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. 

--

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!

#RPGaDAY2023 - DAY TWENTY-TWO: Best SECONDHAND RPG Purchase

 

Day twenty-two of #RPGaDAY2023, and it's another one asking what you've been buying... weird. When I wrote these questions ten years ago I really was fixated on possessions. 

And my answers for this question the first time around were the first edition versions of CJ Carella's WitchCraft and Armageddon RPGs. 

I don't mind a good secondhand RPG, especially if it fills a gap in the collection. I managed to finally get the Octopussy supplement for James Bond 007 secondhand which completed the Bond collection, and multiple Star Trek RPGs (FASA, Last Unicorn, Decipher) when I was researching during my tenure working on Star Trek Adventures. 

One of my favourite secondhand purchases was the original Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium RPG that was produced before the corporate buyouts and so on. Only 3000 of them printed, and I managed to get it for a not horrific price (though it does smell a bit smokey - I've been trying to fumigate it with cinnamon for years, to make it smell like the spice melange). 

#RPGaDAY2023 - DAY EIGHT: Favourite CHARACTER

Day Eight of #RPGaDAY2023 has a very different answer to the original one from all those years ago. Back then, I'd mostly been GMing, so my video focussed on my players' characters, and characters from the epic Mage/Kult/WitchCraft game we'd done in the past. 

Now, however, I've been playing a lot more, and haven't GM'd in years. My favourite character is probably going to be 'Stevie', the daughter of a grumpy couple who ran an arcade in 1980's Yarmouth in our epic Tales From The Loop game. After discovering mind-controlling VHS tapes, weird time portals, and trying to stop the Loop facility from going horribly wrong, the characters grew and we switched into playing Things From The Flood. We failed to stop the impending apocalypse, and our game progressed into Mutant Year Zero, where we built our post-apocalypse community near the beach, and faced the horrific mutations of our family members as they became weird crab-people. We managed to get back into the Loop facility, time travelled back to the 80s, and this time we managed to stop the apocalypse. 

You can't get much more epic than that! 

#RPGaDay2022 - Day 28: Style Sunday

 

Day 28 of #RPGaDay2022 and it's Style Sunday, and it's all about your favourite cover art. That's tricky, because there's a lot of really cool cover art to choose from. One that really stood out for me when I was a kid and just discovering RPGs was the awesome cover for Star Frontiers. 

Really sold the game to me, and I couldn't wait to play it. 

The other game that I bought purely because of the cover was CJ Carella's WitchCraft.

That cover, along with the way that the book is smaller, digest sized, really sold it to me, and started me down a slippery slope buying all of Eden's games, and eventually writing some of them!

West End Games' Star Wars RPG was just perfect as well. Okay, so it wasn't original artwork, but it was everything I could have hoped for in an RPG, and that cover was wonderful. 

[Roll Your Own Life] The Games That Shaped Me (Part 6)

C J Carella's WitchCraft - Eden Studios (1999)

After ditching using White Wolf's World of Darkness to run my massive urban fantasy game of mages, werecreatures and vampires, I converted the whole game over to Kult. I must admit, I loved Kult, especially 2nd Edition with its cool black and white cover and bizarre typography, but something caught my eye on the game store shelves and had me intrigued...

C J Carella's WitchCraft was a smaller paperback than the other game books on the shelf (yes, paperback - the hardback came later). Flicking through it looked like it was just what I needed. It had magic users in different cabals, using different magical traditions, to fight of a rising threat of taint that could corrupt the world. 

I particularly liked the cover - simple, gorgeous and gothic. I picked up the main WitchCraft rulebook and the Mystery Codex (as it detailed vampires and spirits) and set to converting my Kult (formerly Mage) game over to Unisystem - the game system that powered WitchCraft.

One thing lead to another, and we relocated across the country, but I quickly found the local comic/game shop and discovered the new game they had - All Flesh Must Be Eaten. A game of zombie survival horror, using the Unisystem that had powered WitchCraft, and in the same, smaller, digest sized rulebooks that made transportation easier. 

While I only ran All Flesh Must Be Eaten once (for part of the Ottakar's RPG "book group", after we'd relocated back across the country to where we began), but I did love Unisytem.

A friend of ours, Jason, knew I was a massive fan of The X-Files and loaned me the rulebook for the RPG he'd been reading called Conspiracy X. I read it through and loved the setting - loved it so much that when I gave him the book back I bought my own copy from the local RPG shop - only to discover it was the same publisher (Eden Studios) who did WitchCraft and All Flesh Must Be Eaten. (Jason's older version was published by Eden's forerunners - New Millennium Entertainment).

