Black Gate

One day a few years ago, my brother casually mentioned how he thought it would be fun to create our own RPG game. After a bit of conversation, I understood this was not an off the cuff remark and found myself excited about the prospect. We had a number of conversations about it. Would we use an existing rule set or setting that allowed others to write content into, or would we create our very own?

We decided to build our own. Neither of us had built a game from scratch, but we have played a lot over the years. I had also house-ruled any number of decisions. For those that do not know, house-ruling in RPGs is when the game master (GM) determines a rule on the fly or establishes a rule for their game that either contravenes or is not covered by the rules themself. This is a common activity for GMs because RPGs cannot cover every single thing a player may want to do.

My brother and I bounced a few ideas around, particularly setting. What kind of game did we want? Without knowing it, we stumbled our way through answering a number of questions in the Power 19. In the early 2000s, among the indie RPG movement, a number of names in that space interacted on The Forge. Folks in the indie RPG game community — for example, Ron Edwards the creator of Sorcerer — discussed game design.

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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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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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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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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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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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