More Words, Deeper Hole

SPI’s Universe was, as previously mentioned, a foray into science fiction roleplaying. Included in the box, the Interstellar Display, a poster-sized, astronomically accurate (by 1980s standards) map depicting all known stars within 30 light-years of Earth. Unlike Traveller’s star maps, the Interstellar Display took into account that space is three-dimensional, not a paper-map-friendly two dimensions. It was very eye-catching and it makes me sad nobody seems to have ever take a high-resolution scan of the whole thing. The best I have found is this scan of the box set at Wayne’s Books.



Two-dimensional displays of three-dimensional volumes quickly get cumbersome as the volume increases and the number of objects within that volume soars. 30 light years is a reasonable compromise between having enough star systems to be interesting and not having so many as to be unreadably busy. GDW’s 2300 AD opted for 50 light years, encompassing about five times the volume, and their map was pretty crowded.

The Universe map is long out of print but happily Atomic Rockets is happy to fulfill your star map needs.

George MacDonald and Steve Peterson’s 1981 Champions is Hero Games’ superhero rpg. I think I first encountered it with the second edition, which means I missed the heady days when one could put a multipower into an elemental control. I assure you that makes sense. I played Champions avidly across third, fourth, and fifth editions, ultimately moving on once its increasing complexity exceeded my capacity to keep the rules straight.



The aspect of Champions that endeared it to me wasn’t the moral certainty it offered that every possible problem can be solved with the right application of skin-tight garish clothes, bare fists, and laser vision, although that is comforting. Champions was the first system I encountered where character generation was fully points based, entirely under the player’s control. The only thing between player and a perfect character was flawless comprehension of the rules and an ability to convince the game master that the clearly abusive interpretation of the mechanics one proposed was reasonable. Although I am in no sense a control freak, I loath being in any was dependent on factors that are imponderable, unpredictable. random, and/or outside my command. The ability to craft characters precisely offered Champions and the Hero Games rules derived from it played into my preferences.

Mark Rein*Hagen’s 1991’s Vampire the Masquerade offered players the opportunity to play lugubriously morose undead, cursed with eternal youth and abilities beyond those of mortal kind, generally with supernatural beauty tossed in there as well. The only distraction from their melancholy, endless backbiting politics. Basically, Drama Students: the RPG.

I could and have made fun of many aspects of the game, from the designer’s splat to the game mechanics, but VtM did one thing extremely well. VtM was in its self-conscious 1991 way a lot more inclusive than competing RPGs and it sold buckets loads to women. It was also pretty popular with the queer kids as well.

This shouldn’t have been exceptional in 1991 and yet it was. Women make up half the population. Games unlikely to sell to women leave half the money on the table but until Vampire came along, the best one might encounter was games that weren’t actively hostile to women gamers. Others made it pretty clear they considered women second class or possibly mythical. White Wolf was a notable exception.

Once a dominating figure in table top wargames, by the early 1980s Simulations Publications, Inc. had by means of a series of extremely bold decisions a desperate need for an infusion of cash. Who better to appeal to than the young company who by creating roleplaying games had contributed to SPI’s increasing challenging environment? SPI borrowed $425,000 from TSR. What could go wrong?

I remember sitting in RAFM’s lunch room reading a Gygax Dragon editorial in which if I recall correctly he angrily denounced Origins as an SPI/Avalon Hill anti-TST plot. It may be at least some elements of TSR were not entirely fond of SPI. In any case, SPI did have two RPGs (DragonQuest and Universe) and that made them a competitor.



Two weeks later, TSR called in their loan. SPI could not pay. RIP, SPI.

Frank Chadwick’s 1988 Space 1889 was GDW’s foray into Steampunk roleplaying, although as I recall Jeter had just coined the term ​“steampunk” and it wasn’t applied to Space 1889. Instead, this planetary adventure RPG, set in a Victorian era where implausible physics handed spaceflight to 19th century humans, got the tag line ​“Science Fiction Role Playing in a More Civilized Time.“

Since this was a time when, for example, women in most nations barely had rights, sixty million or so Indians starved to death under the British, the Belgians were busily converting the Congo over to a severed-hand based currency, and the North American settler nations were enthusiastically genociding their way to the West Coast, it does raise the question of from whose perspective the 19th century could be said to be more civilized, and what precisely there was to be nostalgic about.

This may be a misnamed series, because in this case the detail I am very sure I know exactly what the company was thinking.

R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk (later Cyberpunk 2020) adapted the cyberpunk genre to gaming (and did it without getting the FBI coming down on them like a ton of technically illiterate bricks). As far as the game itself goes, it's about what one would expect: lots of focus on the surface details of cyberpunk [1], not much awareness of any depth in the fiction. Ah, well. Nothing stopping players from adding layers to their game.

The reason I single R. Tal out is because their cover art inspired me to think about how I shelved games. A large fraction of my clientele were women and I didn't want the first thing they saw when they came in to be something like this.



I'd like to think this was because I was a particularly insightful but really, it only occurred to me after I overheard two customers complaining about the porn comics another store kept near the register to reduce shrinkage. Cue a bit of reshelving, with the R Tal moved to a side room, and companies like White Wolf and Dreampod 9 in the front.

The reason for the soft core porn art seems pretty obvious: the company thought it would help sell their books, which paints an interesting image of their customer base's demographics. Sure, the art may potentially alienate a fair swath of the people who see it but that's really only an issue if you thought the people it puts off were going to buy it in the first place.