My comic publishing efforts had come to a grinding halt, and I reached out to Eden Studios - so enamoured I was with the Conspiracy X setting - that I initially thought about writing and illustrating a comic set in the Conspiracy X world. But comic publishing wasn't going to be the way for me, and it all kinda fell apart.

BUT... I kept in touch with Eden. George and Alex were fantastic to chat to over the internet, and they were very encouraging. I asked if I could write game material for All Flesh Must Be Eaten, and they wanted a sample of my writing - so I got a bit carried away. I wrote a whole supplement for AFMBE that has never seen light of day, called Summercamp Stalkers And Unstoppable Evil. It was a twist on AFMBE that allowed you to switch the genre of the game from zombie survival horror to 80's slasher movie - just one "nemesis" who threatened you and seemed to be unstoppable. The Jason/Shape/Freddy that you'd expect from a good 80's slasher. 

And that was the door opener that got me writing stuff for Eden Studios. I just kept getting as involved as much as I could, helping out with All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Army of Darkness, Ghosts of Albion, and Terra Primate... before I finally asked the question that was a bit of an elephant in the room - why are all of Eden's games Unisystem except Conspiracy X? Which lead to me spending a couple of years completely immersed in files as I converted Conspiracy X's system over to Unisystem for Conspiracy X 2.0.  

But it all started with WitchCraft. It really did have a massive impact on my life, and without it I may never have gone back into trying to join the ranks of game writers and designers. I have very fond memories of helping out at one of the last couple of GenConUK conventions, working on Eden's stand while C J Carella was in the UK to promote the Buffy RPG. Shame I didn't get my books signed...  One day...

#RPGaDAY2018 - DAY 23: Which game do you hope to play again?

Day twenty-three of #RPGaDAY2018 asks "which game do you hope to play again?"

So many games! So, so many!

We've just finished playing an epic game of Tales from the Loop, running through the "Four Seasons of Mad Science" that is in the core rulebook, and that was a complete blast. Really enjoyed playing that, and look forward to playing Tales from the Loop again sometime in the future.

I guess I could dial it right back on the way-back machine and think of the old games that I used to love and haven't revisited. I mean, I'd love to play WitchCraft again, but I'd be tempted to run it with cinematic Unisystem instead of the full "classic" Unisystem. I kinda miss playing urban fantasy horror. The Mage/Kult/WitchCraft game that we played over many years was awesome.

Further back, I'd love to play James Bond again, just to see if it is still as much fun as I remember. Still one of the biggest influences on me, along with the Ghostbusters RPG. I still have the complete set of the Bond RPG (minus the mini-games and the Assault desktop battles game) and it's still a gorgeous work. I started thinking about merging the system with Vortex a while ago... maybe I'll give it another tinker sometime.

I did have a weird desire to reread Star Frontiers, going way back to my start of gaming back in the early 80's. I wonder how that holds up after all these years?

There we go, what do you hope to play again?

Until tomorrow's question, stay multi-classy!!

WILD Character Creation (take 2)

Last night we put the band back together. Well, as best we could.

Edge (left), Stoo (via virtual reality, which worked surprisingly well) and Debs

On many occasions I've mentioned the most involved gaming sessions in my gaming history were with a few players - Edge, Tetch, Stoo and my lovely wifey. Those were some of the most intense and creepiest games when we played Mage, Kult and later WitchCraft. And I was eager to try to recapture the magic again.

Admittedly, Stoo lives miles away and had to appear via the wonders of Skype, which didn't work too badly (he could see us all and the table and everything!) and Tetch is on holiday somewhere, we thought we'd run a little trial session and see if the character creation for WILD worked.

I did a trial char-gen before, but thanks to writing the key-phrases on the WILD Cards, this worked a lot faster and easier.

Cards you say? Yes, the weird and wacky thing about WILD is that character creation involves cards. WILD can mean that your character's inner-most fears or memories can surface while dreamsharing, so it is important to have some depth to the character's history and background prior to gaming. Creating a character in WILD involves making a traditional Tarot spread using the WILD Cards.

Stoo's character creation layout.

I think it worked this time. Players who came to the table with an idea in mind for what they wanted their character to be and do still had what they wanted, but with some additional elements they hadn't considered before. Those who came without an idea had a pretty interesting launching point to get them started.

The next phase involved using a handful of spare cards each player had to create a relationship between the characters, common locations, events or people. For such a small group, there may have been too many cards involved, but that's what playtesting is all about. But it strangely worked - a location ties the characters together, and added an NPC and a person in one character's past that may have repercussions for the whole group. Not only does it tie the characters together without the "you're in a bar" first session, but it gives me as the DM (DreamMaster) some ideas for elements to draw into the game.

