated by the nasty minority in The Camarilla.

The cover for KULT 1st Edition

I did, however, still really like the characters and the setting that we'd formed for the game, and I wanted to continue the story of the tabletop game, but on a smaller scale. The multiple games in the same setting was too demanding considering I was supposed to be doing college work, so I reeled it back to the basics - just one game running at once, just a handful of players. But what I needed was a new system to play dark urban occult fantasy with. And, as usually happens with my game buying, there was one game sitting on the shelves that intrigued me with its striking cover - Kult.

I don't know what it was about Kult, but there was something scary about it. The cover was cool, but it seemed a little sinister too. Maybe that's what drew me to it, that strange scared fascination you have to see something that you're not really sure you want to see. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When I was a kid, that film came out and it was legendary. The stories of how people were fainting during it, it was something that was almost too scary to watch, but you were fascinated enough to almost dare yourself to try.

Kult was the same for me. Its inspiration from Hellraiser was obvious, but I gave in, bought the rule book, and was hooked. Not in a "tear your soul apart" way, but just in the way that it was crafted. I set to converting the characters from the Mage game and soon we were back in action.

The cover for KULT 2nd Edition
Just awesome and wacky.

Kult allowed us to do some really weird things in game. One of the characters was killed - not even a player character, just a reliable NPC, and one of the PCs vowed to bring him back by using a host of powerful and available spells from Kult to make the character pregnant, to put the dead character's spirit back in the unborn baby, and to travel back in time to leave the child with foster parents so the character could still be alive today. Of course, he was radically different when they returned. He wasn't a vampire anymore for starters.

It was very cool, and the way that The Metropolis worked, the city behind the illusion of reality, would be something I would always remember in future projects.

When second edition Kult came out with its awesome typography and design, I was shown a whole new world of how rulebooks could be presented. They didn't need to be plain or basic, they could play with the conventions of typography and layout, experiment with the way that the game could be published, and laugh in the face of mundanity. The two supplements for magic were so bizarre in their layout that some pages were almost unreadable, but that just made it cooler. And the Judas Grail adventure was so bonkers, I don't think the players got very far with it. Love that game.

Layout design for the Purgatory supplement
courtesy of www.kult-rpg.com

The following versions of the game just didn't have the same scary coolness or wacky graphic design as that or the first edition, and for now Kult seems to have faded into obscurity.

However, it was at this time that weird things were happening outside of the game.

I'd set up a comic publishing company, Autocratik Press (also known as Autocratik For The Masses) with the backing of the Prince's Trust, and my attention to games and games writing had taken a back seat while I created a different world of my own. The world of my comic, Missing.

Roll Your Own Life (13) - Talkin' 'bout my Generations

Last post I mentioned that Debs and I got very into playing Vampire: The Masquerade. I was intrigued by the adverts in the rulebooks for something called "The Camarilla" and so I started looking into what it was and how we could get involved.

The Camarilla took LARPing (that's Live Action Role Playing) to its logical next level. A global RPG, where Storytellers organised regional games, and reported what had happened to national and international coordinators to create a huge international game where everything was connected. It was like MMORPG without the internet. Genius.

We signed up, and started to get involved.

There were a couple of groups organised in Norwich, and we tagged along - they didn't really amount to much. I guess the problem was that we tried to meet up in public places - I remember a great meeting at one of the oldest pubs in the city, there were about ten of us meeting to discuss what we were going to do and when the next game should be, and it was like An American Werewolf in London. Not so much "beware the moon, lads," and more "we don't want your kind in here!"

Being a northern lad myself, we also went to the regional meetings in York. These weren't in a public place, rather in a hired hall, or at the "Prince of York's" house. We met some really cool people there, and made some good friends.

We also attended a huge meeting in Basildon. It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. A huge LARP with hundreds of gamers all partaking in one massive event. It was like a convention and a party all in one, with everyone in-character and running around pretending to be vampires.

