[Roll Your Own Life] The TV That Shaped Me (Part 3)

Twin Peaks (1990-1991, 2017)

Number 3 (chronologically) in my "Ten 10 Shows That Shaped Me" is probably my favourite TV series of all time. One that has had a massive impact on me, and continues to be an inspiration and influence on me to this day.

Twin Peaks.

After I'd left school and had started work at the archaeology unit, I spent my weekends watching a lot of movies. The local video stores had very cheap rentals, and I remember most weekends were spent with seven or eight movies out for a weekend of intense movie watching. I'd watch everything, from action, to horror, to detective movies, to arthouse. When something new came in, I'd give it a go.

I'd already experienced the wonders of David Lynch, having watched Eraserhead, Dune, and the amazing Blue Velvet, so when a fairly non-descript video surfaced at the video store for a weird little movie called Twin Peaks, and the back cover said it was "from the director of Blue Velvet" I thought I'd give it a go.

It was cool, and very strange. Like a soap opera with a murder mystery, but the camera seemed to linger too long on some scenes - especially the scenes of emotional grief - that it started to make you feel strangely uncomfortable.

Just when you're feeling confused at this town of characters, along comes FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, the Kyle MacLachlan that I'd recognised from Dune and Blue Velvet. This weirdly perky FBI agent, with an interest in the trees and coffee, with his almost Dudley Do-Right naiveté, really appealed to me.

And the weird just kept coming. The killer Bob, Mike the one-armed man, and weird goings on in the basement. I was kinda entranced and confused. But it came to a logical conclusion with this weird killer meeting his end. And then, there was an extra bit. A strange red room - the dead girl, Laura Palmer, was there. A small dancing man. All filmed backwards.

What the hell?

Months went by, and the Radio Times features Twin Peaks on the cover announcing that the cult US TV series was coming to the UK. Wait. There's a TV series? Of that weird movie I watched ages ago?

Well, that makes a lot more sense. Or does it?

Tuesday, 23rd October 1990, and BBC2 airs the 90min first episode of Twin Peaks. I'd seen it before with that movie, but the weirdness at the end, and the resolution to Bob was gone. I recorded it on my VHS machine, and eagerly awaited the next episode.

The following week, the story unfolded. But it wouldn't be until the week after that the strange scene in the red room appeared. By this time I was absolutely hooked.

I love movies and TV series where I don't know what's going to happen. While I can enjoy most things, if I can't see what's coming and it really takes me by surprise, I enjoy it so much more. And that's how it was with Twin Peaks. Every week I had no idea where it was going to go. My desire to be the cocky-charmer that David Addison was in Moonlighting had long been forgotten. Now, all I wanted to be was Dale Cooper. He was smart, inquisitive, and had an upstanding set of morals. What a legend.

I really was obsessed at this point. I bought the book (The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer) for clues to what was going on. I bought the awesome soundtrack. And by the time season two was airing, with its mind-blowing feature length opening episode, with the arrival of the Giant (or should that be, "The Fireman"?)... I was loving every second.

By the time I was back in education and on my BTEC, and one of the major projects was to create something graphically to explain something. Most people went for something normal like, how to fold a paper aeroplane. Me? Hell, no. I went for a massive graphic to try to explain who's who in Twin Peaks.

My BTEC project trying to map the relationships in Twin Peaks

Anyway, season 2 faltered a little when the studios insisted that Laura Palmer's killer should be revealed. David Lynch and Mark Frost's vision was more looking at the effect a young girl's death would have on a small town, and the revelations of her secret life - the moment they revealed and resolved the murder the series lost its way a little.

It quickly tried to bring in a new villain in the shape of Windom Earle, who has come to enact revenge upon Dale Cooper, while building up the weird mythology of the Black and White Lodges. I still loved it, and was gripped to the very last, agonising cliffhanger - "How's Annie?"

Oh my god. So good...

But that was it. It was over. I remained obsessed. I still wanted more, but there was little besides reading issues of Wrapped in Plastic and analysing (and over-analysing) the episodes over and over again.

There was the movie - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) which offered little resolution short of a weird dream sequence line - "The good Dale is in the Lodge and cannot leave". However, it introduced some new excellent characters - FBI Special Agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley - who I'd love to see more of. Instead of a sequel we were given the FBI's investigation into the Teresa Banks murder, in Deer Meadow, Washington, prior to the Twin Peaks series, and the events that lead up to Laura Palmer's murder. It was dark, horrific, and even more unsettling than the series. But it didn't do brilliantly in the box office, and Twin Peaks was, as Lynch said, "dead as a doornail."