I talked them through the rules (not that there are many) and it all seems to make sense...

Next will be the first game. I don't know how it'll go - I have an epic and bizarre game designed for them, but it'll be the first time I put the rules into action, so we'll see how it goes.

Until next time,

LLAP - and Stay Multi-classy!

#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.

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 7: Favourite Free RPG

Right down to the wire again today! With just under an hour to post on the 7th, I'm uploading the next video while frantically posting about today's.

Hopefully I'll have more time to post about topics as the month progresses, which is a shame because I really like today's video. It's great to get people talking about the cool free RPGs that are out there - some of them are only a handful of pages, but contain some of the most revolutionary, and most innovative games out there.

Luckily, I had help with today's video in the form of the awesome Anita Murray, from the London Indie RPG Meetup group.

#RPGaDAY in a Day. A Month in Review

Wow. Well, August is over, and #RPGaDAY was amazing. I thought it would just be a bit of fun - August is a bad month for a number of reasons, and it would be a good distraction - and I thought it would be nice to talk about the cool and positive side of tabletop gaming, and get everyone reminiscing and feeling nostalgic for those great games we've played, characters we loved, and encounters that have stayed with us over the years.

I really wasn't expecting it to be so readily adopted by so many people worldwide. To hear the name "Autocratik" being spoken on Brazilian vid-casts as people the other side of the planet to me started discussing their favourite adventure and favourite games was just amazing.

Thank you everybody who took part, started following me on Twitter or liked the Facebook page, or just spread the word about #RPGaDAY. Thank you everyone.

I've seen people comment saying that it has helped with their word count to get their blog-writing motivation going, some have said that it has helped them through a bad month as well, some even mentioned that they've learned a lot about writing through working through the questions. I'm just stunned. I'm really overwhelmed that people got so much out of it. Fantastic.

Quite a few people I've followed have summed up their 31 entries in a simple, single blog entry and have suggested that I do the same. So here goes!

Day 1 - First Game Played

As chronicled many, many, many, many months ago, it was original LBB Traveller.

Day 2 - First RPG Gamemastered

Again, chronicled in the early days of this blog, it was the glorious Star Frontiers.

Day 3 - First RPG Purchased

The blue (wizard) covered AD&D Player's Handbook. Bought that before Star Frontiers, to join in with the AD&D game. Still owned today.

Day 4 - Most Recent RPG Purchase

The rather awesome Atomic Robo RPG (powered by Fate), bought at the same time as the new D&D 5th Edition / D&D Next Starter Set.

Day 5 - Most Old-School RPG Owned

While I looked at the old white-box Warhammer, I plumped for TSR's old spy RPG Top Secret. (Finding it hard to write that without the exclamation point, but that's a whole different kind of game involving Val Kilmer...)

Day 6 - Favourite RPG You Never Get to Play

I went for Leverage. Amazing looking game, just don't really have any players...

Day 7 - Most Intellectual RPG Owned

Had to be Nobilis. Gorgeous, but way, waaaay smarter than I am.

Day 8 - Favourite Character

As I don't get to play much, as I GM more than I play, I opted for a bunch of characters that I enjoyed GMing for - the old Mage / Kult / WitchCraft game I used to play. The rather amazing little group of goths that hung around a strange mansion in north London. Awesome.

Day 9 - Favourite Die / Dice Set

I went for my very first D20, which I store in a sad little display box...

Day 10 - Favourite tie in Novel / Game Fiction

The rather amazing Dark*Matter novels which captured the weird X-Files feeling perfectly and kept my head in the right mood for writing Conspiracy X 2.0.

Day 11 - Weirdest RPG Owned

There were a few that leapt to mind. I went for Price of Freedom, which was an odd choice for a subject for a game. While I nearly went for the Xena and Hercules RPG by WEG, I also picked out the Neon Genesis Evangelion RPG, which I've never read as it's entirely in Japanese.

Day 12 - Old RPG You Still Play / Read

I've just started playing a fantasy game that uses the Buffy version of Cinematic Unisystem, so that's really the old RPG I still play (possibly because it's the only game I still play at the moment).

Day 13 - Most Memorable Character Death

Ah, my poor and stupid thief character who enjoyed setting off traps. I guess he deserved everything he got. Pull those levers, see what they do!!!

Day 14 - Best Convention Purchase

One of the elusive supplements for the James Bond RPG - Thrilling Locations!

Day 15 - Favourite Convention Game

CJ Carella's demos of Buffy that were happening on the table next to the Eden Studios stand at Gen Con UK was amazing. 

