#RPGaDAY 2019 - DAY 12: FRIENDSHIP

Red Spartan vs Blue Spartan (HaloClix) - custom Autocratik dice thanks to www.chimericdesigns.co.uk

Day Twelve of #RPGaDAY for 2019 is FRIENDSHIP. I've been pondering what to write for this one, and my amazing wife suggested that I talked about character friendship, rather than player friendship. After all, I've mentioned many times on my blog about "The Eight" - the group of friends I used to game with from my school days who have remained the most awesome friends I could imagine to this day.

But there are some friendships that are formed in game between characters that are pretty powerful too. I remember our Mage game when one of the characters was killed, it was a truly devastating moment for the other two players and their characters. While that game has finished, we've found that the friendships formed between the characters can be just as strong - the sense of connection our apprentice Jedi had was almost as close as those Mage characters. And despite any disagreements our characters had during our Aegean game, we'd gladly leap to each other's side when our little village came under threat.

Powerful stuff. You don't get anything like that playing Risk...

#RPGaDAY 2019 - DAY 1: "FIRST"

The figure is a customised version of one of those Dr Who Micro Universe figures to look a bit like me...
The dice are awesome and created by the amazing Chimeric Designs 

And so it begins - welcome to August, and the start of another #RPGaDAY. Unlike previous years where each day had a question to answer, this time we're just given a single word prompt to inspire us to write, draw, paint, blog and vid anything we like to spread the positive word of tabletop RPGs.

The first word for #RPGaDAY 2019 is (aptly) "FIRST".

But first what?

I figured I'd go with the basics and post the first RPG I ever played. I'd gone 'round to a friend's house in the early 80's, expecting the usual Saturday afternoon of playing games on the ZX Spectrum, trying to program our own version of light cycles, when he greeted me at the door with, "We're going over to JR's to do something different..."

I had no idea what was going on, but went along with it. At JR's I was introduced to a whole new concept of playing games. Some very interesting and confusing little black books, and no clue what I was supposed to do...

Traveller, 1st Edition. Not my books from the 80s, but a good friend's (Mole's)
who left them under my care when he moved to the other side of the planet
(Don't worry, they're still being looked after!)

I don't think I said much, just sitting there absorbing what was going on for most of that first session, and it was only a week later that I was joining JR's group for playing AD&D. The rest, as they say, is history...

#RPGaDAY2018 - DAY 29: Share a friendship you have because of RPGs

On the final stretch now! Day twenty-nine of #RPGaDAY2019 asks us to share a friendship you have because of RPGs. That's one of the great things about tabletop gaming, that it's not (normally) a solo affair, and the players we game with can become some of the closest friends we have.

There are so many I could list. Most of the people I know on social media are gamers, but the best of my friends have been from my old pre-internet days of gaming. I had a few friends at school, but when one introduced me to tabletop gaming, and my first game of Traveller with some of his friends, my circle of friends grew. We'd game two or three nights a week, and most weekends.

The core of "The Eight", l-r Bragi, JR, Me, Mole, Pete, Coop, Fordy, and at the front Milo
(Not pictured - John)
(Photo, early 90s)

We were "The Eight" as we called ourselves, though at times our number was more. When some of the group moved away for University, we returned to playing during vacations, and always kept in touch. Now, thirty-five years or more later, we're still in contact. Always there if one of us is in need.

So, thank you guys. I don't think I'd have lasted this far without you.

Until tomorrow, everyone stay multi-classy!

#RPGaDAY 2016 - Day Fourteen: Dream Team

Dream Team of people you used to game with. That's an easy one. I'd love to get the old band back together. We were The Eight. We were the Yorkshire equivalent of the Losers Club in a Stephen King novel. Together we could take on the world.

The Eight, or at least seven of us. Mole, Milo, Me, Bragi, Coop, JR and Fordy, at one of our reunions
(real names not used to protect the innocent)
(Ironically, missing two, John and Pete)

I haven't gamed with them since the early 90's, so it'd be interesting to see how gaming with them would compare.

Otherwise, I'd love to get the two groups I am in at the moment together. To see how the players of Star Wars and Changeling would work as a whole. They're all excellent gamers, and I'm sure it'd be amazing.

#RPGaDAY 2016 - Day Seven: What aspect of RPGs has had the biggest effect on you?

Wow, let's go for the big questions!

Okay. RPGs have been a part of my life for a long, long time. And RPGs have had a major impact on my life in four, very distinct and life changing ways.

First of all, I'll just get this out of the way, I was a nerd as a kid. Slightly dumpy, weird looking kid, and I didn't really have many friends. I had a couple of really close friends, and we hardly did anything without each other. But RPGs changed all of that. Thanks to the D&D group(s) I was in, which merged into a great RPG group, I had the best friends ever. Especially through those awkward teenage years when social standing is weird and bizarre, we stuck together - we gamed constantly, and now, thirty-plus years later, we're still the best of friends. We may be miles apart, spread across the world in different continents, we're always there for each other and rally to each other's aid if necessary.