I still loved the series, rewatched it a couple of times, and always wanted more.

Then, on the 3rd October 2014... over twenty years after Twin Peaks ended... David Lynch and Mark Frost simultaneously tweeted: "Dear Twitter Friends: That gum you like is going to come back in style! #damngoodcoffee"

Twin Peaks was back. Eighteen hours of what would become known as Twin Peaks: The Return. A direct continuation, set in the present day, looking at what has happened to the characters in the years that have passed and hopefully answering the questions that had bugged fans like me for years.

What we actually got was one 18-hour movie split into sections, punctuated by cool musical performances at the Roadhouse bar (including Nine Inch Nails, how could it go wrong). The agent Cooper we loved was gone, split into two - Dougie Jones, a child-like and confused replica inhabiting the life and body of a gambling and philandering insurance agent, and Mr C, the evil doppelgänger of agent Cooper.

There were strange moments that even the hardened Peaks fans would find weird, and then there was Episode 8. David Lynch does arthouse cinema on TV. After progressing the story a little, with Mr C almost meeting his end, we have the aforementioned performance by Nine Inch Nails, and then a flashback to the first atomic bomb test, unleashing the seed of Bob onto the world - ten minutes of weird flashing images, experimental film, and madness. After that, we have a weird black and white sequence of dirty people attacking a radio station, and the inhabitants of the White Lodge seeding Laura Palmer's existence with a strange frog-bug-thing.

The whole thing is beautiful, horrific, mesmerising, and above all, free. Every time I doubt what I'm doing. Every time I think "No one will like this, why should I bother" I think of Episode 8 of The Return. Did David Lynch think "Maybe this is too weird, I should make this more commercial"? No. He went with what he wanted to make.

By the end of The Return we'd had a sort-of reset of the Twin Peaks story, with a potential for going off and doing something new, with slightly different / alternate versions of the characters.

It's genius, but ends with another cliff hanger that has you wonder not only "What Year is this?" but also if we'll ever get a resolution/continuation.

I just hope I don't have to wait another 25 years to find out.

Stay Safe, have pie.

[Roll Your Own Life] The TV That Shaped Me (Part 2)

Moonlighting (1985 - 1989)

The second of my "10 TV shows that had an impact on me" is probably one that may surprise you. Expecting a whole load of SF/Fantasy series and along comes Moonlighting. As I mentioned last post, I watched a whole lot of TV. Just about anything I could absorb. While I was avidly watching series like "V", Doctor Who (especially the 5th Doctor), MacGyver, Street Hawk, Miami Vice, and the like, there was one series I thought I'd check out because I liked quirky detective series and the adverts made it look like it was going to be something special.

Turns out it was.

Moonlighting was really the first TV series I became super-obsessed with. I bought the soundtrack, taped the episodes on VHS, hunted out the songs in the massive catalogue of tunes David Addison referred to from my dad's collection of Atlantic soul classics, got the stonewash trenchcoat because Addison had one. Hell, there was just something about it. It was fast paced, quick dialogue, funny, dramatic, with a great couple of leads. Bruce Willis was what I wanted to be when I grew up (ironically, I now have a haircut like he has now) and Cybill Shepherd was cool, witty, and attractive (and usually filmed in soft focus for added effect), and took absolutely no BS.

But, on top of the funny crime solving drama that has become commonplace these days on TV (with things like Bones, Castle, Lucifer, etc.) it was radical TV. It broke the rules, it broke convention, and it broke the fourth wall. Before Deadpool or even Lovejoy had even considered turning to the camera and talking to the audience, Moonlighting did it often. It even started episodes with "cold opens" with David & Maddie (strangely, in character, not as Willis / Shepherd) sitting on the office desk talking to the audience about the upcoming episode.


Then it really broke convention with strange episodes. Two that always stand out is "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" with its extended (and gorgeously shot) black and white sequences, and intros that feature the last screen appearance of the legendary Orson Welles (telling you that your television wasn't faulty, it's supposed to be in black and white).

And "Atomic Shakespeare" where the cast do their version of the Taming of the Shrew. I always remember Addison (as Petruchio) entering the scene on a white horse, wearing RayBans (both he, and the horse) - and the horse has a BMW symbol on its side (as Addison always drove a BMW).

