Sidequest: Every TTRPG played 21-30

Continuing my previous posts listing every tabletop RPG I've ever played, we're starting to get into the Nineties! Of course, just a handful of Eighties RPGs to get through, but we're getting there. 

If you want to catch up with the list in (sorta) chronological order, check out the previous parts here:

Part 1 - 1-10

Part 2 - 11-20

And now, without further ado, let's get on with it. 

#21 - The Price of Freedom

Cover of West End Games' The Price of Freedom

The Eighties were certainly a strange time when it came to the political climate (not that it's any more stable now). In the Eighties, the threat of war influenced movies, TV series, and games. Heavily influenced by Red Dawn, West End Games' TTRPG The Price of Freedom was all about guerrilla warfare in an occupied America. It was very tactical, and came with hex maps and counters for units. It was a bit bleak, and my players didn't really want to play in that setting, so I ended up converting it to play "V", the TV series of alien invasion with a deep message mirroring the horrors of WWII. 

Instead of fighting humans, the resistance was fighting alien Visitors. The hamsters and mice needed saving!

#22 - Robotech

Palladium Games' Robotech RPG

A bit of a strange one and a bit left-field, but for some reason I wanted to play with big robots, and spotted the Robotech RPG on the shelves at our local store. I bought it, read it, was thoroughly confused (it felt a bit like D&D) and we created some characters, but that may have been as far as it went. I'd never seen Robotech, so the concept of the aliens being flippin' giants didn't even occur to me (it wasn't that clear in the book I don't think, or I was just stupid). This may have been my only exposure to the Palladium system. I think someone else in the group had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, but I never played it. 

#23 - Star Wars (West End Games)

Star Wars RPG (West End Games)

Look at it. It's beautiful. One of my favourite games of all time, up there with Ghostbusters, is the original Star Wars RPG by West End Games. I mean, I was a fan of WEG having played Ghostbusters, Paranoia, and The Price of Freedom, but when they announced they had the license for my favourite films that was me sold. 

The Star Wars RPG is just awesome. I know it has its foibles and there were times where we were rolling so many D6s that you could hardly see the table, but it was glorious. It really captured the action and feel of Star Wars. It was the last RPG I bought and ran in what I call my "Golden Age", and we played a heck of a lot of it. Probably so much my players were sick of it, but I loved it, and I loved Star Wars. Still do (with both). 

After that, things wound down for a bit. I went to college, a lot of the players went off to university, and gaming in general faded into the background for two or three years. 

#24 - Vampire: The Masquerade

Vampire: The Masquerade (1st Edition)

There is going to be a bit of a recurring theme here for a while, sorry. I went to the University of the Arts to do a degree (so I could do comics and graphic novels - see, that constant bouncing between comics and RPGs at it again). I'd gone away to Uni, met loads of new people, and immediately stumbled across a gaming group playing Vampire: The Masquerade. I'd never even heard of it, but was immediately hooked. This was back when we had student grants to help pay for our education, before it became 'loans', and I was terrible. I blew a chunk of my grant on buying a heap of Vampire books. This was going to be my next big thing. I ran a game for my old group, started another group locally with people from the comic shop, and set both games in the same city, at the same time, crossing over events and characters. 

Vampire got me back into gaming in a big way, and introduced me to my future wife. We joined the Camarilla, went to a couple of big Camarilla meetings. Heck, Debs was head of Clan Toreador for a while, while I was the second in command in Clan Tremere. 

#25 - Werewolf: The Apocalypse

Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1st Edition)

I told you there was going to be recurring theme... Of course, Vampire wasn't going to be enough, and when Werewolf: The Apocalypse came out, I was just as intrigued, aiming to add werewolves into our current Vampire game. As a bit of an aside, I ran a Werewolf story with my local group set in the same city as the Vampire game – their actions directly impacting upon the Vampire chronicle as a whole. It was fun! I think we did a couple of adventures like that... but then, something else came along.