We're like veterans of a war, only we were fighting orcs, sathar and broo. The bonds formed in those years of adventuring have made us the best of friends. To the Eight (and more) - Bragi, Mole, Milo, Cooper, John, Pete, JR, Fordy, and the extended family of Gladys, Norm, and more... You're all legends, and I'll always have your backs.

Secondly, I got my first job thanks to RPGs. Interviewing for a job in cartography working for the local council's Nature Conservation group, where I'd eventually end up amending Ordnance Survey maps to highlight sites of importance, I was my usual nervous self.

The interview went okay, and I got on well with the two who were doing the interviewing - Mark, and Doug. And I got the job! Hurrah!

Later, working with Doug, we were chatting and he revealed that the position came down to two finalists - me, and someone else. And I pipped the other to the post due to my playing tabletop roleplaying games. Doug said that thanks to RPGs, he knew that not only could I draw maps, but I knew how to work in a team (party) and could think my way out of problems.

Thirdly, the dumb response is that RPGs have certainly had a major effect on me as I now write RPGs. Livin' the dream!

Fourth, and probably most importantly, I met my wife at an RPG session. You can't have any bigger effect on your life than to meet your lifelong partner. So, thanks Debs, for being not only awesome, but also being a gamer.

Okay, much to do. Until tomorrow. Stay multi-classy!

#RPGaDAY 2016 - Day Six: Most amazing thing a game group did for their community.

Clipping from the local paper in the late 80's. Names have been removed just in case anyone doesn't
want to be associated with me. I'm at the back on the right, grinning like a loon.

I'm taking the question as referring to a game group I've been in rather than one anywhere in the world who have done far more than our tiny effort, but it was quite an effort none-the-less.

I've written about it before on my blog, but back in the late 80's my little game group decided to play a marathon session of multiple games for 90 hours, sponsored to raise money for the local church roof. I know, D&D in the 80's raising money for a church?

Anyway, check out my earlier blog post as part of my "Roll Your Own Life" series to hear tales of muscle cramps, hallucinations, and strange visitors.

We may have only raised £150, but in converted to today's money, that's about £300, which isn't bad for sitting on our butts eating junk food for five days...

Until tomorrow, stay multi-classy and keep good friends.

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 31: Favourite Non-RPG thing to come out of gaming...

This is it - the final day of #RPGaDAY2015 - and possibly the final #RPGaDAY post ever (we'll see).
It is "Favourite non-RPG thing to come out of RPGing".

In my video I mention a couple of things - how I got my first job thanks to gaming, and meeting my lovely wifey.

In addition to all this, I must also mention my old gaming group. The Eight as we used to call ourselves (even though there were more than eight of us at many times).

We started gaming as two different groups and came together over the years. Through many years of school and beyond, these guys have always been a huge part of my life. I've mentioned them many times on this blog, and although we're divided by geography, we always know that we're keeping a look out for each other... ready to rally to support if any of us are in need.

So, without RPGing in school, not only would I have never got that job in the council, working for Nature Conservation and Archaeology, which lead to me going to University, and meeting my wife who is also a gamer. But also, I wouldn't have had the amazing friends and support that I needed.

-

I guess that's why I started RPGaDAY to begin with last year.

Playing roleplaying games may seem like a sad and nerdy thing to those unfamiliar with it, but it changed and shaped my life for the better.

When I keep going online and finding such negativity, I just wanted to do something positive.

But, of course, someone didn't even like me doing that. Yes, daily disliker - you troll - I had noticed you systematically disliking my videos every day. It's that sort of behaviour that made me want to do something.

-

As to whether RPGaDAY returns for another year will depend upon a few things...

If the RPG playing community want to do it again?
If I can come up with some new questions that people actually like (and won't complain about)?
If I can justify the amount of time and effort it takes to do this.

RPGaDAY inspired me to get back into writing WILD, right at the moment when I was feeling the most unmotivated. And I'm really glad about that. But I can't help but feel that the last two months of video making, editing, planning, scheduling, and so on, could have been spent writing!!

We'll see...

If you want to do it again next year, comment!
If you have ideas for questions, comment!
If you think it's had its day, let me know...

Until next post - which may be a while, I'm going to spend some time away from the interwebs to recover and do something productive - be good to each other... and stay multi-classy!

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 16: Longest Game Session

It's really a sign of the times when a long game session for an oldie like me is about three hours. I'm in a game once a fortnight, and find it hard to squeeze in the time to do it. Gone are the days of my youth - when I was a teenager we used to play four or five nights a week, and afternoons at weekends. Just couldn't get enough of it.

It's weird but I can still picture the rooms we used to game in, at various houses... the subdued lighting, the DM screen, the 8pm cup of tea.

We just wanted to keep on playing.

One day we had the crazy idea of playing non-stop for 90-hours to raise money for charity...