1: And made up slang, which happens to be one of those details that grate on me.

Number ten in my hit-list of cool RPGs that I never actually played: from GDW, Frank Chadwick, Timothy B. Brown, Lester W. Smith, and Marc W. Miller's Traveller: 2300, later renamed 2300 AD. Despite the first edition's title, T2300 had nothing to do with GDW's flagship science fiction roleplaying game. Instead, it was a sequel to Twilight 2000. Three centuries (which the company gamed out) was long enough for humans to recover from the Twilight War, although not long enough to replace the nation-state and empire with something less pugilistic, develop star flight and explore the nearer stars, where it did not take too long to encounter aliens, peaceful and otherwise.

T2300 had many interesting features: alien aliens, an attempt to provide a hard SF RPG, and most notably the Near Star map, which did its best to provide a three dimensional map of the stars within 50 light years of the Solar System. It also had ... issues, from the confusing product name to playtest/proofreading issues that meant that _as written_, nine in ten characters were permanently comatose. Thus the 1988 second edition, renamed, polished, and expanded.



As I recall, GDW even allowed people with the first edition to swap the original box set for the second edition rather than making them pay for the same game twice.

The big background event was an ongoing war between humans and the alien Kafer but near space was a big place and it was possible to run games in regions of space unaffected by the war.

Alien races proved fairly common in our neck of the woods. In fact, there were enough for rather disquieting patterns to emerge. Common pathways for technological species included self-extermination (near miss for humans and Eber, success for the Little Guys and maybe the Medusae as well), and domination by a more powerful species (the Song, the Xiang, and the Ylii, with the Klaxun an edge case because humans had only just discovered the stone age aliens). Humans and Kafer were avid empire builders, keen on dominating other species [1]. Although humans were not aware of the fact, neither humans not Kafers were the most advanced species around: locally, that was whatever created the Pentapods, and on a grander scale there was something building dimensional bridges between the core of the galaxy and the outer arms.

The system was well supported, although the quality of the supplements was a bit hit or miss. Later on, GDW stitched on cyberpunk elements in an attempt to keep up with fashion.

We never played the system as written but we did use it for a locked room murder mystery IN SPACE, and a campaign, both using the HERO system.

1: It happened that humans had characteristics that inflamed Kafer paranoia, so there would have been conflict regardless of empire building.

Day eight of unplayed RPGs: Frank Chadwick, Dave Nilsen, Loren K. Wiseman, and Lester W. Smith's Twilight 2000, GDW's SF RPG to which history was very unkind. Set in the far-off year of 2000 AD, it depicts the later stages of World War Three, triggered in the east by Soviet-Chinese tensions and in the west by an ill-considered attempt by East and West Germans to forcibly reunify their nations while the Soviet were distracted. This did not go entirely well. Five years into the war, Earth is a much emptier place, and central command structures are, if not broken, under severe strain.

Players are soldiers somewhere in central Europe, stranded after the One Last Big Push That Will Surely End in Allied Victory... didn't. This leaves the players free to pursue campaigns from murder hoboing their way across Europe (which, given the lack of supplies, was unlikely to end well) to trying to get home to a US divided between MilGov and CivGov.

T2000 avoided Chadwickification--the tendency of any RPG Frank Chadwick had a hand in to slowly become a military RPG--by being one right from the get-to. It was pretty well supported by GDW. New editions appeared as various key elements of their future history were superseded.



A non-WWIII variant, MERC 2000, provided rules for Murder Hobos for Hire in a more peaceful world, which was mainly notable because one of the source books used Canadian Tire money instead of actual Canadian currency.



GDW even provided an element of hope, in that T2000 tied into a sequel I will get to, one in which the Earth recovered from the Twilight War. If not Chadwickification.

Day Five of Unplayed RPGs: Niall C. Shapero's SF RPG Other Suns. Game mechanics were a very detailed, math-heavy cousin of BRP. The setting drew on popular SF of the time (More the Mote in God's Eye and Space Viking side), with the twist that when the heavily-armed Terran Empire encountered the vast, alien community that dominated a third of the galaxy, they were promptly and immediately defeated. Twice. Currently, humans have a collective government but functionally, humans fall under the purview of three alien regional governments.

Said aliens for the most part curiously similar to humanoid animals for the most part, which makes this one of the earlier furry RPGs.



The aliens were also available as PCs, so anyone not wanting to play a member of a second tier group notable mainly for being homicidal bastards who almost crashed civilization could select something more palatable. Seriously, why play a naked ape when you could be a telepathic fox person?

A vast variety of weapons was provided, despite which the example of combat provided in the rules ends with the example character (a human) getting arrested for murder. Also provided, planet generation and ship building rules, which I had a lot of fun playing with.

FGU supported the game rather poorly.

Day Three of Unplayed RPGs: Chaosium's Stormbringer! This was a licensed product based on Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné secondary world fantasy series. The game engine used modified Basic Roleplaying mechanics; in particular, magic worked very differently in Stormbringer than in Runequest. Characters could come from a wide variety of backgrounds; power-gamers preferred certain back-grounds over others because there was no pretense of game balance between them.

Meeting Elric and his soul-eating demon sword was not recommended. In fact, although it was best not to think about it, all PCs who did not somehow flee their home plane were ultimately doomed thanks to the well-meaning, mopey albino protagonist of the series.

There have been many editions of Stormbringer, and the related RPG Elric!