The Black Campbell

I’ve never done horror well, and I haven’t seen anyone else do it terribly well, either. I played Call of Chthulu a few times in 1991, and the experience was so bad that I haven’t played the game, and recoil at its very mention. So I guess in that sense the shitty GM was successful…

I know it’s unfair. I know it was a bad experience and I should chance it with a GM I trust, but as if considering a deviant sex act, I’m trepidatious.

I had, before that, looked at a few different systems — Chill stands out but I remember nothing of the system. Ghostbusters was a silly and fun pick-up game, but we had played it up more for the comedy than the horror. Even my own dip of the toe into horror a few years ago with Supernatural, had a few eery moments, but the natural humor of the group overcame that. There is the infamous fight between the drunk FBI character and a — I think it was a fox spirit — in a men’s room that involved the character peeing on himself, throwing up, and also getting the s#!t kicked out of him. It was a good fight, and nowhere as gratuitous as it sounds, but it wasn’t scary…it was hilarious!

So, I’ve steered away from horror. I just can’t maintain the atmosphere long enough for a full adventure, much less a campaign.

Easy — Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by Margaret Weis. It’s the first iteration of Cortex Plus I liked (the other being Firefly) and I thought it captured the feel of the comic books very well. The rules were approachable, but could get a bit complex, with a lot of moving parts for what plot points could do, but all of that was easily stripped out, if needed.

Before that, I would have said DC Heroes by Mayfair. I liked the logarithmic progression of the stats, that they tied to time, weight, distance, etc… so that you had a good idea of exactly what your character could do. At the time, in the late ’80s, FASERIP Marvel Superheroes was too abstract (something that appeals, now), and Champions was out because I didn’t have access to a Cray computer or a few days to do character creation.

Easy — Battlestar Galactica. I love the “new show” setting, the old Cortex mechanics, and the post-apocalyptic politics while fighting killer robots works right into my sensibilities.

I’ve run Star Trek with shocking success in the early 2000s; prior to that all Trek efforts had proven to be lackluster and died quickly. I’ve run a successful 2 year campaign in the Babylon 5 universe that was fun, but died once my army service was over and I moved back to Albuquerque. I’ve always wanted to run Jovian Chronicles — I love the look and the politics, am not so hot on the giant robots (but one of my players is), but the denseness of the setting has actually been a bar to entry…I just don’t know where to fit my stuff in. I ran a short Serenity/Firefly campaign that was fun, but ultimately lost steam as we went along. I really want to do a transhuman game, but I’m finding my buy-in hard…

Thinking on it, I realized that the Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica games both found themselves overrun by transhuman ideas and elements, and it made sense to introduce them…but that seems to be the key: that this transformation to post-human and machine intelligence be happening around them. Most transhuman settings are post-Singularity, where the technology is, well, mundane. Look at the Culture novels of Iain Banks — while those stories are big, bold, and he paints an interesting universe, the events are separated by hundreds of years. There’s no scarcity, no real threats (or they would be distressingly similar — some big bad with even bigger tech), and no real drama. Kinda like The Next Generation movies of the 1990s.

You have to set them in the Singularity, discover a society in the midst of it, or pull a Rip van Winkle, where the characters come in and the tech is new. I don’t think it supports a long-term campaign, but that could also be my lack of imagination on the subject speaking.

An honorable mention has to go to Space: 1889 — a Victorian sci-fi game (I’m not calling it steampunk — gad, what a terrible tag!) where steam powered marvels of Verne and Wells combine with imperial efforts of the Great Powers, and courtly behavior is still cool. It’s just as sci-fi as anything else out there, and is one of the reasons I like Firefly, but I drifted away from it because we were playing Serenity and the two games had a lot of the same themes and motifs.

I can’t remember exactly, as this would have been in 1988 or ’89, when I was living in Philadelphia, but there were several all day/evening games that would run for 8-10 hours. These were usually either superhero games using the DC Heroes RPG by Mayfair, or spy games using James Bond: 007 RPG. I do remember one ended with everyone sacked out on my massive studio apartment floor well after midnight, while I was getting busy with one of the female gamers in the closet.

Ah, good times…

The longest continuous campaign I’ve ever played would have to be the Star Trek campaign I started in 2000, after moving back to Albuquerque from Texas. I had intended it to be a mini-campaign, maybe a dozen nights of play, at most, and I was doing it mostly to get a few of our old gamers back into the fold. One of them was a huge Trekkie.

It lasted six years.

The game started with Last Unicorn’s rules, then migrated to Decipher’s in 2001 or 2002. We set the game post Dominion War, and I kept a lot of The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 “canon” for the game, but ignored all but the good parts of The Old Show and the movies. I ignored Voyager and Enterprise. The game centered on post-war politics and the rise of a machine race composed of von Neumann robots. We had a few rules — technology did what it was supposed to…no rewiring the deflector dish into a spiraling quantum whatsinator; the Federation and its culture was going to be explored…what was so great about it?; the tech that was discovered in the various shows and movies hadn’t disappeared…robots and sentient machines were just starting to show up and were based on the Ilya gynoid from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Data was tech that had been largely unsuccessful.

We went through various ships and period from just post-Dominion War to about 100 years in the future, when the whole fleet was comprised of sentient starships, their crews who were as often as not cybernetically linked to the ship’s network. They busted the Borg by winning that enemy over with a better deal — the same fusion of tech and organics, but without the coercion…Federation crews either wanted to be wired, or served without the cybernetics. The cybernetics were not invasive, like the Borg’s. We did Borg better than they did.

Eventually, the issue was that the technology was so good, their understanding of the universe so complete that there was no real drama in the game… Game over.

I decided to discount screencaps, comic art (or Dr. Dinosaur’s “Behold an ordinary motorist!” while driving through a building wins, hands down!) and anything that wasn’t specifically created for a game. I had a few pieces i really like — the Hill Martians Detrick did in the original Space: 1889 rulebook (p.179), the Castle Falkenstein two page splash on p.10-11 of Castle Falkenstein, and there’s a lot of really nice stuff in the Numenera book, but I think I have to go with the “Shadow Hunter” pantherwoman, tied with the Amazon Warrior from the example character pages of Mysteries of the Hollow Earth. I need to touch base with Jeff Combos and find out who the artist was, so I can give them their due.

Here they are…