Trawling for treasure on Ebay

I'm currently in the process of moving out of London (I've been here for 20 years and I think that's enough), hence the lack of blog activity. Anyway, despite the stresses and strains that moving house involves, I've recently been able to track down and acquire various RPG-related goodies on Ebay. This is something I do every once in a while when the idea pops into my head, as there's various things I used to own and would like to own again, or couldn't find at some earlier point in time.

So, here's the result of the latest trawl:

A few of these things were new to me, such as the Tunnels & Trolls books. These are UK reprints published by Corgi in 1986, one of which is a rulebook for the game itself and the other is Fighting Fantasy/Choose Your Own Adventure-type book. It was only recently that I found out that there was a range of miniatures for Star Frontiers, and it was great to actually find one of the box sets. Here are a few pics of what's inside:

The level of detail on these is rather good, and it's particularly nice to see a Sathar miniature. Of note is a detail on the back of the box:

For some reason, the Yazirian figures have been labelled as 'Yazarian' (along with a TM) which seems an odd little mistake and one wonders why TSR trademarked this typo.

As for the rest of the above haul, TMNT and CyberSpace were always fun games to referee, although I don't think that I got as much mileage out of them as RPGs as I wanted to. As for the Palladium Book of Contemporary Weapons, this seemed to be a little rare back in the late '80s when we played TMNT. Maybe that was just because of a lack of stockists at the time, but it was nice to finally acquire a copy. It's an interesting book as far as being a system for the Palladium RPGs (as it bases potential damage of any given weapon on the calibre and type of bullet fired) and I'd like to see how this would work in-game.

One very recent acquisition was this '80s-era Citadel Miniatures Dwarf fighter:

When I was first introduced to D&D (as detailed in an earlier blog post) I was slightly obsessed with acquiring miniatures, despite the fact that I lacked the necessary cash to fund that obsession. Nevertheless, the various dwarves made by Citadel stood out for me, and so the above example was the first one I bought. I then decided to create my first D&D character based on his gear, and thus was born Mystichi Argonshire. Seeing the miniature again was a real Proustian moment - it immediately transported me back to my 13-year old self, which was a rather strange but enjoyable experience.

In Praise of... Twilight: 2000

Twilight: 2000 is an RPG born out of the Cold War. I was born in 1969, and the Cold War started to come into focus for me in the late 70s and early 80s – and I didn’t like it at all. The one thing that really terrified me was the threat of nuclear war. I grew up near a major air base (RNAS Yeovilton) and a principal aviation factory (Westland Helicopters), so I knew that I would be vaporised should the Cold War turn hot. Because of this, life did sometimes feel like there was a lid on it – sure, I carried on with things (going to school, playing RPGs, listening to heavy metal, watching a lot of bad straight-to-video movies, etc), but there was always this nagging sense that somewhere in the background things could get nasty very quickly. Various themes from the time fed into that sense – the Falklands War, the Soviet Army fighting in Afghanistan, the Lebanese War and various other conflicts covered by the news on TV. TV also did much to add to my fears by showing programmes such as Threads...

To this day, watching it still makes me uncomfortable. The US attempt at such scariness, The Day After, was (to my mind, then and now) somehow watered down and almost more like sci-fi. British TV was once very good at creating gritty, stark programmes and I don’t think anyone really topped their output.

I remember reading an issue of White Dwarf at school in 1984 and seeing an advert for Twilight: 2000, deciding then and there to buy it whenever I got the chance. I liked the idea of a game where you had to try and survive after World War III. As with my recent Ebay trawling for Car Wars, I’ve just gotten my hands on a pretty decent copy of Twilight: 2000...

I've included the FFE compendium (top right) as I'm a completist. Note the original game dice.

If you’re not familiar with the game’s back story, there’s an overview here. What follows is an overview of the 1^st Edition rules that I’ve played the most – I’ll state here and now that this version does a better job than later reworks. Over the years I’ve read various articles slating it as both a game and a system. Some think that nowadays the game seems ‘unrealistic’ (and this is coming from people who probably don’t use the same critiques for D&D etc), because the world it creates no longer seems plausible. Others think that the system is clunky. I don’t share the view of either point. Firstly, I don’t think people are really judging the game for its ‘What if...?’ value. Like all RPGs, the game works from a certain premise. Sure, real world events overtook the premise of Twilight: 2000, but that doesn’t make it defunct. You could still play it for the story it’s trying to tell. Nowadays, it’s simply a fantasy that has links to certain realities.

