The games I’ve played in over the last year or so:
A long-time friend died recently. As I knew him mostly through the best part of forty years of gaming I compiled a list of all the characters I knew or heard of him as, with the help of mutual friends. In Memory of Pete Shepherd
The games I’ve played in over the last year or so:
Currently running:
2018-
More fully “Pulvis et umbra sumus” or ‘We are dust and shadows’, 201x’s work in somewhat indecisive progress, with a setting starting 30 years after Gin Lane, but not quite a continuation of the old game. Early working titles were Gin Noir and The Black Joak.
Games I used to run are below. There is some old-ish html down some of those links so layout may be a bit suspect in places.
2006-2012
Set in London in the 1730s, around the time of the second Gin Act. Player characters generally using escapades in the name of the abolitionist kill-joys to get themselves entangled in increasingly bizarre plots against the realm and reality. Stopped rather suddenly, for reasons, and for too long to pick up again. Game system evolved from FATE v2. Magic had a Sephiroth theme, inspired by Mary Gentle’s White Crow stories, with practical implementation from GURPS Cabal and GURPS Thaumatology.
2010
Some collaborative background material for a test game using the commercial rules and setting of VSCA’s Diaspora, an SF instance of the FATE gaming system. I rather liked the system and the game concept, but in the end SF gaming is not my dish of tea, so there were only a couple of sessions.
Early 2000s
Shortlived, unsuccessful attempt to do a retro AD&D fantasy, lifting some background from Harry Turtledove’s Videssos series. Maybe this was entirely offline?
Mid 1990s to early 2000s
Yo-ho-ho, me hearties! Set in the 1660s Caribbean rather than the golden age of Pirates in the early C18th. Under the influence of Tim Power’s On Stranger Tides and Michael Scott Rohan’s Chase The Morning, this sailed to some strange and unlikely ports. Regrettably there are only a few, contributed, game accounts; we just didn’t do them at the time. Game systems: FUDGE, a flirtation with Risus, some Person’s Intentionally Simple System and possibly others. Background informed by GURPS Atlantis and the cosmology of Michael Scott Rohan’s High Seas leavened with GURPS Cabal’s Pearl Bright Ocean. And Voodoo.
Memories? Aust as a direction; A two-decker sailing up the Niger, with a spot of elephant hunting by broadside; down the Nile via the Vampire Queen’s Court; Mr Sesostris…
50-60 sessions, so one of the successful ones.
1992-3?
Apart from one or two incidents I’d entirely forgotten this failed-to-fly game until I found a folder of old character sheets. Powered by a watered-down GURPS. As I recall there was the edge of human civilisation down in the valleys – farms and steadings and local Sherifs — and rather more, lords and ladies – in the lowlands. Up on the high tops there were… others. The half dozen or so games that ran were centred on sheep rustling and family/clan disagreements. Whether the Others came into it much now escapes me.
The memorable trip? Some player-characters were deputised as bounty hunters to bring to justice a bunch of sheep thieves, incidentally meeting sweet, simple Willum and his prize sheep, Flossie — a romantic tragedy most seemed to reckon at the time.
Late 1980s
Set a few years after the ‘fall’ of New Jerusalem into mundane reality, some old lags rode out in search of adventure, and magic, again. Run as a play-by-mail narrative game (inspired by Rob Nott’s Sundown, as I recall) over many months, though finished face-to-face — which is why there is no detailed account of the conclusion, damnit.
late 1980s to early 1990s?
I wrote some pieces for the narrative shared-world game Hurry On A Sundown, started by Rob Nott in the late, great Lankhmar Star Daily ’zine, later continued in ArgleBargle / The Brothers Grim and possibly other places. Almost everyone else was better at Sundown and writing than me. Though I find my pieces lightly embarrassing it would be interesting to see some (more) of the Sundown oeuvre on-line.
198x?
A recent (2020) recollection: the flip side of New Jerusalem. A scenario I set up for a games con (in Coventry Poly, as I recall, the brother’s old stamping ground), set in a Holy Roman Empire not unadjacent to NJ. Title taken quite inappropriately from the very Protestant hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, but it was all about irony.
Also ran at St Andrews WarSoc a time or too later. I recall an undead cardinal being involved in this version… Possibly influenced by Michael Moorcock’s The Warhound and the World’s Pain.
Mid 80s
There seems to be little trace of this beyond memories. Ran more than one scenario though. Player characters were denizens of the Unseelie Court and were tasked with stealing unbaptised human babies and otherwise being nasty to humans, if they didn't have a fistful of cold iron with them, and to keep the lesser faerie species in their places. Rune magic: characters had a rune-related personal magic and could gather rune items to give a wider range / more power.
1982
Intended to be a fantasy version ‘Oceania meets the Europeans’, but with a bit more power on the side of the people in the canoes, the player perspective. Tried to run the system on a programmable calculator... The idea foundered on the task of mapping and managing all the itsy-bitsy islands.
1979 to 1988
First run at a New Year house con in late December ’79…
Mostly GM write-ups of the events in a small isolated Germanic town in protestant fundamentalist denial of their location just slightly past the edge of mundane reality, in the time of the C17th 30 Years War. The accounts were originally published in drunk & disorderly, a gaming a.p.a. ’zine of the ’80s.
This was very directly inspired by a film, The Last Valley (1971), plus a dollop of FRP monsters on top: 30 Years War attitudes and gunpowder weapons meet heroic fantasy.
(2016-05-12: Heh: I watched the first 20 minutes of the film for the first time in 37 years (on YouTube in 10 minutes segments). As grim as I recall. And it does not get any lighter. Bailed…)
Game system loosely based on Runequest v2 with necessary firearms input from the early ’70s Western Gunfight Wargames Rules by Curtis, Colwill & Blake, a Bristol (UK) wargames group and also the Fire, Hack and Run universal skirmish rules by Fantasy Games Unlimited.
1976 - 1980s
Some wilderness wrapped around the original D&D dungeon that mopped up the ‘overflow’ of unmatched gamers at the University of St Andrews Wargames Society, WarSoc, in a light-hearted fantasy / puzzle / skirmish game. Few role-playing pretensions in those days… The dungeon was brought out for special occasions and anniversaries well into the ’80s for the old lags.