The Black Campbell

Simple. James Bond:007 RPG by Victory Games. It dropped in 1983 — some about the time of Octopussy. (A terrible entry, especially considering the excellent George MacDonald Fraser wrote it, but after the much superior For Your Eyes Only — bleh!) It was published for about four years and was an a real break from the d20 TSR offering, Top Secret, which hove too tightly to the “class” idea (assassin, spy, whatever), and which still used a random damage system.

JB:007 allowed you to build your character for points, so you could get close to what you envisioned. It had a rudimentary weakness system that could have been buffed up a bit, but it was a start. The system was mostly straightforward — attribute and skill gave a base number, then that was modified by the difficulty. (This required some rudimentary math, so that was not popular, but they had a chart on your character sheet to help. Combat was not radically different from other tasks and the quality of your success dictated the damage you did, not a die roll, which a lot of new system still use and is still, I submit, stupid. Even Cortex used your success as the base damage, plus a weapon damage rating.

The guns, the knives, the cars and boats, the gadgets — all had specific ratings from the speed it could fire to damage, to range and accuracy, as well as how likely to malfunction. This was way cool in the ’80s, and later for someone who tried a lot of cars and shot a lot of different guns. The product placement idea wasn’t overt, but it was there.

They had a series of modules based on the movies and which they altered the plots or the action pieces to be a surprise. There was a combat simulator game that I ignored, and a few setting and equipment guides (which inspired the Q2 Manual here on Black Campbell).

I ran spy games, police procedurals, even a cyberpunk campaign and a Stargate game using this rules set from 1983 until about 2010, when for some inexplicable reason — I just didn’t want to deal with the spy genre anymore. The reasons were really inexplicable, but there were a host of them that converged at the same time to make it “not fun” anymore.

Lately, I’ve been eyeing the rules and thinking about how to run a spy game that decouples the characters from governments and their obvious run toward authoritarianism. simpler stuff like mercenary work ala Extraction or Kingsman.

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?

This prompt again outs my shaky geek credentials. I know there are a lot of games that have tie-in novels, comics, movies, etc. There’s stuff for Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs, but for the most part, I’m usually focused on my take on that particular property, so I don’t really tend to buy those things. That said — and this particular game keeps coming up — I did rather enjoy the run of DIE the comic, which was developed and published at the same time as the creative team were working on the RPG. The run of the comic is over, so you should be able to get a hold of these at your local comic store or via Comicology or Amazon, or whatever. I suggest the LCS — they probably are still reeling from shutting the planet down.

The comic follows the adventures of a group of friends who got together to play a mysterious new roleplaying game in the ’90s as high school students and subsequently got transported to an alternate world based on RPGs, Tolkein’s experiences in World War I, HG Wells’ fascination with wargaming, the writings of the Bronte kids, and of course, Lovecraft. (As one does…) This world is a 20-sided die, with each facet containing a world (although there’s more to it), and over two years, they existed there before finally escaping — minus the GM who was caught in this other world. They come back to their hometown 15 years later and when their friend’s blood-covered (and magic) d20 is delivered to them, they find themselves trying to decide if they should destroy it. Too late, they are pulled back into DIE, where as their characters, they must figure out what’s going on. The comic deals with the emotional and other issues of the players as they deal with a world that feeds on their emotions and actions — good, bad, or indifferent.

It’s pretty good and worth grabbing the four volumes of graphic novels.

The other obvious one is Dungeons & Dragons; Honor Among Thieves which was a surprisingly good, and just flat out fun! movie. I took my daughter to see it and about half way through realized it was the most fun I’d had at a movie in a long time. And the fat dragon — well done.

Otherwise, without that, I would have to go with one of the properties that a roleplaying game was based on — a sort of inverse tie-in — and then there are so many: Babylon 5, Alien, Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica (the good one), and so on… If we’re allowing for that then the hands-down winner for me is Blade Runner. I saw the original in the theater opening night as a teen and was simply blown away by the look and feel, the moral ambiguity, and Rutger Hauer’s amazing performance. I know some purists prefer the original release, but I felt the “director’s cut” improved the movie dramatically by removing the quasi-happy ending, the listless narration, and the addition of the dream sequence that throws an awful lot into question — some of which the newer sequel dodged.

Something a lot of people seem to miss. Gaff makes origami figured to suit the personality of the replicant they are dealing with — the stick figure man for Leon, the unicorn for Deckard (if he is, indeed, a replicant)…and the chicken for Captain Bryant. For me, that one bit begs the question: how many people were actually replicants and didn’t know it? Never went off the reservation and lived out their short lives not knowing?

The Denis Villaneue sequel is excellent, and I think from a standpoint of story and pacing, character and acting, and hitting the emotional and moral elements of the original, it far surpasses the original. (But I could be full of shit.) That said, the world created by Ridley Scott was so unique at the time that it inspired a host of manga, anime, and science fiction films’ look. Ghost in the Shell and Akira owe much to Blade Runner, as do other sci-fi animes (and curiously, to two smaller films — Streets of Fire and the very strange Trouble in Mind (which has one of my all-time favorite villains, Hilly Blue, a gangster played by Divine [out of drag]).

So — tell me what I’m missing out there? Is there a tie-in I absolutely need to see/read?

This is probably unusual for most gamers, but I don’t really have a favorite set of dice. I’ll use pretty much whatever is at hand, and since I run a lot of the games using my laptop, I often just use a dice-rolling app like Dice by PCCalc on the MacBook Air. This app works well for me as you can set up strange sided dice, like d5s and d7s — which are useful if you play Lex Arcana with it’s strange dice mechanic. It allows for Fate dice, as well.

However, there is a new trend in games of having bits and bobs to go along with it — especially stuff on Kickstarter where stretch goals usually include some form of card deck and dice. Of those specialty dice, the ones from Broken Compass were pretty neat — with faces reading N, W, E, S, and a compass face. You don’t really need numbers in a game of (essentially) Yahtze, where you are looking for matches. The red and black ones from DIE are neat in that the highest face has a graphic representation of the type of die you’re using. The facehugger dice for Alien were cool, and helped craft a mood — but necessary? Not so much. I particularly liked the specialty dice for Avatar Legends, which have the sigils of the various elements on the 6 face.

Are any of these necessary? No — but they are fun and help set the mood.