Black Gate

The Gaean Reach and The Gaean Reach Gazetteer (Pelgrane Press, 2014). Covers by Chris Huth

The great Jack Vance doesn’t get a lot of love from role players. Despite his huge influence on the field (Gygax based the fundamental cast-and-forget spellcasting system of Dungeons and Dragons on the Vancian magic system the author developed for his Dying Earth tales, just as an example), there aren’t a lot of ways to use dice to explore the wonderful worlds Vance created.

Twenty years ago Pelgrane Press released The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game by Robin D. Laws, which went a long to rectifying this artistic injustice. More recently Laws and Pelgrane Press took the versatile Gumshoe System, designed for running investigative games like Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars, and used it as the basis for The Gaean Reach, a science fiction RPG set in the lusciously detailed setting for much of Vance’s best science fiction, including The Demon Princes novels, the Cadwal Chronicles, the Alastor Cluster trilogy, and the Ports of Call novels.

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Player and gamemasters (GMs) of tabletop roleplaying games often refer to “crunch.” This is in reference to how the mechanics of the game work, and generally (though I suspect some folks will fight me on this), a crunchier game has more context-based rules. For example, the least crunchiest game is someone roles a 20-sided die and no matter what, if it rolls above 10, it is always a success. You start adding crunch to it when the rules start to say, “okay, not modify that roll by +2 for attempting to break a grapple or -1 if doing the task in the dark.” Games can get crunchy in a whole lot of ways (lots of rules for various situations–looking at you Starfinder). Some go way crunchy (an example of an extreme crunchy game is Dystopia 23, see my article here).

In the early 2000s, games tended to get more complex and crunchier and a “movement” referred to as the OSR, or old-school revival (sometimes old-school renaissance), crept into the tabletop gaming community. Originally hearkening back to the supposed simpler days of tabletop RPGs in the early 70s (okay, the early days of Dungeons & Dragons), the movement’s core can best be summed up in “rulings over rules.”

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Twilight 2000: Return to Warsaw (GDW, 1989)

Twilight: 2000, GDW’s mid 1980s post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, started out in Europe. The players, part of the US Army’s 5th Division, hear their commander’s last, chilling words: “You’re on your own. Good luck.” Trapped in Poland and far away from friendly lines, the players are presumed to want to return to the United States, where they believe conditions may be better.

The major powers in the conflict portrayed in Twilight: 2000 inched across nuclear apocalypse, and amongst the ruins of devastated cities, blasted landscapes, and radioactive craters, the players encounter groups of armed thugs, petty warlords, families struggling to survive, disease, and a host of other ills. But always a drip of hope.

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The Last Submarine (GDW, 1988)

Twilight: 2000 the 1980s tabletop Roleplaying game by GDW started with the players stranded behind enemy lines in Poland with the disintegration of the last major offensive of World War III. The first six published adventures, referred to as the Polish Campaign, deal with the players attempting to find passage back to the United States.

Twilight: 2000’s setting takes place after the US and USSR have exchanged nuclear strikes, inching across the nuclear apocalypse. Players find themselves in the midst of society breaking down — with pockets and dreams of hope and recovery. Once back in the US, they learn not all is well. The country has split into many semi-independent states, governing bodies, and anarchy. The military and remnants of the civilian government are competing for legitimacy and control. It seems only fitting that a trilogy of adventures, The Last Submarine Campaign, should see the players returning to Europe.

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I have heard it said that a number of the central ideas in James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse series were first developed for a tabletop RPG campaign (a series of adventures that usually tell a coherent story arc). I have been unable to validate this, but one find any number of chats positing the game they were playing. And the Foreword for The Expanse RPG does say “for a long run, it was a roleplaying game campaign.” Which RPG, I have not heard definitively stated.

James S. A. Corey is the pen name of authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. What we do know for certain is that they originally pitched The Expanse for an MMPORG (I’m assuming something akin to World of Warcraft). Failing that, they hoped to make a tabletop RPG, and then decided to write the novels, the first of which was Leviathan Wakes in 2011. The ninth and final novel of the series, Leviathan Falls, releases in November this year. The series has exploded in popularity, spawning eight stories and novellas (the last of which is will appear in March 2022), a TV series (entering the sixth and final season in December on Amazon Prime), a board game, comics, and — yes — its own tabletop RPG. Full circle in a way.

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When Free League Publishing released the ALIEN Roleplaying Game, the obvious next supplement (beyond adventures) was a book about the Colonial Marines, featured so prominently in the film ALIENS and subsequent comics and books. The ALIEN Roleplaying Game core rulebook has proven to be very successful, coming in as one of the top five bestselling RPGs in 2021. Black Gate’s own E.E. Knight reviewed that book, which you can read here.

This author’s personal take on the core rules is that they are superb. They capture the cosmic-slasher-horror and cyberpunk-ish setting of the ALIEN universe as we’ve come to understand it. Combat is deadly and the stress mechanic is brutal, particularly when fighting the titular xenomorphs. Characters quickly succumb to all sorts of panic as they witness their human allies impaled by spiked tails, dragged away to become home to the alien implanted larvae, see humans metamorphose into something else as they encounter black goo or corporate experiments with it, and many more. The game is intentionally unfair and unbalanced against players (which they need to understand upfront). When all the players accept this and engage in the store, this results are exciting and memorable roleplaying. Players generally know their character are likely doomed and still work to find their way out. A sliver of hope.

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The is the first of two articles covering FASA’s published adventures in the Sky Raiders trilogy for Traveller.

The Keith Brothers, J. Andrew and William, were prolific and significant contributors to Traveller in the 1980s, often writing under pen names to avoid entire products being obviously written by the two. They wrote the classic Murder on Arcturus Station (you can see my review here). In 1981, they published via FASA (a notable RPG published with licenses to produce Traveller RPG supplement and adventure material), the first in a trilogy of adventures: The Legend of the Sky Raiders. This was followed in 1982 by The Trail of the Sky Raiders and The Fate of the Sky Raiders.

The trilogy is a planet hopping adventure focusing on hunting down the mysteries of the Sky Raiders, a lost civilization. The Legend of the Sky Raiders minces no words in the tone and type of adventure they are going for:

“Dedication: To Indiana Jones, who would feel right at home here.”

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