As for the game system, one of its strengths is the way it tries to model some quite complex concepts (combat, illness, survival, radiation), and I don’t think that any other RPG has topped the way things were done in Twilight: 2000. Skills are easy enough – your character (some form of military personnel) starts with some, and you can buy others on a point for point basis. As these work around percentile values, there’s nothing difficult about it. These percentages affect the outcome of an action or event, and are modified on the basis of whether they are Easy, Average or Difficult to carry out. This covers anything from riding a horse, to making things, to firing weapons. At the same time, even high level skill values don’t make you some sort of god. Your rolls are always modified by the difficulty of the task at hand, so success isn’t necessarily a given. As the game is strongly based around its combat system, some may feel that it’s a bit complicated. On the surface, this is true – especially so of modelling the effects of rounds striking vehicles. However, some basic familiarity with it soon pays off. If anything, things can happen fast and can be resolved quickly, especially as the game seems more geared towards firefights. You just have to take various factors into account – range, whether you can fire before the other guy, etc. At the same time, combat very much has the potential to be lethal and players who understand this have to think and plan what they want to do, certain in the knowledge that resorting to combat has some stark consequences. Death is somewhat likely, and surviving with wounds isn’t a given. The environment is just as likely to finish you off as a bullet if you get things wrong.

To my mind, this forces players to be a bit more cerebral about combat. The same can’t be said for many RPGs. As I was the referee for our Twilight: 2000 sessions, it was always interesting to see my gang of players trying to figure out consequences before the fact. This was especially so because when playing other RPGs they tended to have a much more cavalier, gung-ho approach of the ‘shoot first...’ variety. On top of all of this, the world setting in the game pitched the players against odds which were never in their favour. They were, after all, trying to survive in a (probably) foreign country that had come off the worst for nuclear exchanges and many years of bloody fighting. As soldiers, no-one was telling them what they should do – the last radio message from their HQ was ‘Good luck. You’re on your own, now’. The game, sensibly, provides no moral compass for what they should do. Because of such factors, it was a challenge to play and referee as an RPG.

We played Twilight: 2000 a great deal. As it was a GDW game, it was strongly supported by reference material and scenarios and these did much to add flavour to the experience. My guys managed to survive quite well over the years. Most of them were from the US infantry (i.e. Rasche, a giant Yiddish-speaking Spec 4, and Markowitz the medic), although we had one or two Warsaw Pact deserters - all being led, in a way, by a British combat engineer. Nomadic for most of the time, they teamed up for a while with a NATO-friendly Polish commander who was trying to rebuild his area of control. They finally managed to rejoin a more organised NATO force, only to then be moved to the Middle East in an effort to secure Iranian oil fields...

I decided to get the FFE compendium of the 1^st Edition stuff because it seems to have some interesting extras (i.e. details of the games sales figures, various scenarios) and it’s handy for me to have everything bundled together. At the same time, it’s great to have the actual 1984 issue of the game back in my hands again. It’s actual approach to the subject (and I think this was lost in later editions) is sobre and measured. This is particularly true of the interior artwork, as there’s no attempt at going for clichéd approaches to the subject matter. One other factor of note is that it features women on the box cover who aren’t in silly poses and are depicted as sensibly as the male figures.

Could it still be played today as an RPG? Well, you may have to explain the Cold War to players born after 1990 – or research it yourself if the same time-frame applies to you. Even if you narrow your approach to the way things were in the 1980s, taking some time to research the period would pay off. To be honest, if you’re more familiar with the idea of ‘The War on Terror’, the idea of the Cold War isn’t all that different – it could be said that the latter is just not as nebulous and as open to interpretation as the former. It would also be possible to abandon the idea of playing in the post-apocalyptic world of the original game and instead use the rules to play in some other setting. There are conflicts, old and new, in which the game system would still work.

One thing to always bear in mind, however, is that is first and foremost a game about survival...

Forwards to something...

By the time I finished secondary school in 1985, our RPG obsession was in full swing. Our group now consisted of me, my brother (Sime), my cousin (Mr Cheeks) and some of my brother's friends. My brother and I pooled some money together to buy Star Frontiers, which remains one of my favourite RPGs, and as a group we played that a great deal for many years. Some of us had played Car Wars for a while in 1983, which is another good game, but me and my brother thought the RPG element was missing (we weren't aware of GURPS). We started to design our own version of CW-style game, originally called Freeway, which also had aliens in it called Slatzians. I can't remember why. When the Freeway Fighter Fighting Fantasy book came out, I changed the name of the game to Motormania, and also ditched the sci-fi elements. I still have some of the tables and a few characters, all carefully written up on file paper. We played that quite a lot too, and managed to test and include rules for helicopters and aircraft. This taught me a great deal about designing a game, which would come in handy in my later career. We started playing Twilight:2000 and Runequest. In 1984 or so, I'd played Traveller at school with Jaffa and Wiggy, although our actual play sessions tended to be done when hanging around outside at lunchtime.