The Basildon event, and the Camarilla as a whole, introduced us to the Prince of London, Angus Abranson, and his deputy, Andrew Peregrine. Of course we didn't get to see much of either of them at the Basildon meeting, everything Angus did was surrounded by a gaggle of obfuscated vamps following him around hoping to overhear some vital information that they'd be able to use in the future. Angus and Andrew seemed to be at the heart of the London gaming scene, and they would become important parts of my game writing career in the future. You can see some pics from Angus' Livejournal account here so you can see what the UK Camarilla scene was like.

We got very into the Camarilla, but I'm an inherently antisocial type - I don't really do public functions. However, Debs and I had graphic design backgrounds so we volunteered to help put together our clan newsletters. Debs worked on the Toreador one ("Rosa Nocturnus") and I put together the Tremere one ("Convocations"). They were illustrated A4 black and white newsletters, around 8-16 pages every quarter, with art, poems, game updates, rules, photos, and all that kinda stuff. Debs and I had a blast doing it, and the powers that be in the UK deemed that our hard work should be rewarded by promoting us in the ranks. Debs was made head of Clan Toreador, and I was promoted to 2nd in command of Clan Tremere (there was already a Clan Head).

We made good friends in the Camarilla, met some colourful characters as well, but that would come to an end. Some took our ascent to power personally, unhappy that we'd risen in the ranks (and in Generation as it worked in the Camarilla) just because of our creative and organisational input. We started receiving hate-mail, but in- and out- of character. We decided that nothing we did was worth that kind of feedback and we withdrew from active duty, quit the Camarilla, and I sold 90% of my Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/Wraith rulebooks. I still have the Vampire corebook, and the Mage: The Ascension one (I actually always preferred Mage to Vampire anyway - I liked the idea of being able to change your reality with your mind... a theme that would continue in my games to this day), and I have the corebooks of the re-releases, but I haven't really ventured into the World of Darkness since.

Debs, however, is currently enjoying a game of Mage: The Awakening.

Despite how it ended, I don't regret my time in the Camarilla. Without it, I'd have never met Angus and Andy, and the Doctor Who RPG (Adventures in Time and Space) may never have been made.

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Okay, enough reminiscing - on the subject of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, check out this video of unboxing the new 11th Doctor core set.

I was thinking about making my own unboxing video for this, but this is a pretty good look at the contents of the box.

I'm still planning on making some videos, but the timing's just not right at the moment. Maybe in the new year...

Until next week, possibly my last blog entry for a bit as it's the one before the madness of NaNoWriMo begins!!!

Roll Your Own Life (12) - The Long Dark Teatime of Gaming

Strangely, there was a time when I didn't play RPGs. I guess it happens to us all, we "put away childish things" and I went back into education. Ironically I guess. Back to school I went, but my schooltime hobbies didn't come with me. I call these the Dark Times.

Me at work in the Archaeology Unit, 1989

At school I do remember being told specifically that I wasn't smart enough to go on to college or university, and the best I could hope for would be to leave after the sixth form and find a menial job somewhere. So I did. I left school, became a doley, wrote adventures for West End Games in a desperate attempt to get into the games industry, and then ended up working for the County Council in nature conservation as a cartographer. 

The program closed down and I was transferred to the Council's archaeology unit, where I spent most of my time drawing the bits of pot or bone that had been recovered from various digs, and on occasion going to the dig sites and drawing the finds on location. Not being much of an outdoor person, this wasn't ideal, but the rest of the team in the Archaeology Unit were awesome. The Unit was run by Ian who'd published his own comics as a small press publisher, so we were bound to get along. I also met Gareth, one of the most talented illustrators I've ever come across, and became the best of friends. Seriously, check out his site - the artwork is amazing.

Anyway, the project insisted that we all went to college one day a week to get more qualifications, so we ended up doing Art "A" Levels, which pleased my mum immensely as I'd dropped out of Art at school.

The A Level progressed and encouraged us to do a BTEC in Graphic Design, and soon life was dominated with college, commuting, and the desperate and angst socialising that went along with it. My mind was on drawing comics, and trying to get someone from the opposite sex to even acknowledge my existence for more than a second.