Many thanks to Lynne Hardy for helping with today's video!

I've written about our marathon before as part of my "Roll Your Own Life" blog posts, you can read about it here!

Whostory

Sorry I haven’t written a blog post in a while, there has been a good reason that I’ll come to in a minute. However, it’s a bit of a special day today, and I couldn’t let the occasion go by without writing a little about the cause of all of these celebrations – Doctor Who.

The Doctor Who jigsaw that's
currently in my loft...

On the very day I’m writing this, it will have been exactly fifty years since the first episode of Doctor Who aired on BBC TV. Before you say anything, no I didn’t see it. I’m not that old. I just act like it sometimes… No, my first memory of Doctor Who is the legendary Jon Pertwee driving Bessie about. I can’t have been that old, but my mum was a bit of a Pertwee fan from his other roles, so I have a memory of her having it on TV and watching it on our old Rediffusion set, complete with the dial on the wall to change the channels. I had a jigsaw (which I still have) that appeared recently in the massive BBC publication – the Doctor Who Vault, and watched intermittently, but I don’t think I was old enough to actually take in what was happening or to follow a complete story.

Strangely enough, considering the amount of horror movies I watch now, I was never very good with scary stuff as a kid. I was a bit of a wuss. In fact, I could write a whole blog post about the traumas of a certain holiday in north Wales, in a little cottage next to a cemetery, where I could hear my parents watching The Omen after I’d gone to bed. But that’s a whole different story. Needless to say, when the classic and awesome Hinchcliffe and Holmes era of Doctor Who kicked in, with Tom Baker, I was too much of a wuss to watch. All it took was a shot of the decaying Master and that was enough for me. It wouldn’t be until much later that I started watching Doctor Who again.

There was a certain feeling of a televisual event in 1981. It was announced that Tom Baker was leaving Doctor Who, and it felt like everyone in the country was going to tune in for his final story, Logopolis. I was older, wiser, and less of a scaredy-cat, so like millions of others in the UK I tuned in. That was probably the moment I really discovered Doctor Who. Peter Davison’s first story, Castrovalva, really marked the start of me watching week after week to follow the story.

My copy of the old FASA Doctor Who RPG
Signed by Tom Baker.

Thanks to one of The Eight, my old roleplaying group from school, John introduced me to some of the classic stories I’d not seen. John has to be one of the biggest Who fans I’ve known (and I’ve known and encountered many) but he approached the series in a very appreciative way. He also was our Call of Cthulhu “Keeper” and ran a really good Who RPG game using the old FASA RPG. His experience of running Cthulhu, paired with his love of the Hinchcliffe and Holmes era lead to a particularly cool and creepy investigative game.

However my love of Doctor Who would falter a bit by 1986. For two glorious years my young and impressionable teenage eyes were mesmerised by a veritable vision called Perpugilliam Brown. When the lovely Peri left the Doctor’s side in the middle of Trial of a Time Lord, I was devastated. I’d grown up watching an awful lot of TV, so when they replaced Peri with Mel, I couldn’t get the image of Violet Elizabeth from Just William out of my head. I watched the first episode of Mel, and I just couldn’t face it. My beloved Peri was no longer on screen, the appeal had gone, and I stopped watching. (I should, however, point out that I have since watched many of the Mel episodes. Such is the fickle nature of youth!)

It wouldn’t be until two years later I’d try the series again. John had returned to the hometown during one of the holidays from University, and urged me to try watching Doctor Who. I think his exact words were, “You should watch it! The new companion is Ace and she keeps wanting to blow things up!” So I did. I tuned in to catch the final episode of Silver Nemesis, and I was back – watching every week until that fateful final episode of Survival.

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace — we’ve got work to do!"

-

Setting TARDIS controls to 1996, it had been a pretty quiet time for the Doctor, but the announcement of the TV Movie produced another sense of televisual event. It was something that simply had to be seen, though a lot had changed both with the Doctor and myself. No longer living at home, I’d moved nearly 200 miles to go to art college (now a University), and was living in a terraced house in the city with my future wife. I remember her initial reluctance to watch it, but I had a strange curiosity. Maybe it was a sense of nostalgia, the memory of sitting in my bedroom on Saturday evenings, with my bacon and chips (as we always had every Saturday) watching Doctor Who on my little portable TV while my parents watched something else in the living room.

Needless to say, we both enjoyed it. Sure, it had its flaws, but McGann was excellent, and it still is one of the best looking TARDIS console rooms ever in my opinion. But once again, for a while, Doctor Who had vanished, and things went quiet.

--

By the time the publicity started for the revival in 2005, life had progressed again. I was married and we were both working in Ottakar’s, possibly my favourite job to date. Looking after the SF / Fantasy section, I’d been given free reign to order in roleplaying games, and started to stock Big Finish CDs. With the announcement of Russell T. Davies’ revival of Doctor Who, you couldn’t help but get caught up in the wave of excitement. The shop already had a full sized replica Dalek, and for years I’d listened to kids asking their parents what it was.

