Sidequest: Every TTRPG Played #1-10

Over where the sky is blue (that's Bluesky just in case you haven't been on there), much respected and loved comics creator and TTRPG writer, Kieron Gillen, posted to say that he was trying to make a list of every TTRPG he's ever played. 

Alt Text - Trying to make a list of every TTRPG I've ever played, which presently includes such classics such as 'the very complicated home-brew game made by my friend James when I lived in America' and 'The one where you're all sad people at the end of the world with a name that sounds ominous'. 

I'm really hoping that his results appear on his relatively recent blog-site that he launched https://oldmenrunningtheworld.com/ . However, it did inspire me to think... 'Can I remember every TTRPG I've played?'...

Challenge Accepted!!

I know I've been doing my "My Nerdy Life in 100 Geeky Objects" series, and there's bound to be a little crossover, but I thought I'd try and do this as well, just to keep my brain busy and so I don't spiral into the mire. Do forgive my indulgences. I'm not going to drag this out into another 100 posts... I promise.

Let's take it a chunk at a time, starting from the very beginning. The order may be a little off, but hey, it is 40+ years ago...

#1 - Traveller

The first three "Little Black Books" for the original Traveller RPG

The first tabletop roleplaying game I ever played was Traveller. I had no idea what I was doing, but I generated a character that sunny Saturday afternoon in what must have been 1983(?) up at JR's place. I remember thinking how old my character was by the time I left military service. I didn't do much, just sat in the background and took in the experience, but I was already hooked by the end of the first game. 

#2 - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook (2nd Cover)

Had to be there, didn't it? Usually everyone's first game, I leapt straight into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. None of this Basic or Expert stuff, I was thrown into the deep end of AD&D. Admittedly, I didn't even roll a character to begin with. My first character was a Paladin called Ivanhoe that was already at 8th or maybe 9th level. One of the players in the group was bored of playing the goody-two-shoes, and it was just the sort of character I liked playing. I gave him a last name after a few years, Navarre, from watching Ladyhawke, because, let's face it, Rutger Hauer was the coolest thing around. Played him for years, never got higher than 9th level, but always liked playing Paladins ever since.

#3 - Runequest

Cover of Runequest 2nd Edition

That same gaming group seemed to alternate between AD&D and Runequest most of the time, so it was inevitable that Runequest would turn up on this list, and very early. I really liked the way that individual locations had their own armour ratings, but I remember the GM had bought the Big Rubble setting and we kept heading into the Rubble to seek our fortunes, getting a fraction of the way in, and getting our arses kicked so badly we retreated back to the inn and healed up before doing it all again. 

#4 - Star Frontiers

Front cover of the original Star Frontiers "Expanded" Rulebook

Everyone was running RPGs and I really wanted to get in on the GameMastering action, and I preferred SF to fantasy. Traveller was cool, but it just wasn't saying "Star Wars" to be enough. A trip to the local (if you can all it that) game store and that cover for Star Frontiers literally screamed "Look!! I'm like Star Wars, look at me!!" and I had to get it. Absolutely loved that game. Played so much of it, you wouldn't believe. All the way through to the Zebulon's Guide update and beyond. I'd love to see a proper revival, not the nonsense that's happened recently. 

#5 - Gamma World

Much like my desire to GM something, I remember Coop wanted to GM in our group, and his game of choice to start was TSR's other SF RPG, Gamma World. The weird, post-apocalyptic RPG of an irradiated future. I don't remember playing too much of it, but it was pretty cool. Spent most of my time worrying I was going to grow an extra arm or something from the radiation...

#6 - Call of Cthulhu

Cover of 1st Edition Call of Cthulhu

Of course, the other big classic from the early days of gaming had to be Call of Cthulhu. I hadn't read any Lovecraft, so I had no idea what was going on, but I loved seeing those weird silhouettes and wandering around in the 1920s. I ended up buying my own copy (the Games Workshop hardcover version, rather than the boxed first edition) and we played a heck of a lot of that too. Most of my characters went mad, except for the one that died when another character threw a bottle at me to get me out of their tent. 

#7 - FASA Star Trek

Cover of FASA's Star Trek Roleplaying Game

Our "Keeper" for Call of Cthulhu ran a couple of other games for us as well. One is FASA's Star Trek RPG. I used to watch classic Trek on TV as a kid, and a lot of it went way over my head. It wasn't until much later that I really *got* Star Trek and really loved it (but that's one for another story). I don't remember playing too much of it, but it was cool. I remember us playing the Star Trek III Starship Combat game more...

#8 - Space Opera

Cover of the Space Opera RPG

What the hell even is the Space Opera RPG? I have a dim recollection of this, and remember it being so darn complicated that we spent two evenings just creating characters... and then never actually got around to playing it. Does this one still count? I've cut many a game from this list that I've read but never played, but does character creation count? I think so... maybe?

#9 - Stormbringer

Cover for Chaosium's Stormbringer RPG

Another one of those "one of the players wanted to have a go at GMing" games was Chaosium's Stormbringer. I remember it being very similar to Runequest, so the learning curve was really easy as we'd been playing that for ages. The tricky thing for me was I was completely unfamiliar with Michael Moorcock's Elric stories, so I was mostly confused by what was going on. Still, the art was cool. 