It was nuts, gorgeous to look at, and frequently you'd pan back and see the camera crew - and it was all intentional. It was just revolutionary at the time, and I loved every minute of it. Of course, once the sexual tension between David and Maddie was resolved in the middle of Season 3, and Cybill Shepherd's time on screen was reduced as she was off having children, and Bruce Willis' career was taking off after Die Hard... the focus of the series slipped more and more towards Agnes DiPesto and Herbert Viola, until it was finally cancelled in its fifth year.

Of course, even then it couldn't end without a fourth-wall breaking episode of David and Maddie running through the studios as the Blue Moon Detective Agency set was being dismantled, trying to stop the series' end.

Loved it. Awesome TV.

[Roll Your Own Life] The TV That Shaped Me (Part 1)

I was nearing the end of my "Games That Shaped Me" series of blog posts, looking at tabletop roleplaying games that had a massive impact on my life, when I was tagged in another one of these things on Facebook by T R Knight - who you'll remember from joining in #RPGaDAY a couple of years ago. Anyway, T R Knight tagged me with a similar thing but it was supposed to be ten images of vintage TV series that you loved, with no explanations or reason - just TV shows you loved.

Well, I was getting close to finishing the Games posts, and I was finding the daily blogging thing quite therapeutic in these trying and crazy times, so I thought I'd take the initial "TV Shows" prompt and run with it...

So, Ten TV Series that had an impact on my life. I'm going to do it in chronological order again (hopefully) and - bear in mind I watch(ed) an awful lot of TV - there will be some omissions... I've thought long and hard about these, but you may be surprised at my choices.

Here we go with number one of ten!

Sapphire and Steel (1979 - 1982)

As the earliest of the TV shows that had a major impact, I guess I should set up this point, and you'll see why I started watching this to begin with.

Most of the TV I watched in my dim and distant youth, short of the cool cartoons like Space Sentinels, Battle of the Planets, and so on, was the kinda thing my mum liked. She watched Doctor Who (mostly because she liked Jon Pertwee, and stopped watching it when Tom Baker took over), introduced me to The Man From UNCLE (because she knew I liked the James Bond movies) and The New Avengers. I watched science fiction series, mostly because I was obsessed with Star Wars, but I was happy watching most stuff - The Professionals, Man From Atlantis, Gemini Man, Invisible Man, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries, Fantastic Journey, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Logan's Run... Heck, I'd watch everything.

Then came Sapphire and Steel. I guess it could be called ITV's answer to Doctor Who. Two elemental time agents dispatched to deal with temporal irregularities where time itself would break through and things would go horribly wrong. It had Joanna Lumley in it (from The New Avengers) and David McCallum (I'd seen in The Invisible Man and The Man from UNCLE) - all series I used to watch. A science fiction series with those leads? Heck yes.

That first episode had me hooked. Adventure One (as it's known now) started with a couple of kids in a farm house whose parents had vanished through a crack in time after reciting the old nursery rhyme "Ring a Ring o' Roses". By the end of that first episode, when Sapphire's eyes were glowing blue, and they were reciting the rhyme backwards to prevent the crack opening again, I was glued to the TV.

Later serials were just as creepy. Adventure Two featured Sapphire's eyes going black, and an abandoned railway station and the ghosts of WWI soldiers. But Adventure Four turned up the creep factor even more with a strange faceless man, and weird things happening in old photographs.

The series came to an untimely end with Adventure Six, with Transient Beings trapping Sapphire and Steel in a motorway service station for eternity. It's a shame it finished there - apparently another series was planned, but both Lumley and McCallum had decided to call it quits.

We rewatched Sapphire and Steel a few years ago and it's still creepy and cool to this day. Sure it's a bit old and ropey in places, but it was genuinely cool and very different. It was certainly very different for its time.

Sapphire and Steel made a come back with Big Finish's audio dramas, with David Warner and Susannah Harker taking over the roles, and there have been a few planned revivals that fizzled out over the last few years.

Personally, I'd love to see a revival with Alice Eve and John Simm taking over the roles.

I remember a friend of ours had written a Sapphire and Steel tabletop roleplaying game using the Marvel Superheroes RPG as a base (the old TSR one), and even wrote to the series' creator P J Hammond to get his permission (which he got!), but nothing really came of it. I mean, it's a perfect idea for an RPG - characters playing different elements (as we also saw Silver and Lead in the TV series) with different abilities being sent to strange locations to stop temporal irregularities. It'd be great!