Along with most of the country, we watched that first episode – “Rose”, introducing a new generation to the Doctor. Christopher Eccleston was fantastic, and RTD made the genius decision of following Rose, the companion, rather than the Doctor, giving the new generation of viewers a character they could empathise with, to experience the weird and the danger with, and to gradually get to know the Doctor – this changed Doctor, visibly haunted by unseen events from the Time War. We watched and enjoyed. By The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances it was obvious that the series was going to be huge, and by Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways I was completely hooked.

Nicola Bryant looking beautiful,
me looking like a freak.

Shortly after the demise of Ottakar’s, I found myself working in a shop where the old BBC shop used to be, in a store that was 70% dedicated to Doctor Who merchandise for the first year of its existence. While it was cool getting to sell Daleks and TARDIS models to kids who now couldn’t help but know what that Dalek was, the great thing about it was the signings. We played host to a number of actors from Doctor Who, with our grand store opening being celebrated with a visit from the legendary Tom Baker – and what a legend he is!

We’d hosted lots of signings, and through this I’ve managed to meet some fantastic actors from Doctor Who. And every single one of them were just amazing. Not just Tom Baker, but also Nicholas Courtney, Katy Manning, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Terry Molloy, Peter Purves, Kai Owen, Gareth David-Lloyd, Tom Price, Richard Franklin, Deborah Watling and of course, Nicola Bryant. All of them, lovely people who made the signing days incredible special for the customers and fans, and made them brilliant for the staff too.

I do have to apologise to Nicola Bryant though. The signing was fantastic, but I get the feeling that more than once during the day my sixteen year old self took over and I lost the ability to speak coherently and may have just burbled noises like someone who’d just had dental work. So, if you’re reading this Nicola, I’m sorry!

--

With the fiftieth anniversary episode, The Day of the Doctor, I’m frantically making notes to make adjustments to character write ups for the limited edition of the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space Roleplaying Game (a process that’ll probably involve multiple viewings – not exactly a hardship). But how I came to design the current incarnation of the Doctor Who roleplaying game is something for a future post.

I’ll finish by wishing everyone’s favourite Time Lord a very happy anniversary, and here’s to the next fifty years!!!

Six of Eight

...and half a dozen of the other.

It had been a while since I'd returned up to my home town. The last time was a brief day there and back to bear witness to my mum's ashes being interred at their final resting place, but I thought I'd head back, see my sisters and catch up with some of my old gaming friends.

After an excellent time catching up with my sisters, reminiscing about old times, I headed through to one of the larger towns to meet with six of The Eight, my old roleplaying group.

While chatting to my sisters, one of them asked what the plans were for the evening. One even asked if we'd be playing Dungeons and Dragons. I guess most people would be offended and say "Nooo, not any more!", but in my case I just cursed - if we'd only thought about it, given them more warning, we COULD have been playing D&D for the evening. Just like old times... How stupid of me for not suggesting it.

However, the original plan was going to be get some pop in, and biscuits, and have a good catch up and talk about how life was treating us. At least, that was the original plan.

The plan quickly changed, and soon we were heading to the pub. A pub I'd not been in for over twenty years. One with a particularly apt name considering our D&D roots - The Green Dragon.

Us in the Green Dragon (click to embiggen!)
(L-R: Bragi, JR, Milo, Coop, Fordy, me)

So here we are, in The Green Dragon, Bragi, JR, Milo, Coop, Fordy, and myself (excuse using the nicknames, they're designed to protect the innocent). Many beers were quaffed, food was devoured, and I tried to keep up with their drinking matching them with pints of cola (a really bad idea in most cases).

As the evening progressed, as always, gaming came up in conversation again. 

Fordy pointed out (much as my lovely wife and I had discussed last year) that gaming seems to produce stronger bonds of friendship than any other we'd had. He agreed that it was almost like the comrade-re that is found on the battlefield, when soldiers bond in times of war. It is just that our times of war were marching through dungeons and battling orcs and goblins rather than any real threat.

We chatted about games, and again, Fordy pointed out something we'd not really considered about our old gaming. While we played a lot of roleplaying games as kids, we never really roleplayed. At least, not until later in life. Our characters were just glorified versions of ourselves, a way to escape reality and to do something more interesting with our lives, rather than just go to school, or look for work. These versions of us did cool things, like battling monsters, or fighting off alien invaders. They didn't really stretch our abilities to try to be someone else entirely. It wasn't until we'd matured a bit, and usually in later games apart from The Eight that we sampled the scope of roleplaying games, and how we didn't have to just be us. How we could be anything else. Do something different. Play at being someone new.

