Sidequest: Every TTRPG Played 31-40

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

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

Every TTRPG I've Played 1-10

Every TTRPG I've Played 11-20

Every TTRPG I've Played 21-30

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

31) Buffy The Vampire Slayer / Angel

Cover of Eden Studios's Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG

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

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

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

32) Deadlands

Cover of classic Deadlands RPG by Pinnacle

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

33) Terra Primate

Cover of Terra Primate by Eden Studios

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

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

34) Farscape

The cover of the Farscape RPG from AEG

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

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

35) GURPS/Hellboy

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

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

36) Conspiracy X 2.0

Cover of Conspiracy X 2.0 from Eden Studios

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

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

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

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

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

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

38) Fiasco

Cover of Fiasco from Bully Pulpit Games

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

39) Star Wars (Fantasy Flight Games)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epic. 

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

#RPGaDAY2023 - DAY TWENTY-NINE: Most memorable ENCOUNTER

 This one's a tricky one. Day Twenty-Nine asks about the most memorable encounter. Back when #RPGaDAY began I talked about our old Call of Cthulhu game where one of the player characters had been forceably retired, only to return as the big bad. 

It's still a very memorable encounter, though my thoughts are drawn to that Tales from the Loop game again. After failing to stop the explosion of the Loop facility as teenagers (play progressing through Things from the Flood), there's nothing more memorable than your teenage character's mother appearing, mutated and evil, with crab-like legs and a host of mutated minions under her control. 

Epic. 

#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! 

#RPGaDAY2020 - DAY THREE: "THREAD"

#RPGaDAY2020 is now on Day Three, and the prompt is THREAD. 

We're playing a couple of games at the moment (Things from the Flood and Changeling: The Lost), both with different GMs, but both of them are running the games with a brilliantly open-world way of managing the plot-threads. Both of our GMs have said that plots are ticking away at their own speed, progressing and advancing with or without our intervention. Something I really love in these games.

Of course, I'm sure our GMs thought we were a lot smarter than we really are when they started weaving all of these plot-threads through the games. There have been a few occasions where we've missed something completely, a plot has been resolved by an NPC because we've become distracted by a different element of the setting, or just gone off for a meal or a date - accidentally forgetting about the coming apocalypse in one case!

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

Tales From The Loop - Fria Ligan (2017)

The final entry on my "Games That Shaped Me" little blog series is the most recent one too. I've tried to make it as chronological as possible, and this is definitely the game that has had a big impact on me. You're probably already familiar with the game set in the 1980s where a mysterious company has built a CERN-like particle accelerator style facility known as The Loop. It's the 80s you remember, kids on bikes, walkmans, VHS-tapes, skateboards and so on. But it's "the 80s that never was", so the world is the same, but there are robots, anti-grav vehicles, and weird science experiments that have unleashed dinosaurs and portals onto the rural landscape.

Based on the amazing paintings and art book of Simon Stålenhag, the art alone was to sell the game to me, but then the reviews started appearing and it was obvious that the game was something special.

Why did it have such an impact?

I grew up playing tabletop games in my teens, and so you could kinda call me an old-school gamer. I was used to pages and pages of rules, options, systems, and intricate details of how combat or car chases or crazy science works. Combat turns, rounds, initiative and the like...

Then along comes this game. This simple, beautiful game.

I mean, Character Creation is 16 pages. And 8 of those are full page descriptions of the Archetypes.

The whole game system is on 12 pages. And these are heavily illustrated with the gorgeous art.

Okay, I don't want to name and shame anyone so I'll pick a game I designed. The Doctor Who RPG, in its most recent incarnation (12th Doctor) has 46 pages of character creation, and 51 pages of rules. And I thought when I was working on Doctor Who that it was rules light, and I think it was for the time! I guess it is when you compare it to something like 5e D&D with 154 pages of character creation (just in the Player's Handbook). 

I read Tales from the Loop and thought "I need to rethink my life choices!" 

Okay, so Loop has a great system, but sometimes actually succeeding at a task is hard (nothing like rolling nine D6 and not getting a single success) but that's helped with the way you can push a roll, use your Pride, or take a condition to succeed. And you're playing children. So battling a security robot with a stick, a water pistol and a flashlight is going to be tough. 

It has certainly shaken up my game design. I guess at my age I can't be bothered to read pages upon pages of rules. I want it to be simple, quick, and not take me out of the story, while still influencing the narrative. Something I hope the Doctor Who RPG does anyway.

Looking at the rules for WILD I've been working on, the simplicity of Tales From The Loop (and to come extent Blades In The Dark) have certainly made me consider what you need to detail. At the moment, the complete rules for WILD run to about 10 pages. While it's a far cry from the awesome games that are being produced on a single page (I don't think I can ever be smart enough to do that), I feel this is a step in the right direction for me. 

We played Tales from the Loop for ages last year and it lead to some really cool and quite tense gaming - something I haven't encountered since those old Kult games. We took a break for some Aegean and Scum & Villainy, but have recently returned to Tales From The Loop - this time set in the late 80's ready to progress into its sequel game, Things From The Flood - where the Loop has closed after something bad has happened, and weird creatures are emerging from the floodwaters. Awesome

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Well, that's the last of my seven Games That Shaped Me entries. I've just been challenged to do something similar with TV Series, which is going to be really difficult considering the amount of TV I've absorbed over the years...

Stay tuned...

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