Until tomorrow, stay safe.

[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

-

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...

Stay Safe...

Stay Home!

[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...

[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...

[Roll Your Own Life] The Games That Shaped Me (Part 4)

Star Wars - The Roleplaying Game - West End Games (1987)

This, along with James Bond and the Ghostbusters RPG, constantly vie for the top spot in my personal "Greatest RPG of All Time" list. When I was a kid it was all about Star Wars. Star Wars was just about everything to me - when I first picked up Star Frontiers as the first RPG I ever bought and GM'd, it wasn't because it was a cool game (which it was). It was because I looked at that gorgeous cover and thought, "I could play Star Wars with that".

In an act of typically bad timing, just as most of my gaming group had gone off to universities around the country and the remaining members were cutting back on their gaming time (to have something called "a real life" - I know, right?) along comes the perfect game for me. A tabletop RPG of Star Wars, made by my favourite game publisher at the time. I bought just about everything they'd produced already - Paranoia, Ghostbusters, The Price of Freedom - and this partnering of publisher and property had me far too excited.

Upon release I purchased the core rulebook (see above), as well as the Star Wars Sourcebook (on the right), and was completely blown away by how cool they were. Most, if not all, of the RPGs I'd played in the past were completely black and white inside, so the punctuation of some gorgeous full colour inserts in the corebook was amazing. Especially the one that looked like a recruitment advert of the Imperial Navy.

The game system was basically a more complicated version of the D6 system that I'd played before with Ghostbusters, but not too much more complicated. It was fast, easy, and above all, fun. The players quickly created characters, tweaking the templates at the back to suit their own needs, and before we knew it we were playing in a galaxy far, far away.

The smuggler (Deeko Smiggins) piloting the Ballistic Wombat led the group of misfit rebels, tackling ridiculous odds and seeming to come away pretty unscathed. I think I may have let them progress a bit too quickly with experience, as I remember the ship dodging a complete attack wing of TIE Fighters pretty easily to sound of a dozen or so D6 clattering across the table.

Star Warriors slowed ship combat down a bit, a board game spin-off with advice for using it in the RPG, but strangely that was where my gaming of Star Wars (WEG) finished.

I think that may have been when my tabletop gaming came to a bit of an end in general for a while. I was busy writing those adventures for Ghostbusters for West End Games, was unemployed for a little while before I started working for the local council (thanks to being a gamer, I got my first job as the interviewer knew about D&D and knew it would help with my teamwork, map making, and puzzle solving) and it all kinda ground to a halt.

Shame...

Since then, I have purchased every incarnation of a Star Wars RPG - Wizards of the Coast's D20 version, the Star Wars Saga edition (gotta love those square books), and now the Fantasy Flight Games triple threat (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, Force and Destiny), and while each is very cool, none of them got me as over excited as that 1st Edition West End Games one. Heck, just last year my lovely wife managed to find me the West End Games' 2nd Edition at the charity shop she volunteers at. It's really nice, but again, I didn't feel that buzz like I did before.

Must have been something about the time and the game being just right for it. That 1st Edition and the Star Wars Sourcebook that came out with it are such stuff of legend that Fantasy Flight Games reissued them for their 30th Anniversary in a slipcase. Just proves I wasn't the only one who thought they were something special.

Maybe I can convince my GM to start up Star Wars again with that system, just for fun...

[Roll Your Own Life] The Games That Shaped Me (Part 3)

James Bond 007 Roleplaying Game - Victory Games (1983)

Oh boy. Number three in my list of seven tabletop roleplaying games that had a massive impact on me and my gaming is another one of my favourite games of all time. Victory Games' James Bond 007 RPG. It's hard to know where to begin with this one.

My gaming group had diminished a little as a huge chunk of them had vanished off to university, and I was looking for a game I could run with fewer players. Couple that with me being a massive fan of James Bond, it was an ideal choice. Little did I know what I was getting into.

The game is simply stunning and presented some revolutionary game design that has inspired game systems for years since. It ran brilliantly, and tackled aspects that you'd expect from being a secret agent in Bond's world - chases, shootouts, gambling, seduction, torture, and being an expert in high class luxury.