Fordy suggested that the only one of us who actually tried to be anything different was Mole. Mole's characters were slightly frustrating as they were usually sneaky, backstabbing, anti-heroes who may just as well sell the whole group out or kill them in their sleep than blindly following the plot of the adventure. While at the time we may have dismissed it as "Oh, it's just Mole trying to kill me again," he was the one who wanted to try something different. Mole's not a sneaky person. He certainly didn't want to kill us in our sleep. But he stretched the scope of the game, and we were too blind to see it at the time.

While you may be on the other side of the planet, Mole, hats off to you (if I was wearing a hat, at least) for trying to show us what this roleplaying stuff was all about.

More beer was consumed, the evil looking concoction called a Jaeger-bomb was revealed, and I kept drinking my colas. The conversation turned to "What was your best gaming experience, as a GM and as a player?"

As the sober one, I sat and listened. It was fascinating to hear these tales of the old games, and what made them so special. I just should have videoed the whole thing, it would have made a great (if slightly drunken) vid-blog. Conversation turned to something else (probably motorbikes or cars or something) before I had answered. So, a little later than everyone else, here's my answer. 

My best gaming experience as a player:

Probably Marines Odyssey. Odyssey was a home created system that Pete designed, which felt a bit like a faster version of BRP (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu). Pete ran many games of different genres using that system, but for me, the Colonial Marines game we played, based upon the setting from Alien/Aliens was possibly the best. I wrote a blog post about it a little while back. 

Using the same system, and set in the same universe, we did another SF game with a bunch of pre-gen characters that Pete provided. It felt a bit like a murder mystery in space, with a crashed ship, a hole in the ground, and someone picking off the characters one by one. In my head it looks like LV421 meets Pitch Black (during the eclipses) and it was gripping. Mostly because about half way through the game, Pete started handing me notes under the table. The thing that was taking out the characters was me. My character was the villain, and I'd started writing notes discretely back, reveling in this new-found villaindom to think up new and interesting ways to kill off the rest of the group and to make it look like an accident. This was possibly the closest I came to really "roleplaying" with the old group, and it opened my eyes to the potential of the games that could be run, when I was just making crap up as I went along in my GM'd games. 

My best gaming experience as a GameMaster:

That would have to be Mage. Or at least the Mage: The Ascension game I was running that became Kult. While I don't think I'd progressed much as a GM (I was still making huge chunks up as I went along), I think it was purely down to the players I had at the time. Stoo, Edge, Tetch and Debs made a great team who created real characters who were such individuals, so independently minded, that I hardly had to do anything. They'd start the game, they knew what their characters would want to be doing, and they'd go and do it. It was almost freeform storytelling. Debs' character was an evil little self-centred Goth, while Edge's hippy chick character died early on but continued on as a ghost. It was thrilling, exciting, and every session was a surprise. I'd warn them at the beginning of each session "I don't really have anything prepared" but by the end we were hanging on each other's every word, waiting so see what madness and horrors would come next. Awesome stuff.

Anyway, that was my brief journey back home. 

Maybe next time I'm back I'll try to get a game going.

Funnily enough, tonight I was supposed to be at a game - my first in nearly two years - but it has had to be delayed until next week. It'll be an odd experience getting back into the swing of it all again, maybe just what my game-writing needs.

Until next time, stay multiclassy!!

There's "Old School" and then there's OLD School

Okay, sent the way-back machine to a series of posts pretty early on in the "Roll Your Own Life" series of posts, when I started talking about the old gaming group from my little home-town.

After that initial game of Traveller, I found myself in one of the two/three AD&D groups that existed (or at least, that we knew about) in the town, before the groups started to merge, mix and shift about. Old school D&D was where it was at, and those first months of gaming was really the hard-core original games - AD&D, Traveller and Runequest.

The group I used to play with, originally called the Rheinrhehm Travellers, became affectionately known as "The Eight" (despite the fact that there were rarely occasions when eight of us were present). We also used to visit the local pub (The Alexandra) usually at 8pm - a practice known as "Alex at Eight", so it really was eights all around.

Where am I going with this? Well, one of The Eight used to DM one of the other groups when I first started gaming. Pete used to DM ours, while Milo ran his group on the other side of the town. I've known Milo since the dawn of time, probably since I was about five years old, and he DM'd in a very different way to Pete. Pete's game involved 1st-9th level characters, my 9th level Paladin never levelled up in all those years of play. The games were cool, strategic and subtle.

Milo's games were the complete opposite. They were just as cool, but in their main game it was almost as if Deities and Demigods was the Player's Handbook. Characters were frequently triple multiclass, usually level 10-30 in each, and strode across the battlefields (and planes of existence) like the heroes of  legend.

Both games were very different, both used the same rules, and both were just as cool.

Something I've had problems with since the newer versions of D&D seems to be the focus on tactical wargaming. I know this is where D&D originated, but the use of miniatures and a battle map seems to be a little limiting to me. I love the way that RPGs can fire the imagination, how you can do anything, and having a little plastic dude (that looks mostly like all of the other heroes in other people's games) sitting on a dungeon map takes me out of the moment. I somehow think that with all this battle-map and minis, the idea that you could run the game with such powerful and god-like characters is probably frowned upon.

