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Category: Role Playing Games

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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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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The Many Worlds of Dungeons & Dragons (Fifth Edition, that is)

The Many Worlds of Dungeons & Dragons (Fifth Edition, that is)

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When I began playing Dungeons & Dragons as a teen in the early 1990’s, my initial few games were played in homebrew worlds of the Dungeonmaster’s creation. And, while this has always been a popular part of Dungeons & Dragons, it wasn’t long until I became enamored with the established worlds that were officially sanctioned and supported by setting materials, nor was I the only one. These worlds have been the setting of countless adventures throughout the decades.

For me, the first D&D world I fell in love with was Krynn, the world that is the basis of the Dragonlance storyline. The first trilogy of novels that introduce the world, Chronicles, is a solid adventure, but I could at times almost feel the dice rolling in the background of the combat encounters. The follow-up trilogy, Legends, has a completely different feel, with a much deeper and personal storyline, time travel, complex morality, and an overall that I was surprised to find in novels that were in a tie-in series. I’ve since read some great tie-in literature (see, for example, my reviews of the Pathfinder Tales novels by James L. Sutter, Death’s Heretic and The Redemption Engine), but Legends continues to stand out. And, in terms of adventure, the unusual Dark Sun setting made for some of the most memorable adventures of my teenage years.

These settings were released in AD&D 2nd Edition in the form of setting boxes, with adventures and rulebooks that gave the specific information needed to design characters and campaigns. The current edition of Dungeons & Dragons hasn’t begun releasing similar setting boxes, but they have released supplements spanning a variety of gaming worlds … though not spanning all of their traditional worlds (yet!).

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Traveling the Imperium: Agent of the Imperium by Marc Miller

Traveling the Imperium: Agent of the Imperium by Marc Miller

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Agent of the Imperium (Baen Books, November 3, 2020). Cover by Alan Pollack

For having been created and played since 1977, the Traveller roleplaying game (RPG) has very little in the way of official fiction. Nothing like the Dragonlance or Drizzt series for Dungeons & Dragons or the Warhammer 40,000 line of novels. Those series have spent decades fleshing out stories and setting, acted as entry points into their respective RPGs, or stood alone for those not interested in the gaming stuff.

Traveller, on the other hand, with its rich setting and incredible scope has only seen a few (compared to the other cited series) official fiction releases. A few novels in the 1990s supporting the Traveller: New Era edition, one supporting the Marc Miller’s Traveller (the fourth edition), and few others (for example, Fate of the Kinunir and Shadow of the Storm) were published. Recently, Mongoose Publishing published as series of Traveller short stories, mostly set in the Trojan Reach that they mined and developed so excellently in the Pirates of Drinax campaign.

Perhaps the relative lack of fiction (again, compared to the hundreds of novels in the D&D and Warhammer settings) is because so many excellent science fiction novels already exist and function as surrogates for Traveller fiction. Though Traveller’s setting is unique to that RPG, it is a universe that has its roots in the science fiction of the 60s and early 70s.

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Cyberpunk Red: Style and Substance

Cyberpunk Red: Style and Substance

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IMG_0957

In 1990, R. Talsorian released Cyberpunk 2020, a revision to the original game from the 1980s. This was followed by many supplements and the gaming world had a tabletop RPG that enabled players to engage with a world with elements they saw and read in Blade Runner, Hardwired, Neuromancer, and Strange Days. The game proved so popular that many still play it today. When a third edition was released, it proved so unpopular that it is basically forgotten.

A few years ago the creators of The Witcher video game series, CD Projekt Red, reached out to R. Talsorian. See, they had played Cyberpunk 2020, and they wanted to create a new video game and thought it might be fun to use Cyberpunk 2020 as the basis. Thus, Cyberpunk 2077 — a much anticipated video game — was born.

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The Season of Gaming: Pathfinder

The Season of Gaming: Pathfinder

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Since its release at 2019 GenCon, the RPG Pathfinder Second Edition has been growing in popularity. With a character creation system that allows for immense character customization, it has won over many converts among the scores of existing fans of the game’s first edition, even with all of the difficulties involved in getting those fans together to play the game during a global pandemic.

It’s worth a quick recap of what Paizo has put out to support and expand this game in just a little over a year:

You can get the harcopies of these gaming resources through pretty much any game shop, but digital copies (as well as the hardcopies) are available directly through Paizo.com. If ordering Paizo products – including First Edition Pathfinder, Pathfinder Adventure Card, or Starfinder products – through their website, there’s a one-time promotional code of “holiday21” good through January 17, 2021.

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The Season of Gaming: Star Trek

The Season of Gaming: Star Trek

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There has been something of a Star Trek television renaissance in recent years. Ranging from the all-too-near future (first contact with the Vulcans is slated to take place in 2063, after all) to the far distant future, the ever-growing setting provides ample fodder not only for new episodes and storylines, but for gamers who want to experience the universe by diving into the setting, there are a variety of different games that offer different levels of engagement with the themes of the show. And ones which, if you’re looking for a game to play while in lockdown with family over the holidays, might do the trick … particularly if your family consists of Trek fans.

One of the more curious Star Trek games I’ve run across was the Ferengi-themed sales game Star Trek: Galactic Enterprises, a card game where you spend bars of gold-pressed latinum in an effort to corner the market on a given product. There are of course the various games that are just re-skins of existing games that incorporate elements from the setting, like Star Trek Monopoly, various editions of Star Trek Fluxx, Star Trek Risk, and even Star Trek Catan.

But beyond those games, there are some which delve much more deeply into the concepts, alien species, and lore of the Star Trek universe to provide a more immersive gaming experience, boldly going where no game has gone before.

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Take Advantage of the Thanksgiving Sale at Dark City Games

Take Advantage of the Thanksgiving Sale at Dark City Games

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Dark CIty Games

If you’ve been paying attention, you know we’re big fans of solo role playing games here at Black Gate. Whenever someone asks me for a superior modern example, I point them without hesitation to Dark City Games.

George Dew and his talented team of writers and artists at Dark City Games have been producing high quality solitaire fantasy and science fiction games for nearly two decades. They started with programmed adventures in the mold of The Fantasy Trip classics like Death Test, and soon graduated to much more sophisticated fare. Their games include ambitious fantasy epics likes The Island of Lost Spells (which I reviewed as Todd McAulty in Black Gate 10), and The Sewers of Redpoint, exciting SF fare like Void Station 57 and At Empire’s End, a line of Untamed West western adventures, and even tactical wargames set in WWII. Howard Andrew Jones took a fond look at their early catalog back in 2008, and we even published a free Dark City sample adventure titled S.O.S. in 2010.

That’s why I was so excited to see they have a Thanksgiving Sale. Every game in stock is discounted to $10. I ordered four — the SF horror title Into Chaos, dark fantasy Punisher’s Keep, Battle of the Bulge, first in their Combat Boots series of tactical wargames, and the SF mystery tale The Dark Star Incident.

Whether you’re a new gamer curious about role playing who wants to dip your toe in at your own pace, an experienced player looking for a real challenge, or just someone looking for a great bargain, Dark City has a game for you. Have a look at their catalog here, and try a game or two for just ten bucks each. And tell them Black Gate sent you!