The supplements are something I absolutely adore. Each supplement (well, most of them anyway) came as a boxed set with an envelope of props marked "For Your Eyes Only", along with a mini GM screen, maps, and more. The added genius of it was it took the plots of the movies/books and turned them completely on their heads. If you went into an adventure and you were familiar with the movie, you could assume the way the plot was going to head - but it wouldn't do you any good. It updated the plots, twisted them around, and kept the players on their toes.

The "A View to A Kill" adventure - so darned cool

I ran a lot of the adventures - I seem to remember running For Your Eyes Only two or three times with different players, each with very different outcomes.

I managed to complete the collection a couple of years ago (though I still haven't tracked down an affordable copy of Assault! The tabletop battles game based around the end of You Only Live Twice) when I finally tracked down a relatively cheap copy of Octopussy.

It's still an awesome game, and one I've longed to revive in a new edition for many, many years. Heck, I've written to, called and emailed EON a few times, and even started to put together a pitch for a new Bond RPG... but I wonder if it, like Harry Potter, is an impossible quest.

One day maybe.

[Roll Your Own Life] The Games That Shaped Me (Part 2)

Ghostbusters - West End Games (1986)

Next up on the games that had a massive impact on me is another one of my favourite games of all time. Ghostbusters.

I was obsessed with Ghostbusters (the movie that is) and I desperately wanted to be Venkman when I grew up, so hearing that there was a roleplaying game? I was sold before I'd even looked at the back of the box.

The only disappointment for my youthful brain was the lack of character sheet. Looking back now I see it was a revolutionary work of genius, but despite the character sheet problem (that I remedied with some homegrown efforts) I could tell even then that the game was something special.

I mean, look at the thing - it was a work of perfect simplicity. It didn't need to be full colour, it didn't need anything except that logo on the front, and some dice. And one of those had the logo on it as well.

The thing about it was how quick and simple it was. The rules were possibly the most minimal thing I'd ever seen. And it introduced "Brownie Points", something that I'd never encountered before, allowing the players to fudge rolls, to tweak the outcomes and to generally make the story funnier, better and cooler.

The start of the Rules Chapter from
The Ghostbusters RPG
with thanks to www.gbfans.com

And story was what it was all about. No longer was it a simple dungeon crawl, it was about telling a cool (and funny) story. There were investigation elements, working out who the ghost was, what its typical behaviour was like, and then there was the fun of blasting the place to pieces with Proton Packs. And there was no dying. Buildings could be destroyed (and frequently did) and your characters would stagger out of the rubble in their underwear with a Wile E. Coyote dazed look on their faces.

There were adventures published in the Ghostmaster's rulebook, and what was a revelation, dozens of Story Hooks. Short adventure ideas that could be expanded to complete adventures. Brilliant.

We played Ghostbusters continually, I zipped through all of the Story Hooks in record time. We had some of the most bonkers characters (Coop's character of note was Mr. Oook, an orangutan with a Proton Pack) and some of the craziest adventures ever (I do remember the published adventure "Hot Rods of the Gods" was particularly wacky!).

Of course, without adventures (we'd gone through all the ones published) I had to design my own. And so I did something I hadn't considered before. I contacted the publisher...

A little self portrait I did at the height of
my Ghostbusters writing in 1987

I wrote a letter to West End Games and gushed about how cool and funny their game was, and they kindly supplied me the necessary release forms for budding authors. I saw this as a huge "Go For It!" sign, and promptly set to work.

The problem I had was that my life revolved around gaming and watching movies. So a lot of what I started writing was parodying movies in some way. Also, this was at a time that may seem alien to some... it was B.I. - Before Internet.

Writing was a laborious task involving a huge electric typewriter (not electronic, just electric) that had fans and stuff built in to keep it from overheating. It was about the size of a Volkswagen and when you needed to change the ink ribbon, the front lifted up like the hood of said car. Everything was typed up (double spaced), corrections made with those little Tippex Correction Strips, and then it was all photocopied and posted as a huge mass of A4 paper by airmail to New York to be read by those cool guys at West End Games.

So, what nonsense was I turning out?

The cover I did for Spooky Science.
This is a black and white photocopy
from 1986

I wrote two big adventures. The first was called "Spooky Science", a parody of Call of Cthulhu, Indiana Jones and Weird Science. 45,000 words of bizarreness where an automated computer system attached to the containment grid goes mad, a fitness cult open a portal to unleash their god, Yogurt-Soggoth, onto an unsuspecting New York, and the Ghostbusters have to escape from the Temple of Yogurt in an epic chase involving shopping trollies. I seem to remember the finale involving New York being flooded in yogurt, and the Ghostbusters arrive on the scene on wet-bikes.

