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An Inaudible Blast from the Past: Silent Death: The Next Millennium (Part II)

An Inaudible Blast from the Past: Silent Death: The Next Millennium (Part II)

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Silent Death The Next Millenium-small

Silent Death: The Next Millennium Deluxe Edition (ICE, 1995). Cover art by Kevin Ward

In Part I of this two-part series on the iconic space combat miniatures game Silent Death – Metal Express, published by Iron Crown Enterprises (I.C.E.) in 1990, I discussed the game’s history and basic mechanics. Due to various factors, I.C.E. ceased production of their original Silent Death – Metal Express game after the Night Brood expansion was released in 1992. Part 2 discusses what happened after that decision.

ICE took the bold move to reboot Silent Death rather than try and fix it through further expansions. In 1995 a new version, Silent Death: The Next Millennium (TNM), hit the shelves. By all accounts it was an immediate hit that saw a number of reprints over the next few years. The Deluxe Edition box set was impressive, including a huge rulebook that revised and expanded the original rules while providing the balance that the punters craved. It came with 48 plastic miniatures with revised ship designs as well as much of the same setup paraphernalia as the original game box.

On a personal level I found the whole reboot somewhat vexing. Having invested a lot in the original game, I was super upset that it and all it stood for had been swept aside. TNM had also become expensive beyond my reach. So for the next few years, apart from the occasional nostalgic game using the original rules, Silent Death took a back seat for me, until my finances improved and I discovered eBay some years later.

While ICE pursued a vigorous publication schedule, things were far different. The expansions they’d planned for the original game were revised and released in quick succession, while numerous additional supplements followed. Silent Death: The Next Millennium went from strength to strength. The last official expansion for their flagship science fiction RPG SpaceMaster was released in 1994, and Silent Death appears to have taken up the slack and continued to expand on what had come before.

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Revolt on Antares: Small but Packed with Thrills… and Memories

Revolt on Antares: Small but Packed with Thrills… and Memories

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The rulebook for Revolt on Antares

A couple of weeks ago here at Black Gate, I wrote about the 1983 tabletop roleplaying game Lords of Creation, created by the late Tom Moldvay. Unfortunately, while listing some of Mr. Moldvay’s works, I left out a small but important game, Revolt on Antares.

Published in 1981 by TSR, the producers of Dungeons & Dragons at that time, Revolt on Antares was a minigame, sometimes referred to as a microgame, which were popular at the time. Other minigames of the period included Vampyre and Viking Gods, both from TSR, and such games as Ogre and Car Wars, each produced by Steve Jackson Games. These were just a few of the minigames available back then, and for a time in the early ’80s minigames brought a fair amount of business for game publishers.

As for Revolt on Antares, it was a simple war game made for two to four players. The game took place on the planet of Imirrhos, also known by the name of Antares 9, the ninth planet in the Antares solar system. All that was needed for play was the short, simple rule book, the included map, and two six-sided dice, also included. Oh, and I can’t forget the cardboard playing pieces, referred to in the rule book as counters, especially as there were three types: troops, leaders, and artifacts.

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Surviving the Sci-Fi Horror of Mothership, Maybe

Surviving the Sci-Fi Horror of Mothership, Maybe

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Mothership, by Tuesday Night Games and written by Sean McCoy, started making the rounds in beta format in 2018, causing quite a big splash amongst the RPG community. Styled as sci-fi horror RPG, its tag is: “Survive. Solve. Save. Pick one.” In other words, watch out.

Mothership falls into the OSR-style of game. OSR, which stands for Old School Revival or Old School Renaissance. OSR RPGs take their cues from the earliest days of the hobby, often with a focus on play style and use of Open Gaming License (OGL). In my mind, the former is the more important. OSR games are often as much about player skill as they are about rolling dice. The classic difference in this is that players often say, “Check for traps” before entering a room. The player then rolls an Awareness skill or like check. If they pass, they confirm the presence of traps or not. This is very mechanical.

OSR style play will ask the player to describe how they are checking for traps, and rather than relying on a detailed set of rules, the GM will “simply” establish the check. This “rulings over rules” is another hallmark of OSR games.

Interestingly, while characters are a big focus in modern RPGs (something I wholeheartedly endorse), OSR games often find ways for the players to engage in the game through the character in more meaningful ways because they eschew the “check x, roll y” mechanical formula.

