The Black Campbell

Does chess or Parcheesi or Go count? Probably not.

The oldest RPG I’ve played was pretty new at the time — the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. The one where you didn’t even have die, but had to cut out chits and shake them in a cup. The rules were fairly simple, especially compared to the encyclopedias you need now just to know all the bits your characters do.

The oldest game we still play is Space: 1889, although I’m running the old setting with the new, lite Broken Compass rules. The oldest rules set we used up until about 2010 was the James Bond:007 RPG. It’s still worth a look.

Well, a lot of the stuff that has come in recently was Kickstarter between last year and the end of 2020, so the RPG bought this year was Mödiphiüs’ Star Trek Adventures, reviewed here. I had run a Star Trek game a few years ago, but I used the old Decipher system that had powered our long-running campaign of the early aughties. (A friend was a Trekkie, Enterprise was showing, I figured why not?)

Fast forward to this year. One of the other players has been running Fallout for us (review here) and the 2d20 system that had been so damned awful in playtesting years ago, was much better laid out and explained than when we were trying to struggle through the unedited playtest material for John Carter. I had popped for the PDF of the game a few years back never intending to play it, but maybe mine it for ideas at some point. After playing in Fallout, I had a pretty good sense of how the system worked, and what rules were a bit to wargame-y and would get conveniently ignored in a Trek game.

So I bought the Corebook bundle (comes with the PDFs for pretty much all the books expect Lower Decks and the Klingon supplement), a GM screen (which comes with an excellent set of starship combat sheets to aid players in what they can do when the photons start flying), and the Discovery-period sourcebook (more for the Strange New Worlds ties.) The goal is a “season 2” of the campaign we played a while back, using the 2d20 engine.

This post will also cover the Most Recent Game Bought post for tomorrow.

This was long enough ago I honestly don’t quite remember. I’ve been playing — starting with the box set of Dungeons & Dragons I got from Hess’ department store in…’78? ’79? maybe? Long enough that it was “dungeon master”, not gamemaster. I know it took a long time to find someone who wanted to play. There was a distant cousin I wound up running the game for, and there was an older guy who was running D&D at the local library, but I don’t remember his name, but I remember he didn’t make it very exciting; it was very rules oriented.

Once I had an actually group of friends playing by 1980, we played a lot — and I was usually the GM’d. We cycled through a lot of games — all the TSR offerings, then hit on James Bond:007, which was my favorite system until about a decade ago. It’s still damned good.

In college, others would take over running games, but they usually would last a few episodes then hand it off to me because they were busy or just didn’t have the time.

The only one that really sticks is the redheaded giant dude, totally spectrum, who ran Dungeons & Dragons for the group for about most of a session before we started working on peeling out the good gamers for our own group. This guy was stunningly misogynistic — after going through his 80 page bible on his game world, he gave us our characters, making sure the singular female got the cleric…who was mute. Better yet, he made sure his wife was getting us drinks and food. He had played once at our place and while stretching, he knocked the glass light cover off the kitchen ceiling. Shatter. Did he offer to clean up? Nope — he expected my then-wife to.

Then there was the goth Christian who ran Call of Chthulu — more on him later…