While I own 3.0, 3.5 (the deluxe versions) and 4th edition (and will probably buy 5th), I've only really played it once - a far cry from the three times a week we used to play original AD&D back in the 80's. Maybe the potential's there to do the big and the epic, and to play purely in the imagination. Unfortunately, I don't have a D&D group to experience this. Maybe one day. Hopefully, I'll have a bash at 5th Ed when it comes out. I'd like to see if it still captures my imagination like 1st edition used to.

I was very pleased to hear that Milo, my old DM and constant friend to this day, has not turned his back on his old 1st Edition roots, and his illustrations have graced the cover of the latest issue of "&" Magazine, a fanzine for players of 1st Edition D&D. You can download the latest issue here. (Milo did the cover of issue 4).

On the subject of incredibly retro gaming, I was alerted to this website PlaGMaDA which is compiling player and GM created maps and drawings from old school RPGs. I must admit, most of the maps and illustrations on the site really take me back to those old days of gaming.

The old days when you didn't need a computer to play. When your friends were in the same room as you. When you used your mind and imagination to create worlds, not just wander around a computer generated environment shooting people.

Okay, I'll stop being all nostalgic and get back to work. Until next time, stay multiclassy!!

Roll Your Own Life (11) - They Mostly Game at Night... Mostly...

If I continued writing about my history of "life" in gaming, I'd be reaching what I sometimes call the "long dark teatime of gaming" when I really didn't do anything at all. I didn't game, didn't write, I just became a self-absorbed misery and tried to do college stuff and desperately try to get a member of the opposite sex to see me as more than "just a friend".

I'm going to skip that game-less era, and head straight onto the "Second Renaissance" of my gaming, but that'll be next post.

Before I move on though, I want to mention a particularly influential movie and the amazing game that it spawned.

--

Back in the mid-late 80's, right through to the end of the decade, we had a regular tradition at our house which was "Friday Night Videos!" Basically, we hired a movie from what was our local video rental store (Dixons) and we took over the living room at my mum and dad's and we watched a movie. My folks were usually out until the mid-evening, and they hid in the bedroom until the movie finished, but every now and then we'd hire something that my folks were interested in and one or both of them would join us.

For some reason my dad thought that watching "The Terminator" was a great idea (which caused a slight awkwardness at the Reese / Sarah Connor love scene), but we all agreed (my dad included) that it was awesome. It wasn't my mum's cup of tea, but it didn't stop my dad describing the most violent and gruesome moments to her with a giggle of enthusiasm.

Aliens - What are you looking at Burke?

James Cameron was the new god, and when we first saw the trailer and making of documentary for his sequel to Alien, the Eight were all pretty keen.

I think I saw Aliens about three or four times at the cinema in the end. It was the first 18 certificate film I saw at the cinema, and I managed to see it with various members of the Eight at different times. Even today, Aliens is still awesome, and we can all recite most of the lines word for word.


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Bill Willingham's ELEMENTALS

Meanwhile, as I mentioned briefly in the previous post, Pete had created his own game system called Odyssey. I don't really have much recollection of the system - Pete has mentioned that it was a 2D10 system, and I do remember having skills over 100% which allowed you to do extra actions. That's about all I can remember. But the real test for any game is whether you remember the system (and its faults and interruptions) or whether you remember the games themselves. And Odyssey certainly produced some of the most memorable games I'd ever experienced as a player.

What started as a more realistic and authentic RuneQuest style game proved that it could be used for any genre when Pete decided to use the system to run a superhero style game based on Bill Willingham's "Elementals" comics (published by Comico).

But the game really came into its own when Pete decided we'd play as Colonial Marines in the Aliens universe.

Most of us were troops. JR showed his natural born leadership skills by being the Gorman of the group, remaining in the APC and watching us all balls-it-up through our helmet cameras. I thought Vasquez was the coolest, so I played a similar character. A short, stocky, and hard-as-nails female Smart-Gunner.

Aliens. We were not as smart as these Marines...

Pete had predicted the similar space-colony background that would form the Spartans in the Halo-verse, having our group of marines being sent out to outlying colonies to quash resistance elements and rebels. The Smart Gun was rationalised, and made super cool with a really efficient tracking system, firing punched disks (rapidly bashed into a sharp cone of armour piercing metal) which made the ammo carrying easier. But it was the encumbrance rules that really stick in the mind.

I have very vivid memories of the colony's terraforming reactor being overloaded and damaged, about to cause a huge nuclear explosion (I think part of the damage may have been from stray gunfire, I'm not sure). We'd stopped the rebels, but the explosion was imminent and the squad had to run the 5k back to the dropship as our APC had been taken out, before the nuclear explosion wiped us off the planet. The encumbrance rules really added to the tension, as we realised we were never going to make it to safety without dropping all of our guns and equipment.