Flicking through the photocopies of the manuscript that I'd recently uncovered, it isn't baaaad...  it's just filled with typos, and it's a little derivative. Mulu Pram, the high priest of Yogurt-Soggoth was an obvious rip-off, but it was a bit of a laugh, and a satirical dig at the fitness craze that was big at the time. I blame Olivia Newton-John. Hell, we all loved Olivia Newton-John at that time.

Anyway, I packaged it up, sent it off, then waited the expected three months for a reply from WEG.

I called New York, which in the days before Skype and Facetime was a costly and scary affair from the UK, and talked to someone at West End Games to confirm it had arrived okay. Then, a couple of months later, I received a reply. It was very positive, but explained that they'd already published a food-based adventure (with the first official scenario, Ghost Toasties) and I saw it as an encouragement to go ahead and write more.

The cover I'd supplied for Back to
Transylvania. Really, not good... (1987-8)

The second of the adventures I finished was "Back to Transylvania", a bizarre time travelling adventure where, through a freak accident in history, Dracula had started a vampire plague and the Ghostbusters had to travel back to 1859 in a time-travelling DeLorean to take on the dark master himself, to prevent the world becoming overrun by vampires.

Again, it drew heavily from Hammer movies, Back to the Future and even had a moment where the filming of the TV series Moonlighting was interrupted and Bruce Willis became a vampire (the scene that initially tips the Ghostbusters off that there's something strange in the neighbourhood).

The scenario also introduced new rules for having non-human Ghostbusters (mainly to include Scooby-Doo as a player-character) and a basic magic system.

Again, I photocopied it, and posted it off to New York, and eagerly awaited a response.

And again, I had a really nice response from the guys at West End. I'm sure it was Greg Costikyan who wrote to me (or it may have been Bill Slavicsek) to let me know what they thought. I have the letter somewhere (though it's in a pile of stuff that has moved since the "moving everything out of mum's house" thing happened), but I remember what it said even now, nearly 25 years later.

It said that "you can obviously write, but..." and then went on to explain that Bruce Willis and Scooby-Doo's owners may sue for using them in a comedy adventure like this. While I understood what they were saying, about not using real people or copyrighted characters, the key thing was that letter said I could write.

I'm sure it was Greg Costikyan (and if it wasn't I'm sorry, and this is directed at you) who wrote to me, and without that positive reply I would never have continued writing. I'd have just packed it in there and then, got a boring job in retail (this is called irony) or something, and given up. So whoever it was who wrote to me, thank you.

The cover to an adventure I didn't finish, based
on John Landis' fake movie title
"See You Next Wednesday" (1988)

Encouraged by this, I kept going, but I didn't get every far. I started work on a new scenario called "See You Next Doomsday" which was going to be a fairly basic zombies and "Evil Dead" inspired story, as I'd just seen Evil Dead II and the idea of a Sam Raimi style comedy-horror with the Ghostbusters sounded awesome to me. The title came from John Landis' "See You Next Wednesday", a non-existent movie that appeared in the background of a lot of Landis' films, which in turn inspired our RPG group's name.

I came to a grinding halt a handful of pages in, when I was inspired to do a different game... based upon the movie "A Nightmare on Elm Street" I ran a proper horror game (strangely, using the Indiana Jones RPG system from the original TSR game) which involved going into peoples' dreams and facing their night-terrors. It seemed to go down pretty well, so I thought about changing it and doing it a little more light-heartedly as a Ghostbusters scenario.

Again, taking its title from another John Landis movie, I started work on "Into the Nightmare", but real life interrupted, and I found myself a real job. It wouldn't be until many years later that I would go back to writing RPGs based on dreams...

Since then, I've been able to continue my obsession with Ghostbusters with a project I did for EN Publishing for their WOIN system. I thought I'd do my take on Ghostbusters with Spirits of Manhattan. Must admit, I loved going back to that comedic style of writing. Just great fun. Check it out - you too can drive around Manhattan in a converted Pope-mobile and face a giant building sized Edgar Allan Poe. 

[Disclaimer - Some of this post was originally featured on this blog back in 2012]

[Disclaimer 2 - My wish to bring the Ghostbusters RPG back with a new edition has not changed.]