#26 - Mage: The Ascension

Mage: The Ascension (1st Edition)

Oh yes, now we're talking. Vampire was cool, and goth, and moody. Werewolf was angry, and nature, and anti-corporation. Mage: The Ascension was just nuts. And we loved it. I ran a Mage game for our local group (who we still play with today) and it was amazing. Debs created a character that inspired so many works of fiction. The setting, the characters, the themes we tackled in those games were beyond anything we could hope to replicate. It was Quintessence in a bottle, rather than lightning. When the Paradox Backlashes hit, things went really weird, and yet we kept it all in the same city and story as the old Vampire game. Truly epic. Until one of the characters died...

#27 - Wraith: The Oblivion

The incredibly hard to read and over-the-top cover for Wraith: The Oblivion

So, one of the characters died in our Mage: The Ascension game, but no one wanted to see the end of that character. Luckily, White Wolf had just brought out the next in the line of World of Darkness games, with Wraith: The Oblivion. Therefore, the character remained in the Chantry, and joined in with the adventures, only as a ghost! We never played a dedicated game of Wraith, at least, not to my recollection. But we explored many of the themes and adventure ideas in the Wraith setting in our main WoD campaign. 

It was about this time I considered going back into writing roleplaying games again. 

However, things happened, I got grumpy, over-reacted, and turned my back on World of Darkness. I wanted to keep running the game we had going in Mage, keeping with weird magic and ghosts and supernatural stuff. That's when I turned to the next game in the list...

#28 - KULT

KULT (1st Edition)

The replacement for World of Darkness was an easy conversion over to the grim and terrifying world of Kult. Sure, the magic wasn't as easy to cast, but it made the game more creepy and somewhat sinister. The Mage character's Chantry was a pocket in the Metropolis, and things took a decidedly darker turn. There were still vampires and evil creatures, but the influences of Hellraiser were definitely there. Possibly the tensest games I've ever run, and some of the scariest stuff we've played, but it was cool and very 90s goth.

And that 2nd edition with the cool typography (rumoured to be done in MSWord)... oh, Lordy. That's so good. 

Maybe a little too dark, though, which lead to converting our existing game once again to yet another system...

#29 - CJ Carella's WitchCraft

CJ Carella's WitchCraft

More closely in line with the themes and tone of our old World of Darkness game, we switched over to CJ Carella's WitchCraft. I was initially drawn to the cover design, and that the game was a smaller digest format rather than the usual sized gamebook. It was smaller, easier to carry, had some great art, and the system felt very like the old World of Darkness. Of course, this introduced me to Eden Studios...

#30 - All Flesh Must Be Eaten

All Flesh Must Be Eaten (1st Edition)

We'd relocated to the other side of the country, and the gaming had come to a halt again. But there was a little gaming store on my way into work. In there, I spotted another one of Eden's smaller digest RPGs, the legendary All Flesh Must Be Eaten, a game of zombie survival horror. I didn't actually get to play it until many years later, after we'd moved back to where we were before, and I started hosting an RPG bookclub at the bookstore I was working at. Instead of reading a book and talking about it once a month, we'd pick a game, and run a short one-shot once a month. The members of the group could then buy it at a small discount if they liked it. 

I ended up running a quick one-shot of All Flesh Must Be Eaten, set on one of my sixth-form school trips. It was suitably over-the-top and complete carnage, but great fun. 

--

That's it for the latest section. Possibly only a couple more of these to go, I find I'm buying games and reading them more than I get chance to play them these days. You may be surprised at the omissions when it comes to what I haven't played!! 

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

#RPGaDAY2024 - DAY THREE: Most OFTEN played RPG

As Daniel Craig said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the weekend" (to paraphrase). It's the weekend, and the strange colour scheme for the day on the #RPGaDAY chart not only indicates that it's the weekend, but also the rather bad anniversary that occurs today – and one of the reasons I started #RPGaDAY to begin with (a bit of positivity to distract me). 

Onto Day Three of #RPGaDAY2024 asks about the RPG you've played the most often. Tricky... I guess it would depend upon timescales? If we're talking recently, with my current group, then it'd probably be a close run thing between Aegean (see yesterday's post) or FFG's Star Wars RPG (Force and Destiny, more than the others, but a bit of everything). 