The later games had us encountering the xenomorphs from the movies, and we had a great one shot with different characters where each member of the party was taken out by an unseen force (that was revealed to be my character, under orders from the GM from slips of paper he kept passing me under the table).

Nothing really much to add there except that Odyssey introduced me to the idea of gaming in a group where one of the player characters was the secret villain, showed me how to do a faithful game that was tied to an existing universe, and showed me that you could create a game system from scratch and have some seriously kick-ass adventures with it. I really hope that people have as much fun with the games I've worked on as I had with Odyssey.

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Next "Roll Your Own Life" brings us to the Vampire years...

Roll Your Own Life (10) - Like My Father Before Me

After a tense couple of weeks, my wife has returned and I am once again able to write. There was something about her being the other side of the planet that meant that I just couldn't concentrate. I don't know whether it was the lack of sleep from sitting up to video-Skype with her, or just that fidgety restlessness you get when something isn't right with the world, but in the two weeks she was away, I hardly wrote anything.

I chatted with friends about WILD though, and some absolutely genius ideas came up. There are times when I'm describing what I have in mind for the game, and one of them replies with a simple "why don't you do this?" And I'm left wondering why I didn't think of that genius solution before? Maybe I'm just too close to it sometimes. I needed that break to "catch the big fish" as Lynch would say.

Before I continue with my bizarre history of the world as seen through my life in gaming, I just wanted to point people in the direction of a particularly wacky podcast called Bros and Cons, hosted by Bret and Tim (who, once again, I met through gaming). I recently appeared on Episode 5 - The Poo Poo Wizard episode, and it was a blast. Have a listen, the language is a little colourful, and there are in-depth discussions ranging from genetically grown organs, the legalisation of prostitute assassins, to catching Pokemon. Enjoy.

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Back to the tales of yore!

The West End Games STAR WARS RPG

After a brief stint of trying to write Price of Freedom adventures, I discovered an advert for the forthcoming Star Wars RPG in a magazine and I was immediately sold.

Star Wars was a life defining moment for me. I may get a little sad for a bit, but bear with me. The local cinema was 15 miles away from my home town, and Hull made a big deal about the release of the first real blockbuster. This movie was big, the reception in the States proved it, so Hull reopened one of its old cinemas, The Dorchester, especially for one film, and one film only. Star Wars was the only film shown in the big one screen cinema, and it showed it for about six months. The demand was so high that I remember my dad bringing home the tickets for the film and the earliest we could go and see it was at least two months away.

I have even earlier memories of Star Wars. I remember the page in British comic 2000AD that had some stills from it, saying "This film is going to be big, you should like it." Hell, if 2000AD told you something was going to be good, in the late 70's you darn well listened.

After that (and before seeing the film), I remember my dad had to go away for conferences/training maybe once or twice a year. He went away on one of these trips and when he returned he had a couple of presents for me - two Star Wars figures - Chewbacca and R2-D2. I had no idea who or what they were, but I remembered the 2000AD feature and those were the coolest toys I'd ever had.

When the fateful day of the cinema trip arrived, it was early 1978. I'd seen a couple of trailers on TV, but knew only parts of the story. There was a Marvel comics adaptation (which I still have) that was in two parts, but published HUGE, almost A3, but I'd only read the first half. But there we were, on our way to Hull in the car, with my mum and dad, about to go and see Star Wars.

We'd had a couple of cinema trips before. I remember vaguely the trip to see Michael York in The Three Musketeers, but I have a better memory of going to see The Man with the Golden Gun, and The Spy Who Loved Me (which obviously influenced my love of James Bond movies from an early age), but Star Wars would change my life.

We sat quite near the back on the ground floor as it was near the door and easier to get my mum's wheelchair into the cinema, but it meant that the balcony seating overhung above us, cutting a fraction of the top of the screen off from view. Not much, but enough to mean that when the rebel blockade runner and the star destroyer first appeared on screen in those opening seconds, my mum was convinced they'd flown out from the balcony.

It was like nothing I'd ever seen. I was glued to the screen. It was the most amazing thing in the world. I'd seen movies before, witnessed the way the stories worked, but when they escaped the Death Star I thought the film would end... but no, there was the whole attack on the Death Star which was the most jaw-dropping spectacle my young eyes had ever seen. I could feel Star Wars seeping into my very existence, and from that day there was nothing like it.

I saved up for the toys, my dad dressed up as Darth Vader at the town carnival (with me as Luke, and my friend Jinx as Han Solo). Even my mum loved the movie - sad to think that her last birthday this year, she asked me to get her the original trilogy of Star Wars on DVD (even though they're no longer available) because they didn't have a VHS player in the home where they were trying to nurse her back to health. She never did get to see it again.

Anyway, the Star Wars RPG was a work of genius in my eyes. It took the basic system of Ghostbusters which I already loved, and made it Star Wars-y. It was epic, you could do heroic and cinematic things, you could duel with lightsabers and use the Force. It was fantastic.