[Roll Your Own Life] The Games That Shaped Me (Part 1)

My last twenty posts have been one of those Facebook meme things where I was challenged to list twenty albums that had an impact on my life. It was really quite a challenge as well, but fun trying to think of the music that really changed me.

Right in the middle of that challenge, I was tagged in another one by Anthony Boyd who helps moderate and run the annual #RPGaDAY initiative. This time, I was tasked with listing the games that had the biggest impact on my life. Luckily it's not twenty this time, but D8+2, and I rolled a 5. So the next seven posts will be the tabletop RPGs that had the biggest impact on my life.

So here goes with the first (I'm going to try to do these in chronological order if possible).

Star Frontiers - TSR (1982)

I've written a few times about Star Frontiers on my blog. After my first couple of games being introduced to tabletop roleplaying games, starting with Traveller, and then moving onto Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, when I went to the local game shop - an hour's bus ride away, and hidden in a secret store above a picture framers and gallery - I saw that cover. Okay, so it's a bit beaten up in that picture, but I wanted an image with the cool title text on it.

But look at that cover. It's freakin' gorgeous. It's just oozing potential, crashed spaceships, cool aliens, laser guns, alien planet, freakin' cool goggles. Woo! I was sold. Straight away.

First game I purchased, and we played it a LOT. Our campaigns were epic and mostly silly, involving powered armour, whole armies of Sathar agents, vast space battles, and ridiculous media tie-ins that I added like The Terminator, Transformers, and the like.

The way I played it was far from serious, but it was epic and crazy fun, and I loved it.

When Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space came out, everything changed (including the game system) and we were fuelled with more to inspire bigger and bolder games. That was 1985, and it wasn't long before a huge chunk of my gaming group went off to University the following year.

Still have very, very fond memories of Star Frontiers, and often wonder why no one has tried to bring it back? I mean, Gamma World, TSR's post-apocalypse mutant game that came out before Star Frontiers has had seven editions by different publishers. Why hasn't Star Frontiers seen the same love?

[Roll Your Own Life] The Music That Shaped Me (Part 20)

Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile (1999)

This is it, the last entry in my Twenty Albums that had an impact on me meme that I was tagged in many, many moons ago. And I thought for the last one, I'd save my favourite album of all time. The one album I really couldn't do without - the one album I could never tire of.

Nine Inch Nails' album, The Fragile.

For me, it is the perfect album. It's long (2 CDs designated Left and Right) and contains a wide variety of musical styles. The first track, Somewhat Damaged, builds by layering industrial noises to incorporate Trent Reznor's softer vocals, to eventually ending with Reznor's shouting "Where the f*** were you?" over deep noisey guitars.

A few tracks into the album and we're presented with my favourite song of all time - The Wretched. Best listened to with The Frail instrumental track before it serving as a build-up to an angry shout at the world and how things just suck...

"The clouds will part and the sky cracks open,
And God himself will reach his f***ing arm through,
Just to push you down, just to hold you down.
Stuck in this hole with the sh** and the piss,
and it's hard to believe it could come down to this..."

"It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to,
It didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?"

God I love that track.

Just after that we're treated to the first proper single of the album, We're in this Together, which Debs and I always listen to when the world seems to kick us in the ass. Amazing .

I could go through the rest of the album like this and rave about how great every track is, but I won't. It's perfect. There are no bad tracks on The Fragile.

And then, Trent Reznor had to top it off with another couple of versions of the album. I mean, who else has three versions of the same album on their iPod for walking in to work? The Fragile: The Definitive Edition was released in 2017, with additional tracks and slightly extended versions of a handful of others. And then there's The Fragile: Deviations, an instrumental version of the album, with instrumental versions of all the tracks with vocals, and slightly different versions of all the instrumental ones (if that makes sense)? Anyway, it's different. It's great. And essential for a sad Nails-fanboy like me.

(I post this just as Nine Inch Nails have released another two albums of instrumental work for free to see us through the hard times of virus isolation. God, I love Nine Inch Nails. Thank you Trent.)

[Roll Your Own Life] The Music That Shaped Me (Part 19)

Thirty Seconds to Mars - The Is War (2009)

Here's where there may be a lot of people who follow me on Facebook who suddenly think I've lost all cool and credibility. Not that I really had any. Yes, Thirty Seconds to Mars.