Setting the way-back machine a bit further to the previous era of gaming, it'd probably be a close-run thing between Vampire: The Masquerade and Mage: The Ascension. (Oh, man... I loved Mage.)

However, if you take into account all of the games I've played over the many years, it'd probably be a close run thing between AD&D and Star Frontiers. We played so much of both of those (along with Runequest, Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu, and a host of others) - and I know it sounds weird but Star Frontiers may actually top the list by a fraction. It'd be close...  

I'd still love to see a proper new (non-racist) edition of this, I just remember having way too much fun with Star Frontiers, and I was always more of a Sci-Fi person than a swords and fantasy type in my youth. 

#RPGaDAY2023 - DAY EIGHT: Favourite CHARACTER

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

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

You can't get much more epic than that! 

#RPGaDAY2023 - DAY SIX: Favourite RPG you NEVER get to play

 

Day Six of #RPGaDAY2023 and this one is the same question as the very first year of #RPGaDAY - What is your favourite game that you NEVER get to play. 

Way back in the dawn of time, I answered that very question... with the Leverage RPG. You know what, I think it's probably a darn good answer. Though recently I've had a strange urge to dig out my old copy of Mage the Ascension again - had some good times with that game...

[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...

#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...

Relics: A Game of Angels

Over the last three weeks I've been looking at the Tarot and how it has influenced my game playing and designing over the years. This brings me handily to this week's blogpost - a review of a forthcoming Kickstarter that uses the Tarot as a game mechanic...

Relics: A Game of Angels launches on Kickstarter on the 10th April 2019

Relics: A Game of Angels really ticks some major boxes in appealing to me. First of all, it uses Tarot as a mechanic for task resolution (and other cool elements). It also is about angels, which is very cool. And also, it's written by Steve Dee who I've known from the days of playtesting Conspiracy X 2.0. Sure, I may be a little biased, but you need to see what is sure to be a very cool Kickstarter launching next month.

Relics uses the Fugue System as designed by James Wallis that first appeared in his game Alas Vegas (which I mentioned last week in the blog). In Alas Vegas the basic premise was that the characters woke with no knowledge of who or where they were, and the game gradually filled in those details as the story progressed. The Tarot cards are used for task resolution using Blackjack (or "21") as the main system. However, in Relics the characters know who they are - they are angels stranded on Earth. The memory recovery element is still present, but the players start with a definite feel for who their character is, as they struggle against demons, creatures and some humans, to try to save the world from itself. Instead of remembering who they are, the mechanic cleverly allows players to recall skills or information that will help them in times of need, filling in the character's backstory as the game progresses. The player determines the skill they need to "remember" but another player narrates the memory.

In addition to this, the angels can discover and reconnect with powerful relics that have powers and abilities that could aid them in their fight, or have the opposite effect. While the game could be a pure fight against demons and evil forces, the inclusion of these relics adds an element of hunting for hidden and powerful items, racing against time and demonic powers to gain control of them before they fall into the wrong hands.

Artwork from the forthcoming Relics RPG

I've been reading the playtest document for Relics and I'm really enjoying the use of the Fugue system for it. It seems like a perfect marriage of system and setting as the characters uncover elements of their past that can influence their actions now.

The Tarot cards are used in additional ways in Relics, coming into play in character creation (though in a faster way to that which I've been toying with in WILD) as well as generating random miracles, and other narrative effects.

It is going to be hard to review or preview Relics without mentioning other angelic roleplaying games, and this really does feel like it could be an excellent successor to the incredibly popular RPG In Nomine, (originally In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas) that was big in the late 90's. And that's not a bad thing to be compared to as I loved In Nomine. Relics also has echoes of TV series such as Lucifer and Supernatural, and movies like The Prophecy, though the tone of the game is certainly a lot darker.

Another fantastic element that the game has going for it is the design of the Tarot cards. Remember a couple of posts ago I talked about the original Mage: The Ascension game and the Mage Tarot that was produced to accompany it? It is still one of my favourite decks and the artwork is fantastic. Well, it seems that Dan Smith (aka SMIF) who did some of the artwork for the Mage Tarot, as well as most of the illustrations for In Nomine, is on board as artist for the Relics Tarot.