Day 16 - Game You Wish You Owned

Coming back to the awesome James Bond RPG by Victory Games, I picked the Assault tabletop battle game that I was missing. And possibly some of the other Bond supplements I'm missing like Dr No and Octopussy...

Day 17 - Funniest Game You've Played

It could only really be one choice, and that was Ghostbusters... love that game.

Day 18 - Favourite Game System

While I love Unisystem, really enjoyed oWoD, and WEG's D6 system, I've had the most fun writing and using the Vortex system. Bit of a gratuitous self-plug, but it's not because it's the best game system, but one I've had the most fun with.

Day 19 - Favourite Published Adventure

I picked out two - again with the James Bond with For Your Eyes Only, and secondly with the immensely creepy Kult RPG's "The Judas Grail".

Day 20 - Game You'll Still Play in 20 Years' Time

Again, I went for something a little self-referential, and mentioned WILD.

Day 21 - Favourite Licensed RPG

While I could have mentioned James Bond, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Buffy, Firefly, etc... I decided to rant about the lack of Harry Potter RPG, and how much I want to write it...

Day 22 - Best Secondhand RPG Purchase

Which were the first editions of CJ Carella's games WitchCraft and Armageddon. One day I'll get them signed...

 

Day 23 - Coolest Looking RPG Product

I love square books...  so it has to be Nobilis again!

Day 24 - Most Complicated RPG Owned

I own a lot of complicated games, but I think GURPS and 4th Edition D&D would probably win... But a special mention goes to Space Opera.

Day 25 - Favourite RPG no one else wants to play...

Everway look amazing, but I get the feeling that I'd never get any of the players I know to give it a go...

Day 26 - Coolest Character Sheet

The coolest character sheet that I've seen in recent years has to be the amazing Numenera RPG's sheet... very cool, gorgeous and folds in an interesting way!

Day 27 - Game You'd Most Like to See A New / Improved Version Of...

Again, another chance for me to rant about games I'd love to write - James Bond and Star Trek.

Day 28 - Scariest RPG Played

Some of the events and encounters in the Kult game were incredibly tense, and one of the most jittery experiences of gaming I've had.

Day 29 - Most Memorable Encounter

This one had to be John's Call of Cthulhu game, with one of our player characters going mad and running off to become a follower of Y'golonac, sprouting mouths in the palms of his hands. Really creepy.

Day 30 - Rarest RPG Owned

I love the limited editions of games, but like a lot of avid RPG collectors, the rarest and favourite of my RPG collection is Last Unicorn Games' "Dune" RPG.

Day 31 - Favourite RPG of all time...

Surprising everyone, my favourite RPG (well certainly the one I have the fondest memories of) is West End Games' Star Wars RPG. Glorious game, setting the bar for licensed RPGs to follow...

-

And that was it!!

If you want to suggest topics for the daily questions for next year, feel free to drop me a line in the comments.

If you enjoyed #RPGaDAY, head over the Will Brooks' Facebook page, and his Twitter, and show your support.

Thank you again for taking part. Keep playing games and above all...

Stay Multiclassy!!

#RPGaDAY - Day 22: Best Secondhand RPG Purchase

Day 22 of #RPGaDAY is "best secondhand RPG purchase" where I look at a couple of convention purchase I made to get signed when I was on the Eden Studios stand at the second to last Gen Con UK.

1st Edition Armageddon

1st Edition Witchcraft

#RPGaDAY - Day 8: Favourite Character

I don't really play an awful lot, so instead I used Day 8 of #RPGaDAY to talk about some of the cool characters I've GMd for over the years. My favourite being this group of sulky goth Mages...

Roll Your Own Life (18) - As One Door Closes

I mentioned a couple of “Roll Your Own Life” entries ago that I used to publish comics. I had my own company, set up by The Prince’s Youth Business Trust, and the couple of titles I did (Missing and D’Israeli’s “Consequences”) were shipped internationally. But all was not great with the comics. 

Mostly, because my main comic (Missing) was a bit rough in the artwork, though I still liked the story, but when your main distributor says you’re just not worth carrying, it’s time to close the business. So I did. I officially shut the business down and gave up. But before I finally flick that switch, let’s rewind a little to before I moved to the south coast and ended up in the cinema.

The local video rental store was only a five minute walk away (well, ten coming back, it was a bloody steep hill) and we rented a lot of movies. This was before the wonders of the streaming interwebs and stuff. As we’d frequented the place a lot, we got chatty with Jason, the guy who used to work in the video store. We’d chat when we went in, and we discovered we had very similar interests, and became good friends. We even went to his wedding last year. [We seem to have this knack of becoming friends with people we meet in shops – the manager of our friendly local comic store became such good friends he was actually best man at our wedding!]