By 1986, I started at a college, and met a few other people who were interested in RPGs - the most important one being a bloke called Porky. He joined our group and, since he could drive, his poor little mushroom-coloured Ford Fiesta had to put up with a bunch of us piling into it to go from one playing location to another. As some of us lived in the same village/a nearby village, we sometimes we would walk to someone else's house to play. People would also bike 7 or 8 miles to and from wherever we had our RPG session. Mind you, this implies some sort of order and sensibility. Nothing could be further from the truth. This photo gives some idea of what I mean:

L to R: me, Locock (near my shoulder), Sime, Chick, and Mr Cheeks. Leper stands in the background. Taken by Housey, at Housey's, 1986. I think we were playing Star Frontiers.

This one is a bit more sedate:

L to R: Frannie, Mr Cheeks, me, Locock (behind me), and Porky. The eagle-eyed among you may note that there's a Commodore C16 +4 just to the right of Porky's arse. Taken by Sime, at my place (okay, my mum's place), 1986 - possibly 1987.

The photos don't include some other key players, namely Scotty and Dods. Our sessions usually had this format: arrive, unpack our stuff and sort of arrange it on a table/floor/laps, make large amounts of tea, bicker, take the piss out of each other, start to play, bicker, take the piss, argue over a rule quibble, suggest/argue that someone may have been looking at the rulebook when they shouldn't have, drink tea, eat biscuits, bicker, take the piss, etc etc. This would go around in a loop for hours. So, if we were sat down for, say, 4 hours the actual amount of time actually role-playing was... well... I'd say about an hour. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Oh, and there was always a chance that at least one of Locock's characters would die during each session (for example - one once managed to cut off his own leg and then bleed to death in a ditch). There were occasions where we would tape record our sessions - these will hopefully be digitised soon. I'd bought Call of Cthulhu and we only ever played that at night, by candlelight. To round off the effect I had a red candle melted to the top of a sheep's skull. Ooh. Scary.

We played RPGs on Saturdays and Sundays, usually all day if we could. In the intervening time, we were either thinking about or reading about RPGs - and/or computer games. That said, none of us actually owned D&D. We just knew the basic outline of the rules, etc and went from there, and would alternate who was the DM. Games we played many times: AD&D (1st Ed), Star Frontiers, Call of Cthulhu (2nd Ed), Twilight:2000, Traveller 2300AD, Runequest, and Dark Conspiracy. Games we played at least once (and sometimes only once): Talisman, Blood Bowl, Star Trek, MERP, Cyberpunk, CyberSpace, Judge Dredd, Paranoia, TMNT, Living Steel, Mechwarrior, and probably some others I've forgotten about. We also played Motormania, and Frannie invented two RPGs that we played quite often: Arena and ATK. We did sometimes buy official adventures to play, but 50% of our adventures were created, designed and run by us. I wrote a huge amount for Call of Cthulhu and Twilight:2000, for example.

This all continued on it's merry way until about 1992. We haven't played in any organised way since then, more's the pity. Our last RPG session was a drunken bout of Tales From The Floating Vagabond. We ended up going our seperate ways in some form or another. Maybe one day, if just for one day, we'll play again.

Fast-forward to 1996. I live in London. I'm unemployed and want a job in the computer games industry. I haven't a clue how to do this. I want to be a games artist. I apply to an advert in The Grauniad from a company looking to develop adventure and strategy games. I get an interview and take along my portfolio of painstakingly created drawings and paintings, and some crap 3D work. The 'company' is in reality just some rich bloke, on his own, trying to set up a company from his ludicriously posh flat. He hires me on the spot. My first job is actually as a designer. I have to design a paper prototype for a first-person adventure/shooter game based on ancient Egypt. I have no idea how to do this. I don't know what a game design document (GDD) is. So what do I do? I just write it all up like a D&D level, including maps, room descriptions, monsters, etc. I still have it to this day. He really likes it but it is never used - a crushing blow for me then, but little did I know at the time that this is de rigueur for games development. So I do some more work for him for a few months. He then fires me because he doesn't want to pay me any more. After a while I then get an interview at a development studio called Intelligent Games (IG). This goes well. After a second interview they hire me as a graphics artist. Nice. Once there (up until the time IG folds in 2002) I do graphics work, concept art, game design, character design, tons of stuff - excluding coding. I don't do coding. It gives me a headache.

During all that time, and since, D&D and RPGs were continually feeding into my work and how I rationalised ideas, art, design etc. It turns out that the computer games industry was - and still is - largely in debt to D&D. 

Some may not agree. 

But they're talking out of their arses...

Sometime soon - but maybe not tomorrow: On the physiology of the Otyugh...