With that, and Steve Dee's writing, and a great use of the Fugue system, it looks like Relics could be a huge success. Definitely check it out when the Kickstarter - you can find it here!

Tarotica (Part II)

Last week I thought I'd start a series of blog posts about the Tarot, and how I've been influenced by their use and design over the years. On to part 2!

I got into University, or Art School as it was then before it gained full University status, with a very clear purpose. I was going to draw comics. I loved comics, and I'd teamed up with some of my RPG group to publish some comics including my first title - Drowning in Darkness. How cheery! After the review that called me the "Goth Hergé" I was more determined to pursue my comic career. You can read more about that, my comic publishing company that was, and the few titles I released here.

While attending Uni, I started hanging out at the local comic shop (Abstract Sprocket) and continued my obsession with all things Vertigo. I loved the Sandman, Shade: The Changing Man, Kid Eternity, Enigma and The Invisibles. Almost everything they brought out I loved. So, when the lovely purveyor of comics at Sprocket showed me the listing for a rather special collectors item - The Vertigo Tarot - I put in an order straight away.

The Vertigo Tarot set, published by DC Comics in 1995. Gorgeous!

What sold it to me was not only the use of Vertigo characters for the Major Arcana (The Fool is an image of John Constantine, The Empress is Titania, Queen of the Fairies from Books of Magic), but the artwork was by Dave McKean - someone whose art I've admired for years. It's a huge set, in a big white box (strangely the same size as the fabled Nobilis 2nd Edition) with the deck, and a hardback guide book that explains the images and divinatory meanings, written by Rachel Pollack. While I'd been aware of her writing from her time on Doom Patrol, I didn't know she was an authority on the Tarot as well. As I read, my eyes were opened to how the cards worked, and Rachel's explanations have become my instant go-to for Tarot readings.

However, a weird thing happened. Inspired by how cool the cards were, and the clear and informative write ups in the accompanying book, I started actually doing Tarot readings. And the weirder thing is - they seemed to be strangely accurate. I had no idea what I was doing, and maybe that is the power of the Tarot and its iconography - with the vaguest of interpretations the questioner applies the meaning to their lives and it suddenly all makes sense.

I was doing readings for myself, as well as friends from Uni and my new found gaming group...

-

At Uni I rediscovered my love of tabletop roleplaying. When I'd gone into work, and then on my Graphic Design course, I'd almost put the RPG writing side of things away. I was concentrating on the comic production, and getting into Uni, and RPGs didn't really seem to be in my life. However, when I relocated to Uni I quickly fell into a game being run by my fellow students. A game that had become huge in the early 90's - Vampire: The Masquerade. The reawakening of my gaming interests has been covered before in my blog, waaaay back here.

We played a lot of Vampire, and then I kinda went off and started a new game with new players continuing the World of Darkness setting, moving over onto playing Mage: The Ascension. Wow, I loved that game. Our Mage game was huge, epic and bonkers, with some massive Paradox Backlashes that distorted reality. It inspired Debs to write her fiction, and I had my eyes opened again when they released the Mage Tarot set.

The Mage The Ascension Tarot set (pictured on the Mage rulebook)

We were very into Mage: The Ascension in a big way, so much so that Debs was the one who actually bought the Tarot set. As a card carrying Wiccan (as she liked to call herself) she took the cards very seriously, keeping them wrapped rather than boxed, and I was only allowed to handle them for short periods of time (something I respect even now - I touched them enough to put the cards on the table for the above photo before putting them carefully away).

The cards came with a little book of how to read and interpret them, though there was also a short section on using the cards to help with the RPG itself. However, the cards themselves were another revelation. Exchanging the traditional suits from Cups, Coins, Swords and Wands to Dynamism, Questing, Pattern and Primordialism was a revelation to me. You could change the suits? And use them in a roleplaying game?

Now we're getting somewhere.

The next incarnation of Mage (Mage: The Awakening) would explore this in even greater detail with a whole book called "The Keys to the Supernal Tarot" which looked at each card and how they could be used to inspire storylines and adventures. Excellent! Also helps that the art in this newer edition was bloomin' gorgeous!