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Lords of Creation: A Tabletop RPG before its Time

Lords of Creation: A Tabletop RPG before its Time

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Throughout the decades, game company Avalon Hill has been associated with tabletop war gaming, and this was especially true in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the company has been known to dip into other types of games, mainly board games of one stripe or another and sometimes even tabletop role-playing games.

One of Avalon Hill’s earliest tabletop RPGs was Lords of Creation, published in 1983 and written by Tom Moldvay, known for his earlier work on Dungeons & Dragons.

Lords of Creation is very much a game of its time, but in many way it’s also a game ahead of its time. The D&D influence is obvious in the mechanics, especially concerning character and monster stats, but this game was one of the earliest to stretch beyond the boundaries of any single genre. Lords of Creation wasn’t just a fantasy tabletop RPG, but was meant to be a game for all genres, including science fiction, mythology, noir, and more. In fact, the back of the game box reads, “The ultimate role-playing game… a game of science, fantasy, science fiction and high adventure that explores the farthest reaches of your imagination! Splendid adventures take place throughout time, space and other dimensions.”

I didn’t get many chances back in the day to play Lords of Creation, probably because it wasn’t the most popular game around even if it has something of a collector’s following nowadays. Still, the few times I played the game, it was a blast, in no small part because of Moldvay’s ingenuity in making Lords of Creation something unique, at least for the time period of its original publication.

The box itself for the game is somewhat large for a tabletop RPG, though was typical for the Avalon Hill war games of the time. Upon opening the box, one finds a 64-page rule book, a 64-page The Book of Foes (you D&D players will recognize this as similar to a Monster Manual), a Game Catalog of everything Avalon Hill had to offer at the time, and three dice, a D20, a D10, and a D6, everything you need to play the game.

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Werewolf: The Apocalypse Brought to Digital Life in Earthblood

Werewolf: The Apocalypse Brought to Digital Life in Earthblood

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For a solid year in college, every Saturday morning, a group of us would gather together in a friend’s dorm room and play Werewolf: The Apocalypse. This roleplaying game wasn’t made up of your traditional fantasy werewolves, no. In the dark and contemporary setting of Werewolf, the shapeshifting Garou are an ancient lineage of warriors that fight to defend Gaia, the embodiment of nature itself, from being despoiled by both corrupt influences of decay and stagnant modern technology. Your enemies were multinational corporations and corrupt demonic entities … often working together to ruin the world.

As a game where characters can transform into hulking figures of muscle, fang, and claw, it leaned a bit more into physicality than I generally go for … but there was a strong spiritual aspect to the game, as well, which did well to balance the physical. The Garou weren’t just there to kill things, but to restore a natural balance and harmony. The world was spiritually off-kilter, and the Garou were here to wrench it back into harmony … even if a lot of people had to die in the process.

Which leads me into the most recent incarnation of Werewolf, released today across a variety of gaming platforms … Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood. This game definitely brings together the most crucial thematic elements of the Werewolf setting together with exceptional design and playability, into a package that’s well worth it, for both old fans of the genre and players new to it.

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Twilight: 2000 — Roleplaying in a Post-Nuclear Holocaust World

Twilight: 2000 — Roleplaying in a Post-Nuclear Holocaust World

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Nostalgia: noun — a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.

Dictionary.com

I have heard about a phenomenon in film making that when the decision makers and creators get into places of power (usually in their 40s and 50s), the public often sees an uptick in nostalgic films about the creator’s formative years. A cycle that repeats itself not unlike the cycle for fashions coming back in style (though, mercifully, some fashions remain purely historical). TV and film reboots are often the result of this nostalgia as well.

RPGs have reached the age where nostalgia is becoming more apparent — at least it is to this long-time RPGer. While Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and a few other games have had an ongoing existence through multiple editions from the late 70s and early 80s, many games have come and gone.

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Step into a World of RuneQuest Adventure with The Smoking Ruin and The Pegasus Plateau

Step into a World of RuneQuest Adventure with The Smoking Ruin and The Pegasus Plateau

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Cover art by Andrey Fetisov

Maybe it’s because I’ve only recently started paying close attention, but it seems to me that the RuneQuest RPG has been experiencing something of a renaissance since returning to the fold at Chaosium. Certainly there’s been a flurry of attention-grabbing new releases anyway, including the epic and original Red Cow campaign, the tale of a small clan’s desperate battle for freedom against the oppressive Lunar Empire, a tribe of werewolves, and even darker threats; the Rough Guide to Glamour, a compilation of long out-of-print articles on Lunar magic and colorful personalities; and of course the gorgeous new hardbound rulebooks.