My GM's eye view of running Star Wars, with
Pete peering over the screen (1989)

The presentation was a revelation as well, with its fake adverts for the Imperial Navy and tourist guide to the planets. There was a humour there, and it brought Star Wars to life for me again, just in the cold times when there was no Star Wars to light the way.

I GM'd Star Wars for a while. A group of rebels lead by Deeko Smiggins, scoundrel and pilot of the Ballistic Wombat, who would roll 30D6 to out-fly those stupid TIE Fighter pilots. And for a while, it was great.

But my gaming group was mostly away at University. The few of The Eight left behind were busy having real lives, and I just kinda festered. My only real social life besides the Eight when they returned was hanging around with the people I knew from the Council job (and then the Archaeology Unit when I was transferred over to them).

There were a few gaming highlights (mostly Pete's creation called "Odyssey" which we played as a RuneQuest-y type thing, a superhero game and in its finest incarnation, recreating the worlds of James Cameron's Aliens and beyond), but things started to go quiet on the gaming (and the writing) front.

Looking back, now, I still have very fond memories of Star Wars, and I still have the RPG books (and I've bought the more recent incarnations, and eagerly await looking at the new Fantasy Flight Star Wars game), but Star Wars itself has become tarnished by endless recuts, remasters, re-edits, and a series of prequels that try to make you sympathetic to the stormtroopers and reduces Darth Vader to a sulky teen who didn't get his own way. To me, it'll never be as cool as it was that first time, sitting in the cinema with my parents, where all three of us were transported for the first time to a galaxy far, far away.

Revisionist History

I wasn't sure if I'd be posting this week, Mum's funeral was last Friday and I wasn't sure if I'd be up to writing, but as with all things, I find writing keeps my mind occupied - distracted from any harsh realities.

Distracting myself did have a small advantage last week - I was back in mum's house, clearing the last of my stuff and I was trying to sleep. The house was empty, and my room was just about cleared - it had that horrible echo that empty houses have when they have been stripped of any clutter or personality. Sleep was not coming to me. I lay there in the bed that was too short for me, my feet hanging into the space where the old bookcase used to be, and I resolved that I should do something productive with my mind - solve a problem that had been bothering me for a few months - in order to keep the brain cells busy so that I didn't really think about the enormity of what was actually happening in real life.

The problem I'd been having was character creation for WILD. The game delves so deeply into the character's psyche and personality, where your hidden hopes and fears may bubble to the surface of your dreams, that the character creation needed more than just "I'll roll some dice". I needed a "Life Path" system to create the character, but I wanted to tie it into the rest of the game and how it works...

Then it suddenly came to me - WILD was going to use cards. Not traditional gaming cards, or playing cards. They weren't going to come into play often, just in those strange cases when the dreamers lost control of the dream and things started spiraling out of control. When logic went out of the proverbial window and the characters would find themselves in one of the many repeated dreams that everyone experiences - flying, being chased, finding yourself naked in public, at an exam you haven't prepared for, fighting giant spiders, driving a vehicle that's out of control.

These cards could be used to create the character. I won't go into great detail, and you'll probably think it sucks, but when you hear the full scope behind it, how the cards work, and how character generation works, I think you'll like it. The player is very in control of things, and should form the character how they'd like, but it also adds a small interpretive random element to spice things up, to ensure that every character doesn't end up the same.

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Anyway, the funeral went well. As well as funerals can. It was tough, but my family was there, my wife was by my side, and some of the Eight turned up. In fact, there were many tough and upsetting bits to the day, but I really filled up at the sight of some of my old gaming buddies turning up to help me and the wife through this. I hadn't seen some of them in many years, and some had travelled many miles to attend, and just the thought of the effort they'd put in to come and pay their respects to mum, and to look after Debs while my sisters and I went off to the crematorium for the second smaller service... well, it just proves what true friends are. Thank you guys.

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On the subject of the Eight, Pete pointed out that I missed an element to my previous post - about writing the Ghostbusters adventures. Spooky Science, the first adventure I'd written, I initially passed to Pete when it was finished, and he re-typed the whole thing, correcting my horrible grammar and fixing the typos before we sent it off to New York.

Pete was the DM for my first D&D, and ran Runequest, later writing his own gaming system called Odyssey (which produced some of the most satisfying games I've ever been in a player in). He also wrote a number of the comics I ended up drawing, including Ninja Secretaries from Beyond Dimension X, and the sequel to my original solo comic "Drowning in Darkness". So Pete was the first person I turned to when I thought about submitting my writing to a games company.

Pete must have gone off for his degree when I started on Back to Transylvania and the subsequent efforts, but I'm sorry I forgot about your involvement in the first one, Pete! It was over 25 years ago! I'm going to blame my age and leave it at that...

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That's it for this post. I'd just like to thank everyone for their kind words of support over the last few weeks.