Figures of Text

Rob Donaghue has a great post where he traces his ‘gaming DNA’ – games he enjoyed and vividly remembers. I’m dying of the post-Warpcon manflu, so I shall be deeply unoriginal and copy his theme.

Sometime around 1989 or 1990, I wandered into the city library during Book Week. There was a Tolkien-inspired event on, which turned out to be a huge demo game of MERP run by the local gaming society. I still haven’t seen anything like it – there were kids clustered two or three deep around the table, looking on in confusion and/or awe at a nice map of the Prancing Pony and loads of Mithril miniatures. I got to play – I was an elf who passed through Moria. It was the most awesome thing ever.

(I know that there were at least two other kids at that event who went on to become highly active gamers in the local scene. I’d say that one demo game indirectly spawned at least twenty new players. There’s a lesson there – get ‘em while they’re young and impressionable.)

I really wanted to play again, but I wasn’t sure what I’d played. I ended up buying a Middle-Earth themed board game that I thought was MERP, but turned out to be an insanely complex wargame that involved more tiny dice than you can imagine. It bore no resemblance to the roleplaying game whatsoever. I stared at it in confusion for a long time. This wasn’t right at all.

A few months later, my cousin picked up the D&D Red Box and tried running it. I remember those games, all right. My first character was a cleric of Thor. I had one hit point, and died in the first room of the dungeon when a bat fell on my head. Thor descended from on high and resurrected me. I went into the next room, where a kobold hit me and killed me again. Thor came down from the heavens again and brought me back to life with six hit points. In the room after that, we found a gold statue which was worth enough XP to bring us all up to exactly second level. I remember arguing that I was a cleric and needed only 1500 XP to advance, but the elf needed loads more and so if he was getting enough to hit 2nd level, I should reach 3rd. In retrospect, I should have been a bit more grateful for the repeated deity bailout.

In the room after that, there was a magic portal. We tied a rope to a statue and went through; the GM ruled that the rope was attached to the statue, the statue to the floor, and the floor to the world, so the entire planet was also sucked through.

This, I felt, was also not right.

I ended up getting that red box set, and set up a gaming group in school. We ran mostly D&D and Warhammer, although I do remember a home-brew Star Trek game. Then I went to my first Warpcon, and discovered Call of Cthulhu.

This, I was certain, was right. We played a lot of Cthulhu, followed by several long-running Vampire campaigns that stretched into college, interspersed with Paranoia, SLA Industries, Warhammer and more D&D.

In college, there was Ars Magica and a lot of other stuff, but the really big game was Legend of the Five Rings. The epic Chrysanthemum Road game is still the best campaign I’ve ever run. I was also heavily into Blue Planet at the time, which led me to the Gaming Outpost, which led me to hanging around online with Ron Edwards and Jared and Clinton and co who’d go on to do the whole indie gaming thing. I got burned out after many, many pointless arguments about GNS and went off to play the hell out of Unknown Armies and Nobilis.

After that, I started freelancing, which meant learning d20. I ran through the whole of Temple of Elemental Evil, while playing Charles’ endlessly surreal Hellboy game and a series of Vampire games run by sundry other Galwegians.

Looking back, there’s a distinct lack of wholly original games in that last. I’m very good at finding second-order possibilities in existing settings, which was very handy working when working in the Mongoose word mines – I could find inspiration in (almost) any game, and I’ve never had the driving need to come up with my own games. That’s the next challenge. Call it genetic engineering.

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