The Black Campbell

If I’m still alive? Sure, I’ll probably still be playing RPGs. I hope so.

What will I be playing? Who knows? We’re in a golden age of RPGs, right now. There’s more people playing than ever, more games being published successfully thanks for Kickstarter and DiveThruRPG; and who knows what’s coming that will be awesome?

More to the point: I hope my kiddo is still gaming in 20 years. Still dreaming, still having fun. I think that would make it all worth it.

This one I’ve remained remarkably consistent on since RPGaDay started eight years ago: Cortex. Not the new Cortex or “Fate-ified” Cortex of Leverage and Marvel RPG or later Margaret Weiss Games productions (may MWG rest in peace…) but the one that powered Serenity and more specifically Battlestar Galactica and Supernatural. The rules were simple and elegant, and the few bits that weren’t could easily be ignored. It’s still my favorite balance between simple rules and storytelling, and something more substantial than newer lite systems like Broken Compass (although that is a very good system, as well.)

A tight second is the rules set for James Bond: 007 RPG from the 1980s, and again — I’ve been really steady on this one, as well. It did a good job of evoking the movies, leaned into the product placement mentality with the different ratings for guns, cars, etc. and was the first game to really get away from random damage — making injury based on the quality of the hit. I often find myself tempted to bust it open and run something using JB:007.

This prompt is amusing. With Amazon and the internet, you can find all those old games — often in good shape! — so if you wish it, you can have it. That said, part of me really wishes I had an old science fiction game called Universe that SPI (I think it was) put out in the early to mid ’80s. It had this spectacular map of the nearest stars that was pretty accurate (for a 2d representation of three dimensions), and I remember the rules being decent, if not as simple as Star Frontiers, but lightyears better than the execrable Space Opera, which we also tried and which has never been bested in my mind for truly awful mechanics until the unfortunate Traveler 5 or whatever that shit was that was published a few years ago.

It’s probably awful by today’s standards, and I realize that there’s a lot of sentimental BS — this was the sci-fi game we settled on in the high school group after Star Frontiers. It was supposed to be SPI’s answer to GDW’s Traveler, if I remember.

Having written this, I of course, hit the interwebz and found the game on eBay and Noble Knight for a ludicrous $175ish (but in excellent shape — so probably as close to new as possible.)

This year’s RPGaDay is really exposing my lack of dork. I’ve only been to two conventions in my life. One was back in the ’80s in Philadelphia where I met some cool folks and had to leave early due to food poisoning. The other was a sci-fi and comic convention in Albuquerque about five years ago, and I went to that one to support a friend that was having a time of it and just wanted to go have fun.

I think my favorite purchase was the P90 airsoft gun I found for him to go with his Stargate (Atlantis, if i recall) costume. It wasn’t for me — I wanted him to have a good time and the $100 or so was worth it. I think I bought myself an Eaglemoss Akira-class starship model (one of the wee ones…) The convention was also good for the fee pics he got to take with various actors because i was making a joke of him posing with all these cosplayers — I would take a picture of the person, but only his elbow, arm, small bit would be in frame. (Yes, there was also a proper one with him in the shot.) It was so well received that the actor from Voyager (Garret Wang?), the bad guy/kid from Karate Kid, and a bunch of other guests took pics with him for free to be in on the joke. (They got tipped well — they’re not working for free.)

Sadly, we’re not friends anymore.

I guess someone needs to convince me to go to a convention.

This one’s easy. It’s also a tale of how some folks take gaming way too seriously.

Early ’90s. I had just moved back to my hometown in Pennsylvania and couldn’t find a group. I wound up introducing a regular customer that hung out at the gas station I was working nights at to gaming. I was running Space:1889 using the old GDW rules and the Cloudships and Gunboats minis for the ship combat. A few sessions ensued, a few more folks from the local college joined in.

In an epic battle between the heroes, who had been stranded at a British frontier station on Mars after the cloudship was damaged in a fight, they found themselves pitted against a large force of Martians from a local “empire”. They were fighting to get back to the station after an unsuccessful foray, and running out of ammunition and support, they needed to withdraw. But not this guy. While shouting that he would bring down the might of the British empire (or some such), he charged alone into a horde of baddies.

And died really quickly and ignominiously.

This was done even after the classic GM letting you know you’re idea is truly stupid — “You sure about that?” It was also the way he played the character that made this more comic than tragic or even brave. Afterward, he let me know that he felt the other players weren’t giving Sir Diesalot his appropriate due and that he had a dream where the character had “haunted him” over their lack of respect.

So, he was out of the group quickety-quick. That’s a bit too much lack of reality for me, and honestly, gaming was probably not the healthiest pastime for him, it would appear.

This guy and the “ninja” from my time in Philadelphia are two of the reasons that I vet gamers in a neutral area (you don’t get my address until I know you’re not a kook) and we’re pretty fussy about newcomers.

There’s a few I wouldn’t mind playing, and some that had incredible longevity in our various iterations of the game group. From 1983 until about 2010, I regularly would run James Bond:007, and from 1989 until a few days ago, I ran a Space:1889 game — although I stopped using the GDW mechanics pretty early. We tried FUDGE (the original FATE), settled on Castle Falkenstein (with heavy modifications) to power it through the 1990s and 2000s until it rolled off the game rotation in favor of Hollow Earth Expedition.

So what do we still play? Dungeons & Dragons has recently rejoined the rotation with the latest game group. I hadn’t played it since our big campaign in high school that ended wonderfully. That was Advanced D&D and I didn’t play it again, save for one disastrous game night with a horrorshow of a person running, until 2016 when I coaxed a few old friends back into gaming by doing a Rome-based D&D campaign. Old West End Games’ Star Wars got trotted out for a bit a few years ago, as did the old Decipher Star Trek system.

Setting-wise, however, the big boy is Space:1889 — it was the game that got me into Victorian history (mostly because I wanted verisimilitude in the game world) and eventually led me into history as a field of study. I’ve been running it for my daughter recently, and she loves the setting. However, to drive the game, I’m using the Broken Compass rules. They’re clean, quick, and for a pre-teen that’s the ticket to getting through a “mission” or “adventure” in a night or two.

Define “weird”. I suspect the intent here was to angle toward discussing horror or horror-adjacent RPGs. That’s never really been my thing. I played Call of Chthulu once back in the early ’90s with an absolutely horrible GM. (As an aside, the dude was a goth Christian that wrote really bad goth Christian music.) The experience was so awful, I’ve never played CoC again, and avoided most of the White Wolf lines of the ’90s. (Which, to be honest, having hung around with some of the LARPers that played them, seemed to revolve mostly around dressing up and trying to get laid. Nothing wrong with that, mind; just not my idea of “role playing”.)

I remember buying Kult back in whenever it came out and being unimpressed with the rules. Other than that, the closest I’ve gotten to “weird” — other than being an RPG player in the first place — is probably Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood. These games are meant to evoke the kids-on-bikes movies of the ’80s, but could be taken in the Stranger Things direction very easily. I ran a few sessions of TftL, but just couldn’t quite get the groove, although the players seemed to like it.

Another than might count more for the material explored in the campaign would be Alien. I love the franchise but we’ve steered away from the alien body horror for the most part and focused on corporate intrigue and the horrors of synths replacing people, genetically-engineered critters for pets — from cute anime synths to gene-spliced sabertooth tiger “pets” and worse. Instead of looking to space for the truly awful, I’ve focused more on people.

Anyway — that’s about all I’ve got for this one. What are some “weird” games I’m missing out on?