This isn't talking about games much is it? Sorry. Don't worry, I'll get back to that in a second. As I said, these were dark times on the game front, and my focus was on drawing comics, the college work, and the social life that went along with it. I got so into the college work though, one course wasn't enough. While I was doing BTEC Design during the day, I was on a Fine Art Foundation in the evening, and the second year I added an "A" Level Film Studies evening class to boot. I was a learning machine.

The BTEC really forced us into applying for a further qualification - something I'd not really considered. I had no intention of moving out from home, in my mind I was still 14 and most of the time I still acted like it. But the BTEC staff insisted, so I applied for a number of Graphic Design degrees, aiming initially to stay within reach of home. However, fate would dictate otherwise, and soon I'd been accepted on the degree course at the highly regarded Norwich School of Art and Design. I had to move out, leave my little home town, and branch out on my own.

Luckily, I didn't have to do it alone. Gareth managed to get on the same course, so we moved down together, shared a house with a US Air Force veteran who'd rented out a couple of rooms in his house to students, and set out making new friends in a new town.

Some of these new friends were gamers - I hadn't really partaken in RPGing for a very long time, my mind had been elsewhere, but the invite was given to try a new RPG called "Vampire: The Masquerade" and I happily went along.

Vampire:The Masquerade -
You have a lot to answer for...

It was like that first cup of tea when you come home after a holiday. It was fresh, but felt like home. Gaming was back in my life, and I wasn't going to let go. That week I went to the local game shop and bought about fifteen of the Vampire books (corebook, clanbooks, player's and storyteller's books, the lot) and more D10's than I could carry. I blew most of my student grant (yes, remember those days? Grants? I think I was one of the final year's worth of students to actually get a grant before the student loans came into force) on gaming supplies.

The World of Darkness was my home now, and I was going to bring everyone into it. I started running a game that would incorporate some of the gamers from my home town, and the gamers from Norwich, in one massive setting. The events of the game in Norwich would effect the other and vice-versa. It was huge, and I was revelling in my slightly sociopathic urges to control everything around me.

I branched out, running Werewolf: The Apocalypse for another group from people I'd met in the local comic shop, and then moved onto Mage: The Ascension (we'll come back to that later), but one advert in the back of the rulebooks intrigued me - The Camarilla. What was that all about? (That's definitely one for a future blog post).

The massive game kinda collapsed - the demands of running games concurrently with nearly twenty players in two or three different groups, mixed with the strained social life of college and the dramatic changes that were taking place in my social circles meant that I had to give up on the bigger scheme of things, and concentrate on a smaller group.

However, in the middle of all this, I did meet some particularly good friends, and even met my wife, all through World of Darkness. Scaling back from the bigger game, I started concentrating on Mage: The Ascension, with a small group consisting of me (as Storyteller), Debs (my future wifey), and three guys we'd met through the comic shop - Stoo, Edge and Tetch. 

KULT - still one of my fave games ever

These Mage games have to be some of the most amazing gaming experiences I've had as a GM. The characters were awesome, and would become the stuff of legend. When I turned my back on Mage, and found a new game system (Kult) the characters were adapted and their epic stories continued - and became even more epic (if that was even possible). They time travelled, one gave birth to another character in the past to try to restore a wrong that had been done, one had been killed and haunted the group as a helpful spirit...  I hardly had to write anything (and if I did, the players would ignore any plotline and do their own thing). It was storytelling with characters that the players knew well, and the stories created themselves. There was a magic there that I've not encountered again in GMing... and I doubt I will again. 

These characters went on again when I changed system to CJ Carella's WitchCraft, and their tales have been adapted and became some of the inspiration behind some of Debs' fiction writing (especially her dark fantasy novel "Black Clothes, Blue Fire"). The change to Unisystem would lead to other opportunities but that's getting ahead of the game (so to speak). Next time, we'll rewind to cover Debs and my time in the Camarilla, and the important friendships that were formed there...