The Black Campbell

Im tempted to toot my own horn and say Scott Rhymer (Victoriana, Imperial Age), but that’s too arrogant for my tastes. I think I’ll have to go with eitehr Jeff Combos for the Hollow Earth Expedition stuff or Mike Olsen for his nailing the tone of Atomic Robo in said game.

By “media”, I’m going to go with an established setting…I’ve got a tie.

If we’re going with books, it’s hands-down the Gaea Series by John Varley — Titan, Wizard, and Demon, which have some of the most inventive worldbuilding in a sci-fi setting. If you haven’t read them, you really should give them a try. The style of each book is different — a fast-paced action/adventure in a strange, sentient world; a subversive spy/action adventure in the same, but which really develops the Titanides; and the “what the f#$% were you smoking finale between this world, Gaea, and the heroes.

If TV/movies, I’d like to see a game based on Defiance, which was a bit weak in beginning the first season, but rapidly improved.

I do think a nice dystopian game could be built around the comic book world of Lazarus by the talented Greg Rucka (read his Queen & Country series — it’s fantastic!)

This one is tricky. I don’t tend to get free RPGs, often, or when I do, it’s usually a sale on a RPG Drive Thru. Most likely, I’d have to go with Atomic Highway by the great Colin Chapman, or Lords of Olympus, which I had gotten free, I don’t remember why. Most likely a sale.

Of the two, I find the latter more useful for the massive campaign setting information on the various gods, major, minor, and the Titans. It’s a very accurate guide to Greek myth, or as accurate as you can be with fiction. I’ve used it for the Battlestar Galactica game, and occasionally for guiding my inquiries for research Hercules. (It’s like mining a secondary source to find the primary ones, or using Wikipedia to look for better sources…)

Easy — our Battlestar Galactica game, which is nearing its conclusion, but still has the better part of a few months to go. You can find the skinny on the game by searching the site for “After Action Report”.

The most recent RPG (or related) purchase I’ve made would be Fate dice for the Atomic Robo game. I got a deal on Amazon for an “Olympic” set — four gold, four silver, and four bronze dice…just enough for the current group size. They’ve nicely faux metallic.

If we’re going with just an RPG book — that would The Smuggler’s Guide to the Rim for Margaret Weis’ Cortex Plus Firefly. Here’s the review…

This is an odd question in that it can be taken a multitude of ways. I think I’m going to go with the game campaign that most surprised me…

In 2010, my game group blew apart due to my divorce. About half of it remained intact, and we had to start a new set of campaigns to account for this. The one that most surprised me would have been out Hollow Earth Expedition game, which was set in 1936 Shanghai, a few months before the Japanese pulled the trigger on their invasion. The characters were a tough, unprincipled archeologist who had a reputation for being more tomb raider than scientist, his action-first, thinking later sidekick, a half-Chinese gangster, and an 12 year old female Chinese street urchin.

Rather than stumbling along, the adventures just flowed — from the introduction of the McGuffin, evidence of and possible means to find a mellified man, to trouble with the Japanese and other gangsters, to Nationalist politics where they had to rescue the president of China from his generals (and in the doing uncover the Terracotta Army a few decades too early.) They travel into deepest China to a monastery, battling an old sect of warrior-monks led by “a woman who cannot be killed”, found the mellified men, the girl accidentally ate a piece and was possessed by the spirit of an ancient warrior who wants to rule all China, to a final showdown in the underground tomb of the first Sovereign Emperor and his terracotta army.

The birth of my daughter and the moving away of several players brought the campaign to a close, but it was a good stopping point. We had another couple of adventures where the first two characters were battling Nazis to find a “lost Illuminati treasure” that first looked to be in Virginia, then turned out to be buried under Ben Franklin’s house in London.

Overall, the speed and ease of the plotting, the level of fun had, and the creativity of the group seemed revitalized by the changes it had gone through, and makes it one of my favorite campaigns I’ve ever run.