The Black Campbell

I was just sitting here musing on the past and present — I’ve a new daughter and it’s causing the requisite destruction to my lifestyle that every new parent who gives a crap experiences. We’re working out sleep schedules between the wife and I (we’ve got watches for the night to spell each other — I’m a night owl, she gets up at oh-crap thirty; I take the first half of the night, she’s got the morning and forenoon watches), we’re trying to figure out what we can get done between diaper changes, feedings, and paying her attention, and we’re trying to figure how the gaming group will be effected, as we meet at our place and the wife games…

That’s when I realized I’ve been playing for 31-32 years. Sometime around late 1979/early 1980 I bought the old D&D box set at Hess’ in the Palmer Mall and that was all she wrote. I’ve had a bunch of games I’ve run, systems I’ve bought and never used, games I’ve played but never bought. I did a rough count of the number of campaigns I’ve run or run in: it’s somewhere between 30-35…about one a year, and most of that I ran or co-ran. When you consider this includes failed campaigns that ran a few sessions or adventures and folded, that’s pretty impressive.

The usual high school period saw us playing in the basement cum bar in my friend Eric’s house after dinner until 9 or 10ish.  The main games were D&D, Gamma World, and first Top Secret before moving the campaign to the excellent James Bond: 007 system, Traveler. There were a few other short-lived attempts at other settings that fizzled. There were wargames, the favorite being Car Wars.

College continued much the same, with a superheroes campaign a friend ran (Champions, I seem to remember…I hated the character generation) and I ran JB:007. After I was asked to leave shortly before I would have quit, I kicked around crap jobs and my gaming was restricted to the occasional meets with the high school crowd and a single friend. The games were FASA’s popular but in my opinion highly flawed Star Trek setting and — as always — JB:007 (Is it any wonder I went into intelligence for a time?)

Said friend and I moved to Philadelphia and had one of the larger gaming groups I had up to that point (5-8.) This was my comic book phase, and the friend was a failed comic book artist. The game was DC Heroes in an original universe, and toward the end Space: 1889, which grabbed me hard.

Like Bond, Space: 1889 would be a staple series of campaigns for my groups from 1990 to 2004. It was probably the reason I finally settled on history for my profession. The system changed, playing with a few of the indie games but settling on a highly-modified Castle Falkenstein. The campaigns got steadily less speculative fiction and moved toward more alternative history. It shared time with West End Games’ Star Wars (which still kicks the ass of the WOTC lines…all of them) that went way off-the-wall, but was great fun. I played in a cyberpunk campaign, and wound up running the game because of a lack of interest from the GM, who then fired up a Shadowrun campaign that lasted a few months.

In the military, Bond and Space: 1889/Castle Falkenstein shared time with The Babylon Project — we were all B5 fans and it was the first campaign I can truly say I had go off as I wanted it to. 1) The story got finished in the 2 years it ran. 2) It really honed my skills trying to work a campaign around a TV show’s canon without interfering with the general arc of the original material, but working in a side story that was important enough for the players to feel their actions with important.

On a whim, I ran what was to be a mini-campaign, more to try out the rules set for Star Trek — first the Last Unicorn system (where I had S John Ross in the game for a while), then with the Decipher rules set, before they screwed over their customers. There were several “series”, all set around the same time (after DS9/Voyager) and which got progressively more “transhuman” as they went along. It became the main game — a classic example of a game being so much fun it went from a backup campaign to the main event. It gave way to an abortive, then a relatively successful Serenity campaign that imploded with my last game group a year ago. Due to the similar feel of the Western in space to the Victorian sci-fi of Space: 1889, it took the Victorian campaigns off the docket for the first time in a decade and a half.

The most recent stuff — Serenity, Hollow Earth Expedition — have mostly been short campaigns that either faded away or died on the vine. The surprise success was Battlestar Galactica — which I figured, like Trek and B5 before it would fall apart…it ran beautifully alongside the series “canon” while not getting in the way. Then it went the way of the last game group (usually what brings about the end of a campaign is either too many people move on and the game gets rebooted or ends.)

Looking back, the last decade has seen a steady decline in my gaming time. In the military, in college, working for a living I gamed three or more times a week. Since grad school I’ve seen a steady drop off from thrice to twice a week, to once a week with a biweekly weekend game. Now, with the child here, we’re looking at a biweekly game (the weekend one has been monthly due to school demands on the one gamer…) and I find myself wondering if my life is finally going to take away this hobby that’s been a constant in my life since 1980.

I hope not. I suspect once the initial craziness of having a newborn in the house it will allow me to get back to it, but for now, it looks like my primary creative outlet is going to take a serious hit.

Was there a point to this post? Not really…just reminiscing.