Cover for the 1st Edition
Conspiracy X

Anyway, Jason at the video store knew I was a huge X-Files fan, and knowing I was a roleplayer said that I should check out a roleplaying game called Conspiracy X. I’d not really heard of it, but he loaned me the core rules and I was hooked. Loved the game, thought the game setting was possibly one of the coolest things I’d ever read. It was so well designed and tapped into real events that the whole thing could have been a government leak to spread disinformation, or to prepare the public for the revelation of their dealings with aliens.

I was still publishing comics, so I did some internet research and discovered that Conspiracy X was now published by Eden Studios (rather than New Millennium Entertainment as the edition I borrowed had been) and I thought I’d drop them a line about doing a comic based on the game. Nothing big budget, just a little black and white indie like I normally published, but following the adventures of a Cell as they encountered the weird, the alien and the corrupted.

The Eden guys were as positive and supportive as you could expect, but before I knew it I was relocating to the other side of the country, closing the comics business down and I didn’t really give it much more thought. 

While there, I picked up All Flesh Must Be Eaten and WitchCraft, not really twigging that it was all Eden Studios again until I looked at the adverts in the back of the book. Then, we relocated back this side of the country, Debs taking a new and different job in graphic design, and I looked around desperate for work. I was sat at home while Debs was working, with no comics business and nothing to do except look for a job, when I thought about Eden Studios and my old dream of writing roleplaying games. 

I didn’t have a gaming group, but I was still buying games. I read rulebooks like there was no tomorrow, but Unisystem just seemed to be what I wanted from a game system. I thought I’d drop the guys at Eden a line to see if they were looking for writers, reminding them who I was, how I’d talked to them before about comics and stuff. 

All Flesh Must Be Eaten (2nd Edition)

Rather than the expected response of “Thanks, but no thanks,” they suggested that I wrote something for them to prove I could write a game book, show that I knew the system, and to give them an idea of my writing style (if I even have one). I saw this as a “Hell yes!” and promptly started work on writing my first book for Eden.

I don’t think they were really expecting a supplement – I think they were just expecting a few thousand words, but I just didn’t know how to take a hint. I wrote a supplement for All Flesh Must Be Eaten that allowed you to play the game as survival horror, but without the zombies – to take the game out of the zombie genre, and into the realm of the slasher movie, under the working title of "Summercamp Stalkers and Unstoppable Evil". 

Rightly so, it wouldn’t see print. A lot of it represented rules from WitchCraft for ghosts and spirits, and writing a rules supplement for a game about zombies that didn’t have zombies in it was about as stupid as writing a supplement for Star Wars that was about being clerical workers on the Death Star doing mundane work and never getting involved in any fighting. But, I liked slasher films, and thought it would be interesting to have some of the zombie traits applied to a single enemy, and create a few more.

It meant that you could basically run Friday 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or even Scream, as adventures. I’d even worked out how to do Phantasm (one of my faves), but the problem was that the players needed to be “in on the fun” and willing to split up, and do stupid things. And above all, they should not get too annoyed when their character is killed off half way through the adventure. This is why I added the spirit rules from WitchCraft so even dead characters could try to assist in a “use the Force” way when there were very few player characters left alive. Probably would work as convention games, when the max length of the game would be about an hour, but a whole evening spent sitting around after your character went and investigated the noise in the basement? Not fun for that player.

Terra Primate Core Rulebook

There was a scenario in the book too, set in an old cinema based on the creepy and abandoned bits of the Odeon where I used to work, as a cursed film inspired a supernatural killer to attack the few people invited to an exclusive screening. 

You never know, something may come of it one day. Maybe I’ll strip it down to a 32 page PDF as a freebie or something. But, it proved to Eden that I could write, and before you know it I was asked to work on their new single book RPG – Terra Primate.

--

Conspiracy X 2nd Edition

DW:AITAS 2nd Ed

The rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve helped out on more Eden titles than I can remember, before finally returning to that game that really got me back into game writing – Conspiracy X. And, since then, I’ve gone on to write for other people and design and develop the game system (and write a lot of the core book) for the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG for Cubicle 7.

Which kinda brings me up to date. As I'm writing for these companies, I'm not going to go into any great detail - you don't want to know all the secrets of the universe do you? However, it won't be my final "Roll Your Own Life" retrospective, I've plenty of gaps to fill in and I'll look at specific classic games from my youth as well as my first convention experiences and more.

Anyway, I shouldn't be writing this! I've a game to write! 

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

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...