But the drumbeat of new releases has not slowed, and I recently acquired two adventure anthologies that make excellent resources for any RPG fan: The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories, a collection of three long ready-to-play adventures, and The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories, containing seven shorter adventure scenarios.

Both are essential purchases for serious RuneQuest players. The first focuses on an area in Dragon Pass known as the South Wilds, and includes the full-length scenario “The Smoking Ruin,” in which the players tread the haunted streets of an ancient city in search of a lost artifact. The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories contains seven fast-run adventures set in ghoul-haunted catacombs, mystic ruins, the deserts of Prax, and the rocky pinnacle of the Pegasus Plateau. Both books are gorgeously designed and well written; here’s a peek at the lovely interiors.

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Coriolis: Navigating the Third Horizon

Coriolis: Navigating the Third Horizon

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The “Preface” to the 2018 science fiction roleplaying game Coriolis: The Third Horizon mentions the game’s major influences: Middle Eastern culture, Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and Michael Flynn. Shortly after that, the writers state that Coriolis is Arabian Nights in space — an accurate self-assessment and pretty much hitting all the right notes for me. Grand science fiction space opera set in a universe that differs in meaningful and substantial ways.

Coriolis takes place in a setting called the Third Horizon. At one point in time far in the past, humanity discovered giant portals to other star systems, which had habitable planets. They colonized these systems, which became known as the First Horizon. The origin of the portals remain a mystery. Eventually, a second wave of systems were discovered via more portals and colonized: the Second Horizon.

The Third Horizon was discovered later and its 36 systems were colonized. What is known as the Portal Wars took place — a bloody, protracted, and devastating war that ended with the closing off of the portal between the Third Horizon and the first two. A long dark age ensued after the end of the war.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: The Room VR: A Dark Matter by Fireproof Games

Goth Chick News Reviews: The Room VR: A Dark Matter by Fireproof Games

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A couple years back I did something I have always wanted to do: commission an ultimate gaming computer. As I work in the industry, I only had to ask a couple of my team members if they were interested in building a “sky’s the limit” device. A month and several written checks later, I had a computer I was sure could hack NASA, containing a liquid-cooled, AMD Ryzen 1800x 8-core processor, an MSI AX370 motherboard, an AMD Vega 64 8GB video card, and 11TB of storage. I named it “Winston” and my designers lit it from the inside with a red pulse light that looks like a heartbeat.

When it was delivered, I felt like Victor Frankenstein, screaming “It’s aliiiiiivvvee!”

So, what’s the point? I had my heart set on an HTC Vive virtual reality gaming system and I did not want the word “latency” to ever cross my lips. It took quite an engine to power the first generation Vive, so though I mostly wanted computer bragging rights around the Black Gate offices, I also wanted to turn my home office into my own personal holo-deck. And that’s what I did.

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Jump Back! Quatro-Decadal Review, Looking Ahead to November 1989

Jump Back! Quatro-Decadal Review, Looking Ahead to November 1989

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The Holy Trinity

With the 1969 and 1979 magazines behind me I prepare to delve into 1989.  A problem with the decadal review is that, well, it comes in decade intervals. I was 10 years old in 1979, but in 1989 I was a well-seasoned 20.  The answers?  I had them.   In the intervening decade I had gotten a car, a job, started taekwondo, finished high school, and was deep into college.

Unlike 10-year-old me, 20-year-old me had a full handle on SF/F in popular culture.  In fact, the 80s were a watershed decade for SF/F — the promise of green screen special effects and the progress of practical effects really come to fruition in the 80s. Television was more hit and miss, but the decade that started with The Phoenix, progressed through V and  Knight Rider and ended with Star Trek:  The Next Generation. What started with Adventure Atari 2600 ended with Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. I discovered Dungeons and Dragons in 1982 and never looked back.  My awareness of SF/F books started with Asimov’s juveniles Lucky Starr through Andre Norton and C.J. Cherryh and into Tolkien, Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame and the discovery of REH, Fritz Lieber, Richard and Wendy Pini (which ties into the first round of graphic novels into the public imagination). 

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