Anyway, back to the right place chronologically. I had a strange moment when I wanted to continue our game but I had turned my back on the World of Darkness. I managed to fill the hole in my urban horror/magic/occult gaming with a completely different system - KULT. Again, that connection between tabletop gaming and the Tarot would come to the fore when I picked up a supplement for KULT called Taroticum.

The Taroticum supplement for 1st Edition KULT (US Edition 1994)

At its heart, Taroticum is a series of adventures that revolve around a deck of Tarot cards that can shape reality. It's an epic adventure where the characters must basically travel from London to Hell to create a missing Tarot card for the deck to save creation itself. It's wild and wacky, and I never ran it as our game morphed into a game of CJ Carella's Witchcraft.

However, the Taroticum of the game, KULT, has appeared again with the new edition (Divinity Lost) and the cards are available to purchase.

Kult: Divinity Lost set of the Taroticum cards

The Major Arcana are radically different to normal cards, 0 representing the Awakened Man (Anthropos) and 1 representing "God" (The Demiurge), 2 representing "The Devil" (Astaroth) , and the remaining 20 cards each for the 10 Archons and 10 Death Angels. The Minor Arcana is FIVE suits, rather than four, numbered 1-9 (no court cards) with each suit tied to one of the five paths of awakening - Death (Skulls), Passion (Roses), Time & Space (Hourglasses), Dream (Crescents) and Madness/Elysium (Eyes).

Having the suits represent actual elements of the game, like the Mage Tarot, has been a bit of an inspiration too. But I've gone on too long for this post. Next post will be about how I'm using the Tarot in WILD, and maybe a look at other games that use Tarot for task resolution in tabletop roleplaying.

Until next time, may the cards be in your favour.

Be kind.

#RPGaDAY 2016 - Day Twelve: What Game Next?

So, finishing off the first column of #RPGaDAY is "What game is your group most likely to play next? Why?"

Tricky, and the simple answer is "I have no idea". We seem to be pretty happy with the Star Wars game we have going at the moment, but I guess if we were to try something else I'd be tempted to suggest going back to our roots. The game group formed playing Mage and Kult, so I guess I'd suggest the new edition of Kult, or possibly Invisible Sun, which is very intriguing...

WILD Character Creation (take 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stoo's character creation layout.

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

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

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

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

Until next time,

LLAP - and Stay Multi-classy!

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 23: Perfect Game For You

Perfect game... wow, that's a difficult one. So may times I've thought "this is it, this game is perfect" only to discover, over time, that there are elements I'd change or do slightly differently. But, as I discuss in the video, maybe it's not so reliant upon what you actually play, more who you play it with and finding that perfect level of engagement.

Special guest on the video is Ole Peder Giæver, and my sincerest apologies for my awful pronunciation of your name dude! Since chatting to him online, I've had my eyes opened to a whole new world of gaming that I never knew existed - some of it weird, some of it enlightening, and all of it very different from my gaming experiences. Seriously worth listening to what he has to say...

Tomorrow sees the start of the final week of #RPGaDAY2015 (well, the last seven days, if you include the bank holiday Monday final day)... Onto the final stretch.

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 15: Longest Campaign Played

That's one of the great things about tabletop roleplaying games... They don't have to end if you don't want to. You can do some cool one shots, short adventures, and small stories, but sometimes those adventures string together into a continuing campaign that can go on and on. It's usually due to circumstances outside the game that the story ends.

I've played a few long running campaigns - the longest is probably the Vampire: The Masquerade game that became Mage: The Awakening (and then morphed into Kult, and eventually WitchCraft).

You can find out all about it in the video below, which also features a special guest in the form of gaming guru Robin D. Laws.

#RPGaDAY - Day 8: Favourite Character

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

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!!

Roll Your Own Life (14) - Yes, this is a Kult

Last time I did a little nostalgia piece I was talking about the old World of Darkness and how we all got very into playing Vampire and Mage, and then I had a bit of a falling out with White Wolf, mostly due to the way my wife and I were treated by the nasty minority in The Camarilla.