#10 - Middle Earth Roleplaying (MERP)

The cover I remember the most of the old 
MERP game, with the Balrog looking like
Lobo in the background.

Finally, for this first selection of every game I've played, we'll stop at number 10 with MERP, or Middle Earth Roleplaying Game. And I think this was another of the players wanting to GM something. Again (please forgive me, I was young, and not much of a fantasy reader) I was not very familiar with Tolkien. I mean, everyone else in the gaming group had read The Lord of the Rings, but I'd just watched the 70's animated movie. I tried, and I just didn't have the attention-span until much, much later (thanks to Babylon 5 - see, I told you I was a SF nerd). We did play a lot of this as well though, and I have fond memories of the critical tables. 

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So, that's the first 10 TTRPGs I remember playing. I'm sure I'll go back to this list soon, and try to do the next little batch. When I wrote them down, I did manage to get to 100, but that included RPGs I'd bought and read but hadn't actually played. I may cut those ones from the list, or have a sublist - a side-sidequest. 

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

[Roll Your Own Life] The Movies That Made Me (Part 21)

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001)

I have had a strange relationship with The Lord of the Rings. I remember being at school and getting very into Dungeons & Dragons, and other cool fantasy tabletop RPGs, and everyone in the group seemed to have this almost encyclopaedic knowledge of Tolkien. Me? Not a bit...

Must have been around 1983, I thought I should remedy that especially as we'd started playing Middle Earth Roleplaying (or MERP as everyone called it). So I saved up, and bought myself a copy of The Lord of The Rings (the all-in one edition). And I didn't get very far at all. I think I got as far as Frodo and Sam leaving Hobbiton and the encounter with Tom Bombadil, and that was about it. It was too much for me, I wasn't a reader at that age, and I gave up.

I saw the Ralph Bakshi movie of the first half, and that was all I knew...

And then, many, many years later... Along came Babylon 5. I watched it avidly, but around season 3 there was the introduction of a particularly cool character (Marcus) who was a Ranger. And suddenly things were starting to make sense in my head - Babylon 5 was The Lord of the Rings in space!!

Rangers, the coming of Shadows, and then when Sheridan falls when he goes to Z'ha'dum, and comes back wearing white... Oh god, Sheridan is Gandalf!! Anyway, I loved Babylon 5, and I wanted to see how it compared - so I dug out that old copy of The Lord of the Rings that I bought ten years earlier and tried again.

Older, and wiser, I blasted through the whole thing and loved it. Absolutely loved it.

So when one of my favourite film makers announced he was tackling The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of movies I was very excited. I followed Peter Jackson's movie making right from Bad Taste, through to the awesome and underrated The Frighteners. If anyone was going to bring Middle Earth to life it was going to be him... Jackson had this knack of producing things on a lower budget that didn't look like they were low budget, and approached movies with a practicality that was being dismissed in favour of green-screens.

I think Debs and I went to see The Fellowship of the Ring on opening night, and absolutely loved it. The casting was brilliant, the whole production amazing, and it looked like Middle Earth. It was what I imagined reading it.

Astounding.

As for how The Lord of The Rings has shaped my life? Well... When Debs and I got married, we didn't have a big wedding. Hell, the whole thing cost a fraction of what most weddings are these days. Let's just say that it was half the cost of most engagement rings or wedding dresses. Debs made her dress, and our wedding rings have elvish on them like the One Ring (just not as dark in its message). The ceremony itself was at a little registry office, and the music we chose at the wedding was a track from the Return of the King soundtrack where Aragorn sings when he is crowned. Gotta love Aragorn...

And then, when we were house hunting for our first ever house to buy rather than rent, we looked at so many houses. So many of them. We spent months looking, viewing house after house and none of them were right. We were just about to give up, when this one popped up on Rightmove and the price had come down a bit as it wasn't selling - dropping it just into our price range. We looked at the photos on the site and in the middle of the living room in the estate agent photos was a lifesized cardboard standee of Aragorn.

We had to give it a look. Debs thought if nothing else we could try to get the standee off of them...

As if fate determined it, the house was perfect and we put in an offer that week. (The standee had already moved to a new house by the time we viewed). And we're still here now.

Final bit of Lord of the Rings trivia for me, and how it's impacted my life. I was working at Ottakar's bookstore for many years, looking after the SF/Fantasy section. I loved working there, a really awesome company to work for. Anyway, I was on my lunch break and popped to the nearby Boots to grab some food, and I bumped into an old friend from University, from my Animation Degree, that I hadn't seen in years. This must have been 2003-ish, so I hadn't seen Annabel in nearly eight years. She had popped back to the city to see friends, and was about to jet off to the States. She asked what I was doing, and I said I worked in a bookshop... retail. Nothing glamorous. I asked what she'd been doing, and she said she'd been in New Zealand for a bit, but didn't say anything more... Was fantastic to see her, and off she went. Didn't give it another thought...

A few weeks later I picked up the Extended edition of The Two Towers. We watched the extended movie, then worked our way through the two disks of documentaries... and there, in the little section on the award-winning animation for Gollum, was Annabel. Pulling faces, and animating Gollum...

So that's what she was up to in New Zealand! And there was I working in retail. God, I felt like such a failure.

Anyway, Annabel, if you read this - awesome work, and proud of you.

Me? I really should have done better...