God, I loved Thirty Seconds to Mars. I first saw the video for Attack on MTV and thought "Isn't that guy the one from Fight Club?" and sure enough, Jared Leto was that singer. The track that followed, The Kill (Bury Me) was played all the time on MTV thanks to its cool video tribute to The Shining, and I remember asking Debs for that album, A Beautiful Lie, for Christmas that year. Had no idea what the rest of it was going to be like, but I really liked the singles.

The album was great, and after weeks of playing it a LOT, I tracked down their eponymous first album - which, strangely, I liked even more. A Beautiful Lie sounded like it had taken some influence from The Cure, while the first album felt a bit more U2. There is one track on that first album, The Mission, that has been a constant inspiration for my RPG, WILD.

"I opened up my head inside and find another person's mind..."
"Into the wild..."

Again, I listened to those albums a lot. and followed their fanbase, The Echelon, and kept track of Jared Leto's social media. There was a call out for vocal samples for their next album, and even photos for the cover (the tiger image above was the default cover, but 2000 fan photos were also used as covers - I don't think the ones Debs and I submitted were used).

This Is War is a crazily powerful album. Fuelled by the EMI lawsuit, it's filled with anger, operatic shouts, Queen-like stomping, and cinematic moments. My favourite track is easily Stranger in a Strange Land which still has me questioning why Jared Leto hasn't made that jump into film scores.

On November 25th, 2010, I drove us all the way down to Brighton to see them as part of the Into The Wild tour, and it was bloody amazing.

The next album is pretty awesome too, Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams. While promoting this album I spotted Jared Leto tweeting about being at Soho Sq in London if anyone else wanted to go, and I messaged Debs instantly. Crazy that we were, within an hour we were on a train and headed to London where a group of fans had gathered. The band arrived, and played an impromptu flash gig for about thirty minutes before they rushed off to a waiting car and before the cops came and dispersed the crowd.

Jared Leto in his full-on Jesus look at Soho Square in London. Photo by me (standing on a bench)

We went to see them again 21st November 2013 at the Nottingham Arena as part of the Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams Tour, which was cool (and certainly easier to get to than Brighton for us). A tour where they added circus-style acts to spice things up on stage. 

And that's about it. Their last album, America, felt like a massive disappointment after the cool and edgy music that came before it. With weird collaborations with other artists, strangely looped synths and autotuned vocals, it just didn't do it for me. There were a couple of really stand-out tracks, and Monolith once again made me question why Jared Leto isn't doing epic film scores. 

With the departure of Tomo Miličević during that tour, leaving just Jared and Shannon Leto as the band, I wonder where they will go next. Hopefully, back to their roots...

[Roll Your Own Life] The Music That Shaped Me (Part 18)

Rob Dougan - Furious Angels (2002)

We finally hit the 2000's in my "20 Albums that had an impact on me" thing that was going around Facebook. This one's a bit like one of my previous posts - the one for Bush's Sixteen Stone - where I took a chance on an album with very little knowledge of it, and it turned out to be amazing.

I have to admit, I'm a big fan of The Matrix. I love all of the movies, the anime, the comics, and even liked the first video game (never played the Path of Neo, or Matrix Online). But I guess my first exposure to the music of Rob Dougan was The Matrix. I had a couple of his tracks from the soundtrack albums, and I remember being back in that Virgin Megastore (where we picked up the Bush album) and seeing the rather cool cover for Rob Dougan's album Furious Angels.

I don't know what did it, but I decided to take a chance on it. Maybe it's because it was two discs and the second disc was all instrumental, I figured even if I didn't like the vocal tracks I could listen to the instrumental ones, imagine I'm in the Matrix a bit more, and it would be great music to have on while I was writing.

However, the first disc, the one with the vocals, is just as awesome. I'd not heard Rob Dougan's vocals before, so when the first vocal track, the title track from the album, started up, I was kinda stunned. A strange, gravelly and defeated sound, like an energetic Tom Waits, with lyrics that often sounded like he was spitting them out through gritted teeth.

"It's not like you stayed at my side
Or you called me a priest
You searched through my mouth
To check for gold teeth
You were pawning my shoes as I bled
You left me for, left me for, left me for dead."

Fantastic stuff. With club-like drum machine rifts, mixed with an orchestral score that takes inspiration from Elgar and Chopin, with those gritty vocals. Amazing.

After that, Rob Dougan kinda vanished. He's resurfaced recently with some studio recordings - massive orchestral pieces with choirs. Must check that out.

Stay safe!