The cover for KULT 1st Edition

I did, however, still really like the characters and the setting that we'd formed for the game, and I wanted to continue the story of the tabletop game, but on a smaller scale. The multiple games in the same setting was too demanding considering I was supposed to be doing college work, so I reeled it back to the basics - just one game running at once, just a handful of players. But what I needed was a new system to play dark urban occult fantasy with. And, as usually happens with my game buying, there was one game sitting on the shelves that intrigued me with its striking cover - Kult.

I don't know what it was about Kult, but there was something scary about it. The cover was cool, but it seemed a little sinister too. Maybe that's what drew me to it, that strange scared fascination you have to see something that you're not really sure you want to see. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When I was a kid, that film came out and it was legendary. The stories of how people were fainting during it, it was something that was almost too scary to watch, but you were fascinated enough to almost dare yourself to try.

Kult was the same for me. Its inspiration from Hellraiser was obvious, but I gave in, bought the rule book, and was hooked. Not in a "tear your soul apart" way, but just in the way that it was crafted. I set to converting the characters from the Mage game and soon we were back in action.

The cover for KULT 2nd Edition
Just awesome and wacky.

Kult allowed us to do some really weird things in game. One of the characters was killed - not even a player character, just a reliable NPC, and one of the PCs vowed to bring him back by using a host of powerful and available spells from Kult to make the character pregnant, to put the dead character's spirit back in the unborn baby, and to travel back in time to leave the child with foster parents so the character could still be alive today. Of course, he was radically different when they returned. He wasn't a vampire anymore for starters.

It was very cool, and the way that The Metropolis worked, the city behind the illusion of reality, would be something I would always remember in future projects.

When second edition Kult came out with its awesome typography and design, I was shown a whole new world of how rulebooks could be presented. They didn't need to be plain or basic, they could play with the conventions of typography and layout, experiment with the way that the game could be published, and laugh in the face of mundanity. The two supplements for magic were so bizarre in their layout that some pages were almost unreadable, but that just made it cooler. And the Judas Grail adventure was so bonkers, I don't think the players got very far with it. Love that game.

Layout design for the Purgatory supplement
courtesy of www.kult-rpg.com

The following versions of the game just didn't have the same scary coolness or wacky graphic design as that or the first edition, and for now Kult seems to have faded into obscurity.

However, it was at this time that weird things were happening outside of the game.

I'd set up a comic publishing company, Autocratik Press (also known as Autocratik For The Masses) with the backing of the Prince's Trust, and my attention to games and games writing had taken a back seat while I created a different world of my own. The world of my comic, Missing.

Roll Your Own Life (12) - The Long Dark Teatime of Gaming

Strangely, there was a time when I didn't play RPGs. I guess it happens to us all, we "put away childish things" and I went back into education. Ironically I guess. Back to school I went, but my schooltime hobbies didn't come with me. I call these the Dark Times.

Me at work in the Archaeology Unit, 1989

At school I do remember being told specifically that I wasn't smart enough to go on to college or university, and the best I could hope for would be to leave after the sixth form and find a menial job somewhere. So I did. I left school, became a doley, wrote adventures for West End Games in a desperate attempt to get into the games industry, and then ended up working for the County Council in nature conservation as a cartographer. 

The program closed down and I was transferred to the Council's archaeology unit, where I spent most of my time drawing the bits of pot or bone that had been recovered from various digs, and on occasion going to the dig sites and drawing the finds on location. Not being much of an outdoor person, this wasn't ideal, but the rest of the team in the Archaeology Unit were awesome. The Unit was run by Ian who'd published his own comics as a small press publisher, so we were bound to get along. I also met Gareth, one of the most talented illustrators I've ever come across, and became the best of friends. Seriously, check out his site - the artwork is amazing.

Anyway, the project insisted that we all went to college one day a week to get more qualifications, so we ended up doing Art "A" Levels, which pleased my mum immensely as I'd dropped out of Art at school.

The A Level progressed and encouraged us to do a BTEC in Graphic Design, and soon life was dominated with college, commuting, and the desperate and angst socialising that went along with it. My mind was on drawing comics, and trying to get someone from the opposite sex to even acknowledge my existence for more than a second.

This isn't talking about games much is it? Sorry. Don't worry, I'll get back to that in a second. As I said, these were dark times on the game front, and my focus was on drawing comics, the college work, and the social life that went along with it. I got so into the college work though, one course wasn't enough. While I was doing BTEC Design during the day, I was on a Fine Art Foundation in the evening, and the second year I added an "A" Level Film Studies evening class to boot. I was a learning machine.

The BTEC really forced us into applying for a further qualification - something I'd not really considered. I had no intention of moving out from home, in my mind I was still 14 and most of the time I still acted like it. But the BTEC staff insisted, so I applied for a number of Graphic Design degrees, aiming initially to stay within reach of home. However, fate would dictate otherwise, and soon I'd been accepted on the degree course at the highly regarded Norwich School of Art and Design. I had to move out, leave my little home town, and branch out on my own.

Luckily, I didn't have to do it alone. Gareth managed to get on the same course, so we moved down together, shared a house with a US Air Force veteran who'd rented out a couple of rooms in his house to students, and set out making new friends in a new town.

Some of these new friends were gamers - I hadn't really partaken in RPGing for a very long time, my mind had been elsewhere, but the invite was given to try a new RPG called "Vampire: The Masquerade" and I happily went along.

Vampire:The Masquerade -
You have a lot to answer for...

It was like that first cup of tea when you come home after a holiday. It was fresh, but felt like home. Gaming was back in my life, and I wasn't going to let go. That week I went to the local game shop and bought about fifteen of the Vampire books (corebook, clanbooks, player's and storyteller's books, the lot) and more D10's than I could carry. I blew most of my student grant (yes, remember those days? Grants? I think I was one of the final year's worth of students to actually get a grant before the student loans came into force) on gaming supplies.

The World of Darkness was my home now, and I was going to bring everyone into it. I started running a game that would incorporate some of the gamers from my home town, and the gamers from Norwich, in one massive setting. The events of the game in Norwich would effect the other and vice-versa. It was huge, and I was revelling in my slightly sociopathic urges to control everything around me.

I branched out, running Werewolf: The Apocalypse for another group from people I'd met in the local comic shop, and then moved onto Mage: The Ascension (we'll come back to that later), but one advert in the back of the rulebooks intrigued me - The Camarilla. What was that all about? (That's definitely one for a future blog post).

The massive game kinda collapsed - the demands of running games concurrently with nearly twenty players in two or three different groups, mixed with the strained social life of college and the dramatic changes that were taking place in my social circles meant that I had to give up on the bigger scheme of things, and concentrate on a smaller group.

However, in the middle of all this, I did meet some particularly good friends, and even met my wife, all through World of Darkness. Scaling back from the bigger game, I started concentrating on Mage: The Ascension, with a small group consisting of me (as Storyteller), Debs (my future wifey), and three guys we'd met through the comic shop - Stoo, Edge and Tetch. 

KULT - still one of my fave games ever

These Mage games have to be some of the most amazing gaming experiences I've had as a GM. The characters were awesome, and would become the stuff of legend. When I turned my back on Mage, and found a new game system (Kult) the characters were adapted and their epic stories continued - and became even more epic (if that was even possible). They time travelled, one gave birth to another character in the past to try to restore a wrong that had been done, one had been killed and haunted the group as a helpful spirit...  I hardly had to write anything (and if I did, the players would ignore any plotline and do their own thing). It was storytelling with characters that the players knew well, and the stories created themselves. There was a magic there that I've not encountered again in GMing... and I doubt I will again. 

These characters went on again when I changed system to CJ Carella's WitchCraft, and their tales have been adapted and became some of the inspiration behind some of Debs' fiction writing (especially her dark fantasy novel "Black Clothes, Blue Fire"). The change to Unisystem would lead to other opportunities but that's getting ahead of the game (so to speak). Next time, we'll rewind to cover Debs and my time in the Camarilla, and the important friendships that were formed there...